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

by Marcel Proust

for what had just vanished in the dust of the explosion was not only the feeble old man, of whom no vestige now remained; there was also the beauty of an immense work which I had contrived

Again dream/imagination faces reality

are, no doubt, but whimsical draughtsmen, giving us of people as well as of places sketches so little like the reality that we often experience a kind of stupor when we have before our eyes, in place of the imagined, the visible world

or whether all that was not rather make-believe, whether the differences between one man’s book and another’s were not the result of their respective labours rather than the expression of a radical and essential difference between two contrasted personalities.

******

kneels a moment after everyone else is on his knees.

so poetic and so musical. At those points I could see in what he was saying a plastic beauty independent of whatever his sentences might mean, and as human speech reflects the human soul, though without expressing it as does literary style, Bergotte appeared almost to be talking nonsense,

an eclipse is seen through a smoked glass—of

the beauty of their language is as incalculable as that of a woman whom we have never seen;

advance the same argument for all the other qualities of style) is but a barren uniformity, that is to say the very antithesis of variety, and cannot, in the work of imitators, give the illusion or recall other examples of variety save to a reader who has not acquired the sense

ignoring every aspect of it that was already familiar,

each of us finds lucidity only in those ideas which are in the same state of confusion as his own.

the stereotyped attitude to which we have grown accustomed, and which has seemed to us to be reality itself,

the universe which they depicted. But he has long since decided that this must be the real universe, and so relies confidently upon it.)

twofold preoccupation over his profile and his reputation,

we are to a certain extent closed against ourselves. In

However characteristic it may be, the sound that escapes from human lips is fugitive and does not survive the speaker.

Only many years later, when he no longer had any talent, whenever he wrote anything with which he was not satisfied, so as not to have to suppress it, as he ought to have done, so as to be able to publish it with a clear conscience he would repeat, but to himself this time: “After all, it is more or less accurate, it must be of some value to the country.” So that the phrase murmured long ago among his admirers by the insincere voice of modesty came in the end to be whispered in the secrecy of his heart by the uneasy tongue of pride. And

there may be vice arising from supersensitiveness just as much as from the lack of it.

make use of their vices in order to arrive at a conception of the moral law that is binding upon us all. It

Perhaps the more the great writer was developed in Bergotte at the expense of the little man with the beard, so much the more his own personal life was drowned in the flood of all the lives that he imagined, until he no longer felt himself obliged to perform certain practical duties, for which he had substituted the duty of imagining those other lives.

Nervous men ought always to love, as the lower orders say, ‘beneath’ them, so that their women have a material inducement to do what they tell them.”

It

** Gilberte 's 'versions '

what she herself at that moment was.

when we think of the future,

we are prompted by the too passionate affection of a creature who is destined to survive us.

I was greatly disturbed by the thought of the impression that I must have been making on him,

He had indeed told me that there were any number of pretty women whom one might enjoy. But I could see them only in a vague outline for which those houses were to enable me to substitute actual human features. So that if I owed to Bloch—for his ‘good tidings’ that beauty and the enjoyment of beauty were not inaccessible things, and that we have acted foolishly in renouncing them for all time—a

Brothel starts

reversed, I remembered only long afterwards that it was upon that same sofa that, many years before, I had tasted for the first time the sweets of love with one of my girl cousins, with whom I had not known where to go until she somewhat rashly suggested our taking advantage of a moment in which aunt Léonie had left her room.

First sex, with a cousin on the same couch now given to the brothel

“If I were your father, I should have you up before the magistrate for this.” How

Odette's motherly instinct bestowed upon Marcel, book: p154

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions. I could

P155

my solitude a mental society in which it was not I myself but other imaginary speakers who controlled my choice of words, and in which I felt as I formulated, in place of the thoughts that I believed to be

+++ the whole of this work is that exercise ++

everything was so well arranged because I myself had not yet entered it,

*** Reminds Rilke - " Story told to the Darkness " especially

as though masterpieces of literature arose out of ‘getting to know” people,

There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for further desires.

We are, when we love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving at once to an accident, the most simple to all appearance and one that

may at any moment occur,

What makes us so happy is the presence in our heart of an unstable element which we are perpetually arranging to keep in position, and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced.

**

Actually, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralises, makes conditional only, procrastinates, but which may at any moment become what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we were seeking, sheer agony.

it was as though a wall had sprung up to hide from me a part of the life of Gilberte,

In a language that we know, we have substituted for the opacity of sounds, the perspicuity of ideas. But a language which we do not know is a fortress sealed, within whose walls she whom we love is free to play us false, while we, standing without, desperately alert in our impotence, can see, can prevent nothing.

her melancholy eyes and sullen features. Her face, grown almost livid, reminded me then of those dreary beaches where the sea, ebbing far out, wearies one with its faint shimmering, everywhere the same, fixed in an immutable and low horizon.

sharp depression that then affects our spirits, sunny hitherto, sustained and calm, lets loose in us a raging tempest against which we know not whether we are capable of struggling to the end.

nature which itself creates our loves, and almost creates the women whom we love, even to their faults),

At

*** agony of/and love ***

the other scale there is a feeling of pain—and

go at once to find her.

those ‘nevermores’ so touching to those who pen them, so wearisome to her who will have to read them,

When we come to examine the thoughts, the actions of a woman whom we love, we are as completely at a loss as must have been, face to face with the phenomena of nature, the world’s first natural philosophers, before their science had been elaborated and had cast a ray of light over the unknown.

next day I would go to the Swanns’, happy, but happy in the same way as people who, having long been tormented by the thought of a journey which they have not wished to make, go no farther than to the station and return home to unpack their boxes.

the latter, not having been able to resist the strain of so long a separation, would have ceased to exist; Gilberte would have become immaterial to me.

this strain of waiting, according to the strength of her memory and the resistance of her bodily organs, either helps her on her journey through the years, at the end of which she will be able to endure the knowledge that her son is no more, to forget gradually and to survive his loss, or else it kills her.