Clara Reads Proust

by Stéphane Carlier

Clara opens it and flicks through it, spotting a page with the corner folded down towards the end of the first third. A sentence has been underlined in blue ballpoint pen. You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist’s nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs.

He realised, too, that Odette’s qualities were not such as to justify his setting so high a value on the hours he spent in her company.

We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

Could it be that human nature is just lies, hypocrisy and mediocracy? That life is just a comedy of appearances that’s about as funny as acid reflux? That nothing will ever live up to the desire that preceded it? That the only possible salvation, the only chance of happiness imaginable is to be found through connections with works of art?

‘Sunrise is a necessary concomitant of long railway journeys, just as are hard-boiled eggs, illustrated papers, packs of cards . . .’

‘. . . the better part of our memory exists outside ourself, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected . . .’

Not all that many people reinvent themselves. We usually take the version of reality that we are first presented with and refrain from questioning it because we don’t dare to, because it is easier and more comfortable, and, in doing so, we live out the imperfect, frustrating life of someone who only resembles us from afar. Not much is certain about this life, and it is only becoming less so, but there is this: we don’t realise the extent to which our fates have been shaped by others.