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

by Marcel Proust

A danger seems avoidable once it has been averted.

anacoluthon

An abrupt change in syntax

By the time one wants to remember how one began to love a woman, one is already in love; during earlier reveries, one did not say to oneself, “this is the beginning of love, I must pay attention,” and the feelings crept up on us almost unnoticed.

Later, faced with a blatant lie or seized by anxious doubts, I longed to be able to remember it, but in vain; my memory, not forewarned, had not seen the need to take a copy.

I was more of a master than I had thought. More of a master, that is to say, more of a slave.

I was now in no hurry at all to see Albertine.

The certain knowledge that she was shopping with Françoise, that they would arrive home together very shortly, was like a radiant, peaceful star lighting up a time which, now,...

Even in the piece of music, I did not trouble to notice how much more closely now the alternation of the sexual pleasure motif and the anxiety motif corresponded to my love for Albertine—a love from which jealousy had so long been absent that I had once been able to admit to Swann my ignorance of that feeling.

Having in practice abandoned this ambition, had I given up something real? Could life make up to me for the loss of art, or was there in art a deeper reality where our true personality finds an expression that the actions of life cannot give it?

Mysteries28 in

Slowly my agitation receded. Albertine would be home soon. I would hear her ring the door-bell in a moment. I could feel that my life was no longer what it once might have been; and that to have, in this way, a woman with whom, quite naturally, when she came home, I would be expected to go out, to whose embellishment the strength and activity of my being would be increasingly devoted, made me into something like a twig which has grown in length, but is weighed down by the plump fruit in which all its reserves of strength have been concentrated.

The truth is that every time we try to imitate a truly real experience, we forget that that experience was produced, not by a wish to imitate anything, but by an unconscious force, itself also real.

The intensity of feeling which seized me at the sight of a wine-merchant’s cashier at her desk or a laundry-girl chatting in the street was the feeling we have when we recognize goddesses.

Now that there is no more Olympus, its inhabitants live on earth.

The man who wants to keep alive in himself the wish to go on living and belief in something more delicious than the things of every day, must go out walking; for the streets, the avenues are filled with goddesses.

Lying is the most necessary means of self-preservation, and the most used.

And I found a charm, more immaterial no doubt but no less intimate than that of the nearness, the joining of our bodies, in the fusion of our shadows.

As we emerged from their gloom and headed out of the Bois, we found ourselves in broad daylight once more, so bright that I thought I would have time to do everything I wanted before dinner; however, it was only a few moments later, as our car approached the Arc de Triomphe, that I was surprised and alarmed to see, hanging over Paris, the full moon, premature as the dial of a stopped clock which makes one think one is already late.

Since my taste was not involved, I had the right not to take notice of decor. All the same, I could have got rid of the bronze. But ugly, expensive things can be useful: they can impress people who do not understand us, do not share our taste, but with whom we might be in love, more than a difficult object which does not yield up its beauty at once.

Gisèle

another member of the band of girls

Passy

A wealthy Parisian neighborhood

Verisimilitude, whatever the liar may think, is not at all the same thing as truth.

Every being we love, up to a point every being, is a Janus, showing us its pleasant face as it moves away from us, and its gloomy face if we know it is permanently available to us.

It is dreadful to have another person’s life attached to one’s own, like carrying a bomb which one cannot let go of without committing a crime.

Love, no, pleasure well rooted in the flesh helps literary work because it cancels out other pleasures, the pleasures of social life, for example, which are the same for everyone.

And dreams cannot be made real, we know that; still, perhaps we would not form any without desire, and it is useful to have dreams so that we can see their collapse and learn from it.

He would apologize to the few friends whom he admitted to visit him, pointing to his plaids, his blankets and saying gaily, “It can’t be helped, dear boy, after all, as Anaxagoras said, life is a journey.”

He had long been a lover of dreams, even bad dreams, because it is they, in the way they contradict reality, which give us, when we wake up if not before, the profound sensation that we have been asleep.

We know that cold baths are bad for us, but we like them, so we can always find a doctor to prescribe them for us, if not to stop them harming us.

