Swann's Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)

by Marcel Proust

Comme un temoignage de profonde et affectueuse reconnaissance.

“Often, but a little at a time, like poor old Swann,” became one of my grandfather’s favourite sayings, which he would apply to all manner of things.

And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.

What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day.

The manifestation of being seems apt here: the intellect and its power derive from conscious presence, the souce of being.

feeling deep within myself a tract of soil reclaimed from the waters of Lethe slowly drying until the buildings rise on it again; and then no doubt, and then more anxiously than when, just now, I asked him to direct me, I seek my way again, I turn a corner … but … the goal is in my heart

they imagine that the life they are obliged to lead is not that for which they are really fitted, and they bring to their regular occupations either an indifference tinged with fantasy, or a sustained and haughty application, scornful, bitter, and conscientious.

Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life, little boy,” he added, turning to me. “You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist’s nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs.”

Next to this central belief which, while I was reading, would be constantly reaching out from my inner self to the outer world, towards the discovery of truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in which I was taking part, for these afternoons were crammed with more dramatic events than occur, often, in a whole lifetime.

at certain points they actually coincided, and in my newfound confidence and joy I had wept upon his printed page as in the arms of a long-lost father.

It was like every attitude or action which reveals a man’s underlying character; they bear no relation to what he has previously said, and we cannot confirm our suspicions by the culprit’s own testimony, for he will admit nothing; we are reduced to the evidence of our own senses, and we ask ourselves, in the face of this detached and incoherent fragment of recollection, whether indeed our senses have not been the victims of a hallucination; with the result that such attitudes, which are alone of importance in indicating character, are the most apt to leave us in perplexity.

I dined with Legrandin on the terrace of his house, by moonlight. “There is a charming quality, is there not,” he said to me, “in this silence; for hearts that are wounded, as mine is, a novelist whom you will read in time to come asserts that there is no remedy but silence and shadow. And see you this, my boy, there comes in all our lives a time, towards which you still have far to go, when the weary eyes can endure but one kind of light, the light which a fine evening like this prepares for us in the stillroom of darkness, when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence.”

was roasting the chicken that was to furnish me, in place of the poetic pleasure of the walk, with the sensual pleasures of good feeding, warmth and rest.

The process which had begun in her—and in her a little earlier only than it must come to all of us—was the great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.

Thus it is that most of our attempts to translate our innermost feelings do no more than relieve us of them by drawing them out in a blurred form which does not help us to identify them. When I try to reckon up all that I owe to the Méséglise way, all the humble discoveries of which it was either the fortuitous setting or the direct inspiration and cause,

Perhaps she would not have thought of evil as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one in which it was so refreshing to sojourn, had she been able to discern in herself, as in everyone else, that indifference to the sufferings one causes which, whatever other names one gives it, is the most terrible and lasting form of cruelty.

Mlle Vinteuil was indifferent to thd harm caused by her irreverent gestures to the memory of her dead father.

After leaving this park the Vivonne began to flow again more swiftly. How often have I watched, and longed to imitate when I should be free to live as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lay flat on his back in the bottom of his boat, letting it drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky gliding slowly by above him, his face aglow with a foretaste of happiness and peace!

But it is pre-eminently as the deepest layer of my mental soil, as the firm ground on which I still stand, that I regard the Méséglise and Guermantes ways. It is because I believed in things and in people while I walked along those paths that the things and the people they made known to me are the only ones that I still take seriously and that still bring me joy.

a love affair in which Swann had been involved before I was born, with a precision of detail which it is often easier to obtain for the lives of people who have been dead for centuries than for those of our own most intimate friends, an accuracy which it seems as impossible to attain as it seemed impossible to speak from one town to another, before we knew of the contrivance by which that impossibility has been overcome.

I had built up for myself in the darkness would have gone to join all those other dwellings glimpsed in the whirlpool of awakening, put to flight by that pale sign traced above my window-curtains by the uplifted forefinger of dawn.

The impermanence of memories is accompanied by an overall aspect which remains true and comforting.

‘There, that’s what he’s thinking about!’ What a joy it would be to be able to help you with your work.”

Very much the same intent of Dorothea Brooks when she married Casauron.

To such an extent does passion manifest itself in us as a temporary and distinct character which not only takes the place of our normal character but obliterates the invariable signs by which it has hitherto been discernible!

Other people as a rule mean so little to us that, when we have invested one of them with the power to cause us so much suffering or happiness, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of one’s life a sort of stirring arena in which he or she will be more or less close to one.

But the little phrase, as soon as it struck his ear, had the power to liberate in him the space that was needed to contain it; the proportions of Swann’s soul were altered; a margin was left for an enjoyment that corresponded no more than his love for Odette to any external object and yet was not, like his enjoyment of that love, purely individual, but assumed for him a sort of reality superior to that of concrete things.

