The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Marcel Proust

reality, even if it is inevitable, is not completely predictable;

This new décor, already more immaterial, is still not so charming as the one which the eight o’clock sun produces in place of what we were accustomed to see when we did not rise until midday.

Of all the persons who make up our individual selves, the most apparent are not the most essential.

Perhaps love is nothing but the ripple effect of those disturbances which, in the wake of an emotion, stir up the soul.

Reality is always a mere starting-point toward the unknown, on a path down which we can never travel very far.

This ideal morning filled my mind with permanent reality, identical with all similar mornings, and with a gaiety unimpaired by my weak physical state; for, since our well-being results much less from our good health than from the surplus of our unexpended energy, we can attain it not only by increasing our strength, but by reducing our activity.

Even if we ask of the day only desires, there are some—those provoked not by things, but by human beings—which by nature cannot be shared.

The things people joke about most are usually those which irritate them, but which they do not want to seem to be irritated by; there is perhaps, too, an unspoken hope of further advantage: that the person we are speaking to, hearing us admit something jokingly, will believe that it is not true.

I knew that the laugher’s mind was narrow compared to the mind he laughed at, but his vocabulary was purer.

ad hominem

Ad hominem an argument deriving from emotion

We should note that the regularity of a habit is usually a function of its absurdity.

When you finish a violin solo at my house, have you ever been rewarded with a fart, instead of delirious applause or the silence which is even more eloquent as it comes from the fear of being unable to hold back—not what your fiancée gives us in such quantity, but tears, tears that you have brought to the edge of our lips?”

Often those who hide their possession from everyone do so only for fear that the loved object will be taken away from them. And their happiness, by this prudent choice of silence, is diminished.

The young girl’s passion for the violinist streamed around her like her hair when it was down, like the joy that overflowed in her eyes.

At that moment she seemed like a work of Elstir or of Bergotte, I felt a moment of lofty enthusiasm for her, seeing her distanced by imagination and art.

There was only one thing she would not do for me, a thing she would have done only at the time when I would have cared nothing for it, and which she would have happily done then for that very reason: that is, tell me the truth.

I would therefore always be reduced, like an examining magistrate, to drawing uncertain conclusions from slips of language which could perhaps be explained without invoking the hypothesis of guilt. And she would always see me as jealous and judging of her.

If only I had seized the time before she knew I was jealous of her to ask her the things I wanted to know. One should make the best use of that time.

she had seen from my kindness to her that she did not have to show me as much affection as to other people in order to receive more in return),

The person we love, I used to say to myself at Balbec, is a person whose actions seem particularly to attract our jealousy; we feel that if she told us of all her doings, we could perhaps easily stop loving her.

When one has fallen in love first with one painter, then with another, one can finally admire the whole museum in a way that is not chilly, for the admiration is made of successive loves, each of which in its time was exclusive, but which have finally coalesced.

Then, realizing she was in a deep sleep, and that I would not go aground on reefs of consciousness now covered by the waters of oblivion, I carefully, noiselessly moved up on to the bed; I lay down alongside her, put one of my arms around her waist, touched my lips to her cheek and her heart, and then rested my free hand on every part of her body in turn.

When, as here, love is born in a particular, anguished moment of our relation to a person, born of our uncertain hold on that person and the fear that he or she may escape, then that love always bears the sign of the upheaval of its creation; there is little left of the vision we previously had when we thought of the one we now love.

our desire (the only thing that makes us take any interest in the existence or character of a person) is such a constant reflection of our underlying nature,

ex voto

Ex voto a religious offering given to fulfil a vow

All the same, carnal love for me was above all the joy of triumphing over so many competitors. I cannot repeat it too often, more than anything else it was relief from pain.

Once we pass a certain age, the soul of the child we used to be and the souls of the dead from whom we spring come and scatter over us handfuls of their riches and their misfortunes, asking to bear a part in the new feelings we are experiencing: feelings which allow us, rubbing out their old effigies, to recast them in an original creation.

I was carefree in the way of those who think their happiness can last.

under every physical pleasure of any intensity there lies an abiding sense of danger.

No one works immediately on landing in a strange country; there are the new conditions to get used to.

