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

by Marcel Proust

the different periods of our life overlap one another. We scornfully decline, because of one whom we love and who will some day be of so little account, to see

another who is of no account to-day, with whom we shall be in love to-morrow, with whom we might, perhaps, had we consented to see her now, have fallen in love a little earlier and who would thus have put a term to our present sufferings, bringing others, it is true, in their place.

picture of our friend in our mind, which we believe to be old, original, authentic, has in reality been refashioned by her many times over. The

time is the very thing that we are least willing to allow, for our own suffering is keen and we are anxious to see it brought to an end.

other heart needs to effect its change our own heart will have spent in changing itself also, so that when the goal which we had set ourselves becomes attainable it will have ceased to count as a goal, or to seem worth attaining.

good fortune accrues to us when we have grown indifferent to it.

letters in which she implored my forgiveness, swore that she had never loved anyone but myself and besought me to marry her,

The person with whom we are in love is to be recognised only by the intensity of the pain that we suffer.

As soon as one is unhappy one becomes moral.

certain neurotics, from having at first pretended to be ill, end by becoming chronic invalids.

We construct our house of life to suit another person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, a prisoner within the walls which were intended only for her.

strolling and talking thus with Mme. Swann beneath her parasol, as though in the coloured shade of a wistaria bower.

It's Glbertte's mother, Odette, with whom Marcel actually fall in love.

Now our love memories present no exception to the general rules of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general rules of Habit. And as Habit weakens every impression, what a person recalls to us most vividly is precisely what we had forgotten, because it was of no importance, and had therefore left in full possession of its strength.

That is why the better part of our memory exists outside ourselves, 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, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source can make us weep again.

thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the creature that we were, range ourselves face to face with past events as that creature had to face them, suffer afresh because we are no longer ourselves but he, and because he loved what leaves us now indifferent. In the broad daylight of our ordinary memory the images of the past turn gradually pale and fade out of sight, nothing remains of them, we shall never find them again. Or rather we should never find them again had not a few words (such as this ‘Secretary to the Ministry of Posts’) been carefully locked away in oblivion, just as an author deposits in the National Library a copy of a book

*********

railway stations, which do not constitute, so to speak, a part of the surrounding town but contain the essence of its personality just as upon their sign-boards they bear its painted name.

among these the masterpiece at which we glance up from the table while we dine does not give us that exhilarating delight which we can expect from it only in a public gallery,

Work of art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction - Walter Benjamin

the spectacle of Balbec seemed to me none the less desirable because I must purchase it at the price of a discomfort

those who love and those who find pleasure are not always the same.

whatever it might be that I loved, it would never be attained save at the end of a long and heart-rending pursuit, in the course of which I should have first to sacrifice my own pleasure to that paramount good instead of seeking it there.

separation is made suddenly manifest, impossible to endure when it is no longer possibly to be avoided, concentrated in its entirety in one enormous instant of impotent and supreme lucidity.

in which (a thing that not even in my nightmares had yet been revealed to me) she would already have become something of a stranger, a lady who might be seen going home by herself to a house in which I should not be, asking the porter whether there was not a letter for her from me.

the great ones of the earth, of simple mind, or rather, doomed by a harsh fate to live among the simple-minded, deprived of

heavenly light, were yet more naturally, more instinctively akin to the chosen spirits than most educated people,

she presented things to her readers, in the order of our perception of them, instead of first having to explain them in relation to their several causes.

Dostoievsky side of Madame de Sévigné‘s Letters.

they neutralised the centrifugal force of my insomnia by exercising upon it a contrary pressure which kept me in equilibrium

If a person can be the product of a soil the peculiar charm of which one distinguishes in that person,

I felt in her presence that desire to

live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness.

substituting for them in our mind a con...

lifeless and dull because they are lacking in precisely that element of novelty,

And we deliver on life a pessimistic judgment which we suppose to be fair, for we believed that we were taking into account when we formed it happiness and beauty, whereas in fact we left them out and replaced them by syntheses in which there is not a single atom of either. So

this strapping girl gave me at once the sensation of a certain happiness (the sole form, always different, in which we may learn the sensation of happiness), of a happiness that would be realised by my staying and living there by her side.

most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit,

Life would have seemed an exquisite thing to me if only I had been free to spend it, hour after hour, with her, to go with her to the stream, to the cow, to the train, to be always at her side, to feel that I was known to her, had my place in her thoughts.

*** Is it something similar felt by the protagonist of Simenon's " The Widow"? Yes that 'widow' also passed a signal similar at first sight but hers could be explained. ****

my desire to see her again was really not so much a physical as a mental desire, not

*** mostly Marcel's desires are of desire to masturbate - this is another example ***

part of a life other than the life that I knew,

from which to return now to my old life would be almost suicide.

But alas, she must be for ever absent from the other life towards which I was being borne with ever increasing swiftness, a life to the prospect of which I resigned myself only by weaving plans that would enable me to take the same train again some day and to stop at the same station,

The Night Train to Deoli - Ruskin Bond

our mind turns readily aside from the effort which is required if it is to analyse in itself, in a general and disinterested manner, a pleasant impression which we have received.

I asked my way to the beach so as to see nothing in the place but its church and the sea;

I endeavoured to console myself with the thought that other towns remained still intact for me, that

the impression which my mind had been seeking occupied it steadily less as the place drew nearer to which my body would have to become accustomed.

the ‘fly’ seems to spring out from the end of the word ‘butterfly’—nothing

waiting upon a bench, I sought refuge in the innermost depths of my own consciousness, strove to migrate to a plane of eternal thoughts—to leave nothing of myself, nothing that lived and felt on the surface of my body, anaesthetised as are those of animals which by inhibition feign death when they are attacked—so

a chambermaid came past. I lent to her face, which the gathering dusk made featureless, the mask of my most impassioned dreams of beauty, but read in her eyes as they turned towards me the horror of my own nonentity. Meanwhile,

There is perhaps nothing that gives us so strong an impression of the reality of the external world as the difference in the positions, relative to ourselves, of even a quite unimportant person before we have met him and after.

It is our noticing them that puts things in a room, our growing used to them that takes them away again and clears a space for us. Space there was none for me in my bedroom (mine in name only) at Balbec; it was full of things which did not know me, which flung back at me the distrustful look that I had cast at them, and, without taking any heed of my existence, shewed that I was interrupting the course of theirs.

things in my room in Paris disturbed no more than did my eyelids themselves, for they were merely extensions of my organs, an enlargement of myself—towards