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

by Marcel Proust

with the splendid gratuitousness of the greatest works of art.

Swann also perceived Odette in the same way and the artist also. Difference if the artist brought out of it - art.painting but Swann not. Here the passive protagonist Marcel finally eternalise her by his pen.

thinking that I should not be able to sleep, that even after I was asleep a little of my thought remained.

reflexion of this reflexion, that it was in my sleep that I had had the idea that I was not asleep, then, by a further refraction,

Tbeme of dream startzs

One of my dreams was the synthesis of what my imagination had often sought to depict, in my waking hours, of a certain seagirt place and its mediaeval past. In my sleep I saw a gothic fortress rising from a sea whose waves were stilled as in a painted window.

Dream as wish fulfillment

This dream in which nature had learned from art,

is the property of what we imagine in our sleep to multiply itself in the past,

and suddenly I was ashamed to be seen by them, for we sleep without our clothes.

photographs.

End of the dream-theme

My

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smiled at her with a vague and melancholy air as one smiles at a person with whom one used to play as a child, but with whom one has since severed all one’s relations because she has led an abandoned life, has married a convict or (what is worse still) a co-respondent.

We pardon the crimes of individuals, but not their participation in a collective crime.

Legrandin,

??

The truth is that I scarcely belong to this Earth upon which I feel myself such an exile; it takes all the force of the law of gravity to hold me here,

Certain memories are like friends in common, they can bring about reconciliations; set down amid fields starred with buttercups, upon which were piled the ruins of feudal greatness, the little wooden bridge still joined us, Legrandin and me, as it joined the two banks of the Vivonne.

as if all the dwellings, all the enclosed spaces in the village were on their way to make, on one solemn date, their first communion.

No doubt it was the same thin and narrow face that we saw, Robert and I. But we had arrived at it by two opposite ways, between which there was no communication, and we should never both see it from the same side.

had known

I had known tbem all ……Eliot , Love song of JAP

It was not ‘Rachel when from the Lord’—who seemed to me a small matter—it was the power of the human imagination, the illusion on which were based the pains of love; these I felt to be vast. Robert noticed that I appeared moved.

These trees

strange deities,

But by each of the most wretched, of those that looked as though they had been scorched and branded by a rain of brimstone, a mysterious traveller, halting for a day in the accursed city,

prescience latent in women who love the male body so intensely that they immediately guess what will give most pleasure to that body, which is yet so different from their own.

this hideous self of whom I had just caught sight in the glass was perhaps there for the last time on earth, and that I should never meet the stranger again in the whole course of my life.

saw another drama, mute but expressive, enacted beneath the words of the spoken drama which in itself,

In the moie age the page3 and those gossip mags tried to play thesame but far more dull in their way

the idea of deliberate wickedness being too painful for me to bear.

the wicked man supposes himself to be punishing the wickedness of his victim;

teaching an unworthy comrade a lesson.

Goethe in Wilhelm Meister

blackmail

Sakharam Binder every one has his / her weapons to attack other

I had realised that morning beneath the pear blossom how illusory were the grounds upon which Robert’s love for ‘Rachel when from the Lord’ was based; I was bound now to admit how very real were the sufferings to which that love gave rise.

Had it driven her into taking advantage of certain successes with men so as to avenge herself upon women?

(people in fact who will, when they come to write their memoirs, present a worthy picture of those virtues)

we find a sensibility, an intelligence which are not conducive to action.

the lustre of her name would have blotted out, it was this intellect, resembling rather that of a writer of the second order than that of a woman of position,

make delicate fun of them and to express her incomprehension in a graceful and witty form.

What artists call intellect seems pure presumption to the fashionable world which, unable to place itself at the sole point of view from which they, the artists, look at and judge things,

But a narrative of this sort, even when it treats exclusively of subjects that are not intellectual, is still a work of the intellect,

as a girl she probably appeared to her friends an insufferable prig.

Mme. Leroi,

Volume 2???

losing caste among all the doctors’ or solicitors’ wives

those cutting strokes which the injured party never forgets.

Moreover, talent is not a separate appendage which one artificially attaches to those qualities which make for social success, in order to create from the whole what people in society call a ‘complete woman.’ It is the living product of a certain moral complexion, from which as a rule many moral qualities are lacking

estimating the smartness of a house by the people whom its mistress excluded rather than by those whom she entertained.

we all live in different worlds according to our ages,

such marks of royal friendship, secret and unknown to the world, existed for the Marquise alone,

Bloch, now a rising dramatist,

because it does not

appear to emanate from humanity,

But hardly anyone to-day remembers who Mme. Leroi was, her opinions have vanished into thin air,

“What are your views on love?”—“Love? I make it, constantly, but I never talk about it.”