Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7]: (Book Center) (The Greatest Writers of All Time)

by Marcel Proust

our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal;

which of the two Bermas was the real?

Who is real?

was this feeling of shame and humiliation that had embittered Odette, that the devilish characteristics which she displayed were no essential part of her, no irremediable evil,

**

No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a fresh, a third, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourself, the lover. And so there are very few who can regard as natural the enormous proportions that a creature comes to assume in our eyes who is not the same as the creature that they see.

"Love" in subjectivity

only a mistress or a sister may gain possession of the revealing, cherished image;

so strongly are we attached to such eccentricities, even to those of them which we are most anxious to correct, that it is because a woman comes in time to acquire an indulgent, an affectionately mocking familiarity, such as we ourselves have with them, or our relatives have, that amours of long standing have something of the sweetness and strength of family affection. The bonds that unite us to another creature receive their consecration when that creature adopts the same point of view as ourself in judging one of our imperfections. And among

Love & imperfections

endless pains to get himself elected to the Jockey Club,

In this really vast canvas of these volumes, Swann's intention looks more petty - but this petty thing only he was ignoring the real big thing - that is "love".

Your most ardent longing is to humiliate the man who has insulted you. But if you never hear of him again, having removed to some other place, your enemy will come to have no longer the slightest importance for you. If one has lost sight for a score of years of all the people on whose account one would have liked to be elected to the Jockey Club or the Institute, the prospect of becoming a member of one or other of those corporations will have ceased to tempt one.

"Out of sight.... " theory

they imply the sacrifice of a more or less advantageous position to a purely private happiness that, as a general rule, ‘impossible’ marriages are the happiest of all.

Impossible marriages...

posthumous happiness in this marriage with this Odette whom he had passionately loved—even if she had not been pleasing to him at first sight—whom he had married when he no longer loved her,

posthumous happiness in this marriage with this Odette whom he had passionately loved—even if she had not been pleasing to him at first sight—whom he had married when he no longer loved her ***

Prince happened to set eyes on Mme. Swann.

Prince happened to set eyes on Mme. Swann....*

Bergotte.

such is your Bergotte *****

(at a time when, every day, I regarded myself as standing upon the threshold of a life which was still intact and would not enter upon its course until the following morning) my

" every day, I regarded myself as standing upon the threshold of a life which was still intact and would not enter upon its course until the following morning" **

Time,

"I was not situated somewhere outside the realm of Time, but was subject to its laws, just like the people in novel" **

New Year’s Day was not a day different from, the rest,

NewYrs Day **

there is no boundary ditch between their forerunners and those new years which our desire for them,

one bases a religious system upon the blind laws of nature,

New Year’s Day of old men, who differ on that day from their juniors, not because people have ceased to give them presents but because they themselves have ceased to believe in the New Year. Presents

Old men's newYr

The sadness of men who have grown old lies

I had been able to write her one, by means of which I hoped, in telling her of my solitary dreams of love and longing, to arouse similar dreams in her. The sadness of men who have grown old lies in their no longer even thinking of writing such letters, the futility of which their experience has shewn.

movements of the living person whom as a rule, when we are not in love, we regard as fixed in one permanent position. Whereas the beloved model does not stay still; and our mental photographs of her are always blurred.

signature

First love letter

with every occurrence which, in our life and among its contrasted situations, bears any relation to love, it is best to make no attempt to understand it, since

with every occurrence which, in our life and among its contrasted situations, bears any relation to love, it is best to make no attempt to understand it

I marvelled at the impotence of the mind, the reason and the heart to effect the least conversion, to solve a single one of those difficulties which, in the sequel, life, without one’s so much as knowing what steps it has taken, so easily unravels.

it was not the intrinsic beauty of the objects themselves that made it miraculous for me to be sitting in Swann’s library, it was the attachment to those objects—which might have been the ugliest in the world—of the particular feeling, melancholy and voluptuous, which I had for so many years localised in that room and which still impregnated it; similarly

a great deal of the pleasure which a woman finds in entering a class of society different from that in which she has previously lived would be lacking if she had no means of keeping her old associates informed of those others, relatively more brilliant, with whom she has replaced them. Therefore,

was not the presence there of Republican ‘notables’ that frightened them away. In the days of my early childhood, conservative society was to the last degree worldly, and no ‘good’ house would ever have opened its doors to a Republican. The

like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed to be immovable, and composes a fresh pattern.

like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed to be immovable, and composes a fresh pattern

Everything Jewish, even the smart lady herself, fell out of the pattern, and various obscure nationalities appeared in its place.

