In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)

by Marcel Proust

we bring to bear on the spectacle of life only a dubious vision, extinguished anew every moment by oblivion, the former reality fading before that which follows it as one projection of a magic lantern fades

Philosophy distinguishes often between free and necessary acts.

Everything that he possessed, ideas, works, and the rest which he counted for far less, he would have given gladly to anyone who understood him. But, for lack of congenial company, he lived in an unsociable isolation which fashionable people called pose and ill-breeding, the authorities a recalcitrant spirit, his neighbours madness, his family selfishness and pride.

life of an artist?

the practice of solitude had given him a love for it, as happens with every big thing which we have begun

love with a woman we simply project on to her a state of our own soul; that consequently the important thing is not the worth of the woman but the profundity of the state; and that the emotions which a perfectly ordinary girl arouses in us can enable us to bring to the surface of our consciousness some of the innermost parts of our being, more personal, more remote, more quintessential than any that might be evoked by the pleasure we derive from the conversation of a great man or even from the admiring contemplation of his work.

on love?

the rare moments in which we see nature as she is, poetically, were those from which Elstir’s work was created.

If a little day-dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of one’s day-dreams if one is not to be troubled by them; there is a way of separating one’s dreams from one’s life which so often produces good results that I wonder whether one oughtn’t to try it just in case, simply as a preventative, as certain surgeons suggest that, to avoid the risk of appendicitis later on, we ought all to have our appendixes taken out when we’re children.”

On day dreaming and the notion of it being not wholesome.

The further we descend the social scale the more we find that snobbery fastens on to mere trifles which are perhaps no more null than the distinctions observed by the aristocracy, but, being more obscure, more peculiar to each individual, surprise us more.

works of art not only delightfully executed but representing a subject so singular and so seductive that it is to it that we attribute a great deal of their charm, as if that charm were something that the painter had merely to discover and observe, realised already in a material form by nature, and to reproduce.

fact that such objects can exist, beautiful quite apart from the painter’s interpretation of them, satisfies a sort of innate materialism in us, against which our reason contends, and acts as a counterpoise to the abstractions of aesthetic theory. It

Only, after that rising tide of genius which sweeps over and submerges an artist’s life, when the brain begins to tire, gradually the balance is disturbed and, like a river that resumes its course after the counterflow of a spring tide, it is life that once more takes the upper hand.

unconscious gift.

variations in the importance which a pleasure or a sorrow has in our eyes may depend not merely on this alternation of two moods, but on the displacement of invisible beliefs, such, for example, as make death seem to us of no account because they bathe it in a glow of unreality, and thus enable us to attach importance to our attending a musical evening which would lose much of its charm if, on the announcement that we were sentenced to be guillotined, the belief that had bathed the evening in its warm glow suddenly evaporated.

do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand, when some trivial incident becomes a springboard for romance.

nice!

But is it not thus, in the bustle of daily life, with every true happiness, every great sorrow?

the ephemeral nature of joy and sorrow and their relative positioning

Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative, which we develop later, when we are back at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner dark-room the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people.

complete inactivity in the end has the same effect as prolonged overwork,

Our memory is like one of those shops in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person.

result of deliberate thought, the other of an imprudent disregard for our own health, we take from our family, as the papilionaceae take the form of their seed, as well the ideas by which we live as the malady from which we shall die.

And it is, after all, as good a way as any of solving the problem of existence to get near enough to the things and people that have appeared to us beautiful and mysterious from a distance to be able to satisfy ourselves that they have neither mystery nor beauty.

gives us a certain tranquillity with which to spend what remains of life, and also—since it enables us to regret nothing, by assuring us that we have attained to the best, and that the best was nothing out of the ordinary—with which to resign ourselves to death.

good point on realism