Or else, from the first sound of the bells of a nearby convent, few and hesitant as their early morning worshippers, barely lightening the dark sky with their tentative showers of sound which were fused or broken up by the warm wind, I had already recognized one of those stormy days, mild and unpredictable, when the roofs, briefly dampened by rain, then dried by a breath of wind or a ray of sunshine, poutingly display a few drops and, as they wait for the wind to turn again, preen in the passing sunshine the rainbow glints of their shot-silk slates; one of those days which is filled with so many changes in the weather, so many atmospheric incidents, so much turbulence, that the lazy man feels he has not wasted it, since he has taken an interest in all the activity that the atmosphere, failing any action on his part, has undertaken in his place; days like those times of rioting or war that do not seem empty to the schoolboy missing his classes, since, hanging around outside the Palais de Justice or reading the newspapers, he has the illusion that the unfolding events replace the work he is not doing, developing his intelligence and excusing his idleness; days, in a word, to which we can compare those which bring our lives to some exceptional crisis and which make the man who has never done anything believe that he will, if all turns out happily, adopt new habits of diligence: for example, it is on the morning when he is going out to fight a duel in particularly dangerous ci...

One can absorb, in the form of suspicions, an enormous daily dose of the idea that one is deceived: when the same idea would be fatal in a much smaller quantity, if administered in the single injection of a destructive word.

It is not enough in love, as in everyday life, to fear only the future: one must fear the past, which often becomes real to us only after the future, and I am not simply speaking of the past about which we learn only after the event, but of the one we have carried within us for many years, and which we only now learn to read.

Jealousy is often nothing but an uneasy desire for domination, applied in the context of love.

What? Who was the other person? Alas, those fragmented eyes, sadly reaching into the distance, might perhaps allow you to judge distances, but not directions.

And now that she had once said to me “Mlle Vinteuil” I longed, not to tear off her dress and see her body, but to see through her body to the whole note-book of her memories and plans for further, ardent lovers’ meetings.

How, then, can one dare hope to go on living, how can one take the least step to preserve oneself from death, in a world where love is provoked only by lies and consists only of our need to have our sufferings calmed by the person who makes us suffer?

We give up our fortunes, our very lives for someone, even while knowing that at ten years’ distance, earlier or later, we would hold back the fortune, hold on to the life.

As aircraft hangars had quickly grown up around Paris—they are to airplanes what harbors are to boats—and ever since the day at La Raspelière when my almost mythical meeting with an aviator, whose flight overhead had made my horse rear, had become for me a kind of image of freedom, I liked—and Albertine, with her passion for all sports, agreed—to conclude our days out with a visit to one of these aerodromes.

Love, in painful anxiety as in happy desire, is the need for complete possession. It is born, it lives only for so long as there is something left to conquer.

Anyway, I don’t think much of the feelings of people who say how much they love someone and then can’t do the least thing to help them, and who are so busy thinking of the person that they can’t remember to post a letter for them, even when their whole future depends on it.”

After all, who can “string us up” more than the highly strung?

convolvulus

Already this dream was beginning to fade. By trying to hold on to it in order to describe it, I sent it fleeing all the faster.

If I tried to reconstruct my dream, they would open altogether. We constantly have to choose between health and wisdom on the one hand, and spiritual pleasures on the other. I have always been too much of a coward to choose the second.

It has been said that beauty is the promise of happiness. Reversing the idea, the prospect of pleasure can also be the beginning of beauty.

The curiosity of love is like our curiosity about place-names: always disappointed, it is always reborn and remains insatiable.

For memory is not a copy, always present to our eyes, of the various events of our life, but rather a void from which, every now and then, a present resemblance allows us to recover, to resurrect, dead recollections; but there are also thousands of tiny facts which never fell into this well of potential memories and which we shall never be able to check.

I had to, I simply had to manage it; I didn’t as yet see how, and I spent the first moments opening and closing my hands, staring at them, cracking my knuckles, whether it is that our mind, when it cannot see a solution, is overcome by laziness and decides to suspend its activity for a moment, during which it registers with great clarity the most irrelevant things, like the blades of grass on the embankment which we see trembling in the wind while our train is stopped in the middle of nowhere—this immobility, however, is not always any more productive than that of a captured animal which, paralyzed with fear or spellbound, stares without moving—or whether I was holding my whole body in reserve, with my intelligence inside it and along with that the possibility of acting on a given person, as if it were simply a weapon which I should presently wield to separate Albertine from Léa and her two friends.

Jealousy, whose eyes are bandaged, is not only powerless to see anything in the surrounding darkness; it is one of those tortures where a task has constantly to be begun again, like that of the Danaids or of Ixion.