All this does not, however, prevent the people who move in it from imagining, whenever society is stationary for the moment, that no further change will occur, just as in spite of having witnessed the birth of the telephone they decline to believe in the aeroplane.

philosophers of journalism

****

When, from a family circle, one of its members emigrates into ‘high society’—which to him appears a feat without parallel until after the lapse of a decade he observes that it has been performed in other ways and for different reasons by more than one of the men whom he knew as boys—he draws round about himself a zone of shadow, a terra incognita, which is clearly visible in its minutest details to all those who inhabit it with him, but is darkest night and nothingness to those who may not penetrate it but touch its fringe without the least suspicion of its existence in their midst. There

enslavement of refinement by vulgarity is the rule in many households, when we think, conversely, of all the superior women who yield to the blandishments of a boor, merciless in his censure of their most delicate utterances, while they go into ecstasies, with the infinite indulgence of love, over the feeblest of his witticisms.

There was no question of anti-semitism at the time when I used first to visit Odette. But she was like enough to it to remind people of what they wished, for a while, to avoid.

the Cottards could only be made to know that they were being invited not seriously but for the amusement of their host!

of which he was waiting to attempt the solution only until his jealousy should have subsided, had precisely lost all interest in Swann’s eyes when he had ceased to be jealous.

He continued the attempt to discover what no longer

He continued the attempt to discover what no longer interested him

was she whom I loved and could not, therefore look upon without that disturbance, without that desire for something more which destroys in us, in the presence of one whom we love, the sensation of loving.

often one listens and hears nothing, if it is a piece of music at all complicated

Listening 1st time

Probably what is wanting, the first time, is not comprehension but memory. For our memory, compared to the complexity of the impressions which it has to face while we are listening, is infinitesimal, as brief as the memory of a man who in his sleep thinks of a thousand things and at once forgets them, or as that of a man in his second childhood who cannot recall, a minute afterwards, what one has just been saying to him. Of

great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best. In

great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best

which by the sheer force of its beauty has become invisible and has remained unknown, this comes

long process of assimilation has melted them into a continuous substance, varied of course but, taking it as a whole, homogeneous, in which Hugo blends with Molière.

as every prophecy the non-fulfilment of which will not at all imply any inadequacy on the prophet’s part, for the power to summon possibilities into existence or to exclude them from it is not necessarily within the competence of genius; one may have had genius and yet not have believed in the future of railways or of flight, or,

Odette had been merely his companion, by his side, not (as the phrase had been) within him,

******

During

Page 112 James Grieve, Penguin Mod. Classics

appears that in a coincidence as perfect as this was, when reality is folded over to cover the ideal of which we have so long been dreaming, it completely hides that ideal, absorbing it in itself, as when two geometrical figures that are congruent are made to coincide, so that there is but one, whereas we would rather, so as to give its full significance to our enjoyment, preserve for all those separate points of our desire, at the very moment in which we succeed in touching them, and so as to be quite certain that they are indeed themselves, the distinction of being intangible. And our thought cannot even reconstruct the old state so as to confront the new with it, for it has no longer a clear field: the acquaintance that we have made, the memory of those first, unhoped-for moments, the talk to which we have listened are there now to block the passage of our consciousness, and as they control the outlets of our memory far more than those of our imagination, they react more forcibly upon our past, which we are no longer able to visualise without taking them into account, than upon the form, still unshaped, of our future. I had

belief that they have an existence of their own, give

friends of Gilberte who knew her family and had a share in that other part of her life, the part which was not spent in the Champs-Elysées.

Swann felt something similar about Odette's 'other life ' in vol #1

difference can it make to me what people think? I think it’s perfectly absurd to worry about other people in matters of sentiment. We

when, before I had even seen Gilberte, I reflected that her intimacy with that godlike elder would have made her,

is his dream Gilbertte coincided wirh the real as he mentioned before while talking about coincide of dream & reality?