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

by Marcel Proust

Victor Hugo

became something more than a new man, in which he brought to light, in the order of evolution, a literary species till then unknown, endowed with more complex organs than any then in existence.

His ‘thoughts’ he at that time expressed in the most direct form,

in the visitors’ book,

“Your name, my dear fellow, but no ‘thoughts’ please!”

early Hugo.

were touching, and already round about them, without their form’s having yet the depth which it was to acquire only in later years, the rolling tide of words and of richly articulated rhymes put them beyond comparison with the lines that one might discover in a Corneille, for example, lines in which a Romanticism that is intermittent, restrained and so all the more moving, nevertheless has not at all penetrated to the physical sources of life, modified the unconscious and generalisable organism in which the idea is latent.

Again on Hugo

simply by quoting

isolated line one multiplies its power of attraction tenfold.

conversations with the Duchess resembled the discoveries that we make in the library of a country house, out of date, incomplete, incapable of forming a mind, lacking in almost everything that we value, but offering us now and then some curious scrap of information, for instance the quotation of a fine passage which we did not know

not without danger,

risk of his coming to believe that the things of the past have a charm in themselves,

I looked forward to another dinner-party at which I might myself become a sort of Prince Von to Mme. de Guermantes, and repeat them.

it was with a feverish impatience not to have to bear the whole weight of them any longer by myself in a carriage where, for that matter, I atoned for the lack of conversation by soliloquising aloud,

was kept waiting in a drawing-room into which a footman shewed me

this room of which, despite this long wait, I could at the most have said that it was very big, greenish in colour, and contained a large number of portraits.

Practically he saw nothing as he was preoccupied

The need to speak prevents one not merely from listening but from seeing things,

absence of any description of my external surroundings is tantamount to a descript...

I who remembered with what a torrent of abuse M. de Charlus had parted from me at Balbec

There was in him, according to me, only pride, in me there was only fury.

He had indeed an air of dreading the moment at which he must part from me and find himself alone,

momentary fondness for myself, of

Victor Hugo’s Boaz:

We are attracted by every form of life which represents to us something unknown

and strange, by a last illusion still unshattered.

rendering some effect of perspective without reference to a knowledge of the laws of nature which he might quite well possess,

reality had disappointed me

(people’s names are in this respect like the names of places),

The humanity with which we consort and which bears so little resemblance to our dreams is, for all that, the same that, in the Memoirs, in the Letters of eminent persons, we have seen described and have felt a desire to know.

The old man of complete insignificance whom we met at dinner is the same who wrote that proud letter, which (in a book on the War of 1870) we read with emotion, to Prince Friedrich-Karl.

The fact remains, nevertheless, that these differences do exist. People are never exactly similar to one another, their mode of behaviour with regard to ourselves, at, one might say, the same level of friendship, reveals differences which, in the end, offer compensations.

in the hope of obtaining it for me effectively, all the credit at her disposal,

The types of the human mind are so varied, so opposite, not only in literature but in society, that Baudelaire and Mérimée are not the only people who have the right to despise one another mutually.

Prosper Merimee (1803 -- 1970) French writer.

Placed for the

first time in her life between two duties as incompatible as getting into her carriage to go out to dinner and shewing pity for a man who was about to die, she could find nothing in the code of conventions that indicated the right line to follow, and, not knowing which to choose, felt it better to make a show of not believing that the latter alternative need be seriously considered, so as to follow the first, which demanded of her at the moment less effort, and thought that the best way of settling the conflict would be to deny that any existed. “You’re joking,”

for other people their own social obligations took precedence of the death of a friend,

precious plant, exposed in the courtyard with that insistence with which mothers ‘bring out’ their marriageable offspring,

pistil.

autofecundation,

M. de Charlus

was a woman.

as a man, a man-bird or man-insect,

perhaps, a dim memory of the scene at Montjouvain, when I stood concealed outside Mlle. Vinteuil’s window.

there is another thing as vociferous as pain, namely pleasure,

the vice of each of us accompanies him through life after the manner of the familiar genius who was invisible to men so long as they were unaware of his presence.

explanation

The accurate word should be "reason "

the transformation of M. de Charlus into a new person was so complete

M. de Charlus looked like a woman: he was one!

sons without a mother,

Till today, inspie of so called gay rights/movemens gays are like child without a mother in every country & society.

they fall in love with precisely that type of man who has nothing feminine about him,