And so he denied himself the pleasure of visiting those places, delighted to tell himself that it was for her sake, that he wished only to feel, to enjoy things with her.

He is dimishng his own standards to please her. How foolish to lose oneself to gain affection.

But the state of agitation into which Odette’s presence never failed to throw him, added to a feverish ailment which had persisted for some time now, robbed him of that calm and well-being which are the indispensable background to the impressions we derive from nature.

How she has changed towards him. He seems so powerless to assert himself and resume a more conscoius version of himself.

the circle in which he had spent much of his life, the group that surrounded the Princesse des Laumes, where it was agreed that intelligence was in direct ratio to the degree of scepticism and nothing was considered real and incontestable except the individual tastes of each person—is no longer that of youth, but a positive, almost a medical philosophy, the philosophy of men who, instead of exteriorising the objects of their aspirations, endeavour to extract from the accumulation of the years already spent a fixed residue of habits and passions which they can regard as characteristic and permanent, and with which they will deliberately arrange, before anything else, that the kind of existence they choose to adopt shall not prove inharmonious. Swann deemed it wise to make allowance in his life for the suffering which he derived from not knowing what Odette had done, just as he made allowance for the impetus which a damp climate always gave to his eczema;

Awareness finally.

It’s really impossible to believe that a human being can fail to understand that, in allowing herself to smile at the expense of a fellow-creature who has loyally held out his hand to her, she is sinking into a mire from which it will be impossible, with the best will in the world, ever to rescue her.

And he did not have (as I had at Combray in my childhood) happy days in which to forget the sufferings that would return with the night. For his days were spent without Odette;

as he drove home in utter loneliness, and went to bed as miserable as I was to be some years later on the evenings when he came to dine with us at Combray—seemed to him limitless since he had not seen the end of them.

know a thing does not always enable us to prevent it, but at least the things we know we do hold, if not in our hands, at any rate in our minds, where we can dispose of them as we choose, and this gives us the illusion of a sort of power over them.

The illusion of the mind is our thoughts so out of control due to ego we are not conscious of the false allure.

We do not tremble except for ourselves, or for those whom we love. When our happiness is no longer in their hands, how calm, how relaxed, how bold we become in their presence!

a night from a period when he had not even to ask himself whether he would be annoying her by looking for her and finding her, so certain was he that she knew no greater happiness than to see him and to let him take her home—belonged to a mysterious world to which one never may return again once its doors are closed. And Swann could distinguish, standing motionless before that scene of remembered happiness, a wretched figure who filled him with such pity, because he did not at first recognise who it was, that he had to lower his eyes lest anyone should observe that they were filled with tears. It was himself.

it seemed to say to him, as once it had said of his happiness: “What does it all matter? It means nothing.”

Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is inexistent; but, if so, we feel that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, must be nothing either. We shall perish, but we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable.

he said to himself: “People don’t know when they’re happy. One is never as unhappy as one thinks.”

He also suspected my grandfather. Every time Swann had asked a favour of him, had he not invariably refused? Besides, with his ideas of middle-class respectability, he might have thought that he was acting for Swann’s good.

was walking with Mme Verdurin, Dr Cottard, a young man in a fez whom he failed to identify, the painter, Odette, Napoleon III and my grandfather, along a path which followed the line of the coast,

The narrator reemerges to make his stylistic presence known and perhaps more accurately his realitic assessment of the entirety of the story.

So manifold are our interests in life that it is not uncommon, on the self-same occasion, for the foundations of a happiness which does not yet exist to be laid down simultaneously with the aggravation of a grief from which we are still suffering.

“To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!”

Florence a dazzling golden background like those in Fra Angelico’s pictures.

For often in one we find a day that has strayed from another, that makes us live in that other, evokes at once and makes us long for its particular pleasures, and interrupts the dreams that we were in process of weaving, by inserting out of its turn, too early or too late, this leaf torn from another chapter in the interpolated calendar of Happiness.

they do not return, one cannot live them again here when one has lived them there.

the happiness of love; softer, warmer upon the stone even than moss; robust, a ray of sunlight sufficing for it to spring into life and blossom into joy, even in the heart of winter.

It showed me finally, the new arrangement devised by the invisible seamstress, that, if we find ourselves hoping that the actions of a person who has hitherto caused us pain may prove not to have been sincere, they shed in their wake a light which our hopes are powerless to extinguish and to which we must address ourselves, rather than to our hopes, if we are to know what will be that person’s actions on the morrow.

of the poplars, rounded like the sun and moon in Michelangelo’s “Creation.”

But when a belief vanishes, there survives it—more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things—a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause—the death of the gods.

helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses.

The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.