In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

the nature we display in the second part of our life may not always be, though it often is, a growth from or a stunting of our first nature, an exaggeration or attenuation of it. It is at times an inversion of it, a garment turned inside out.

We learn of a victory either after the war is over or at once from the janitor’s jubilation.

Bergotte is what I call a flute-player. It must of course be admitted that he tootles on his flute quite mellifluously, albeit with more than a modicum of mincing mannerism and affectation. But when all’s said and done, tootling is what it is, and tootling does not amount to a great deal. His works are so flaccid that one can never locate in them anything one could call a framework. There’s never any action in ’em, well, hardly any, and especially no scope. It’s their base which is their weak point – or rather, they have no base. In this day and age, when the increasing complexity of modern life leaves one barely any time for reading, when the map of Europe has undergone a profound recasting, and may well be on the point of undergoing another which may prove to be even more profound, when so many new and threatening problems are cropping up on all sides, you will allow that one may fairly claim the right to expect that a writer might aspire to be something higher than a glib wit, whose futile hair-splittings on the relative merits of merely formal matters distract us from the fact that we may be overrun at any moment by a double wave of barbarians, those from within and those from without! Now, I know that to speak thus is to utter blasphemies against the sacrosanct school of what certain gentlemen call Art for Art’s Sake – but in our day and age there are more urgent tasks than stringing jingles of words together. I must admit that Bergotte’s jingles can at times be quite...

the only acquaintance one should have with writers is through their books.

For the books are just chock-full of incessant analysis (which, between you and me, is actually quite sickly), with agonizing scruples and morbid remorse and a veritable deluge of preachifying over the merest peccadilloes – and we all know what that’s worth!

Think of all the men who go on believing in the love of a mistress in whom nothing is more flagrant than her infidelities; of all those torn between the hope of something beyond this life (such as the bereft widower who remembers a beloved wife, or the artist who indulges in dreams of posthumous fame, each of them looking forward to an after-life which he knows is inconceivable) and the desire for a reassuring oblivion, when their better judgment reminds them of the faults which they might otherwise have to expiate after death; or think of the travellers who are uplifted by the general beauty of a journey they have just completed, although during it their main impression, day after day, was that it was a chore – think of them before deciding whether, given the promiscuity of the ideas that lurk within us, a single one of those which afford us our greatest happiness has not begun life by parasitically attaching itself to a foreign idea with which it happened to come into contact, and by drawing from it much of the power of pleasing which it once lacked.

having earlier extracted from Françoise, the bloodthirsty pacifist, a promise not to inflict too much pain on the rabbit she had had to kill and wishing to know how it had met its death. Françoise assured me that everything had gone off perfectly, very quickly: ‘I never seen any animal like that. It just died without as much as saying a word. Maybe it was dumb …’ Unversed in the speech-habits of animals, I suggested that perhaps rabbits do not screech quite like chickens. ‘Oh, what a thing to say! Françoise gasped in indignation at such ignorance. As if a rabbit wouldn’t screech as loud as a chicken! They’ve actually got much louder voices!’)

Our desires interweave with each other; and in the confusion of existence, it is seldom that a joy is promptly paired with the desire which longed for it.

It is possible that even a genius may have disbelieved that railways or aeroplanes had a future, as it is possible to be an acute psychologist, yet disbelieve in the infidelity of a mistress or the deceit of a friend, whose betrayals can be foreseen by someone much less gifted.

Likewise, those who produce works of genius are not those who spend their days in the most refined company, whose conversation is the most brilliant, or whose culture is the broadest; they are those who have the ability to stop living for themselves and make a mirror of their personality, so that their lives, however nondescript they may be socially, or even in a way intellectually, are reflected in it. For genius lies in reflective power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.

Regret, like desire, seeks satisfaction and not self-analysis: in the beginning of love, our time is spent not in finding out what love is made of, but in trying to make sure we can see each other tomorrow; and at the end of love, you do not try to ascertain the nature of your sorrow, but only to voice it in what you hope is its tenderest form to her who is the cause of it. You say things you feel the need to say and which she will not understand; you talk only for your own benefit.

By every use of her power to hurt, the woman constricts us more and more, shackling us with stronger chains; but she also shows us the weakness of those which once seemed strong enough to bind her and thus to enable us to feel untroubled by her.

For in love, unlike war, the more one is defeated, the more one imposes harsh conditions; and one constantly tries to make them harsher, if one is actually in a position to impose any, that is.

Even so, separation can be effective: the heart which at present ignores us may be visited by the wish to see us again, or by an expectation of pleasure in our company. It just takes time. And the demands we make on time are as inordinate as the requirements of a heart if it is to change. In the first place, time is the very thing we wish not to grant; for our pain is acute and we are in haste to have it cease. As well, in the time that it takes for the other’s heart to change, our own heart will be changing too; and when the fulfilment desired comes within our reach, we will desire it no longer.

In that room of mine at Balbec, ‘mine’ in name only, there was no space for me: it was crammed with things which did not know me, which glared my distrust of them back at me, noting my existence only to the extent of letting me know they resented me for disturbing theirs. Without let-up, in some unfamiliar tongue, the clock, which at home I would never have heard for more than a few seconds a week, on surfacing from a long reverie, went on making comments about me, which must have sounded offensive to the tall violet curtains, for they stood there without a word in a listening posture, looking like the sort of people who will shrug their shoulders to show they are irked by the mere sight of someone.

Taking humankind as a whole, the incidence of the virtues shared by all is no more remarkable than the multiplicity of the defects peculiar to each.

The type of fraudulence which consists of being bold enough to utter a difficult truth, while diluting it with enough untruths to falsify it, is more widespread than one might think; and even those who do not make a habit of this may now and then have recourse to it, if some critical episode of life, in particular one involving a love affair, gives them the opportunity.

Aristocracy is relative: there are all sorts of inexpensive little resorts where the son of a furniture salesman may be the arbiter of all things elegant, holding court like a young Prince of Wales.

I was trapped in the present, as heroes are, or drunkards; in brief eclipse, my past had ceased to project in front of me that shadow of itself which we call our future; seeing the purpose of my life not in any past dreams coming true but in the simple bliss of the passing moment, I could see no further than that moment.

However charming the kindness of a lord may be, compared to the kindness of a great artist, it always suggests play-acting, pretence. Saint-Loup’s aim was to please; Elstir’s was to give, and to give himself: he would have gladly given whatever he possessed, ideas, works and all the rest that he valued much less highly, to anyone who understood him. But he found something lacking in the company of most people, and lived in a state of isolation and unsociability which fashionable people saw as ill-mannered and affected, the powers-that-be as wrong-headed, his neighbours as mad, and his family as arrogant and inconsiderate.

The most exclusive love for any person is always love for something else.

if God the Father had created things by naming them, Elstir recreated them by removing their names, or by giving them another name. The names of things always express a view of the mind, which is foreign to our genuine impressions of them, and which forces us to eliminate from them whatever does not correspond to that view.

Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark-room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.

While talking to her, I had been as unaware of my words and where they went as though I had been throwing pebbles into a bottomless well.

Though we think our thoughts are ours by choice, and our ills a mere consequence of our own recklessly unhealthy life, it may well be that, just as papilionaceous plants produce a seed of a certain shape, our family hands down to us the ideas which keep us alive, as well as the illness which will cause our death.

Geographers or archaeologists may well take us to Calypso’s island or unearth the true palace of King Minos. Unfortunately, though, Calypso then turns into a mere woman; and Minos is no more than a king, shorn of divinity.