He had a further stroke, rolled off the sofa on to the ground as all the visitors and guards came running up. He was dead. Dead for ever? Who can say? Certainly spiritualist experiments provide no more proof than religious dogma of the soul’s survival. What we can say is that everything in our life happens as if we entered it bearing a burden of obligations contracted in an earlier life; there is nothing in the conditions of our life on this earth to make us feel any obligation to do good, to be scrupulous, even to be polite, nor to make the unbelieving artist feel compelled to paint a single passage twenty times over, when the admiration it will excite will be of little importance to his body when it is eaten by the worms, like the little piece of yellow wall painted with such knowledge and such refinement by the never-to-be-known artist whom we have barely identified by the name of Vermeer. All these obligations which do not derive their force from the here-and-now seem to belong to a different world founded on goodness, conscientiousness, sacrifice, a world quite different from this one, which we leave to be born on to this earth, and to which we shall perhaps return, to live under those unknown laws which we have obeyed because we carried their teaching within us without knowing who had written it there, these laws to which we are brought closer by any profound work of the intellect, and which are invisible—if ever wholly invisible—only to fools. So that the idea that ...

The universe is true for all of us and different for each one.

But error is more stubborn than faith and does not examine its beliefs.

from my bed, I hear the world waking up, sometimes to one kind of weather, sometimes to another! Yes, I have been forced to cut down the facts and to belie the truth, for it is not one universe but millions, almost as many as the number of human eyes and human intelligences, that wake up every morning.

The only ones of Albertine’s lies I knew about at this time were the ones Françoise had told me about at Balbec, for example, and which I have not mentioned, much as they hurt me at the time: “She didn’t want to come so she said to me, ‘Couldn’t you tell your master you couldn’t find me, I’d gone out?’ ” But our “inferiors,” when they love us, as Françoise did, always like to wound us in our self-regard.

(he used a more Cambronnesque word

A euphemism for merde

Diminished responsibility aggravates faults and even crimes, whatever the law may say.

A lie, a perfect lie about people we know, our past relations with them, our motives in acting which we presented to ourselves in quite a different light, a lie about who we are, about what we love, about what we feel for the person who loves us and thinks he has molded us in his likeness because he holds us in a constant embrace, a lie of that kind is one of the few things in the world that can open up wholly new perspectives for us, can awaken our torpid senses to contemplate universes which otherwise we should never have known.

“He’s the salt of the earth,” M. de Charlus would say of this old servant, for the people we value most are always those who have great virtues, and apply them unstintingly to the furtherance of our vices.

calumnies

If we had only limbs, only legs and arms, life would be tolerable. Unfortunately we have that little organ called the heart, which is subject to certain periods of weakness during which it is infinitely sensitive to everything that concerns the life of a certain person; at these times a lie—that harmless thing, alongside which we can live so happily whether it is told by ourselves or others—when it comes from this particular person, causes the little heart, which we ought to be able to have surgically removed, unbearable attacks of pain.

Useless to mention the brain, for our thoughts can reason as much as they like during these attacks, they have no more impact on them than on a severe toothache.

On that day, the day when our heart is near breaking, friends who admire our work are distressed to see how such nobodies, such insignificant beings, can hurt us so badly, bring us to the point of death. But what can they do? If a poet is dying of infectious pneumonia, can one imagine his friends explaining to the pneumococcus that the poet is talented and that it should let him get better?

objects can also be also friends,

otiose

Pointless

But the man who can see another’s mistake need only be intoxicated, however gently, by circumstances and he will often fall into it himself.

The only real journey, the only Fountain of Youth, would be to travel not toward new landscapes, but with new eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them can see, or can be; and we can do that with the help of an Elstir, a Vinteuil; with them and their like we can truly fly from star to star.

He was half-dead. We were speaking of counter-attacks; even those which can have only posthumous effects require, in order to be “set up” effectively, the sacrifice of some part of one’s forces. M. de Charlus had too little strength left to embark on such a preparation. We often hear about mortal enemies who open their eyes only to see each other on the point of death and die happy. That must be a rare occurrence, except where death has caught us in the midst of life. On the contrary, it is when we have nothing more to lose that we lose the will to face risks which we should have taken quite happily when in health. The desire for revenge is part of life; more often than not—in spite of exceptions which, within a single character, are mere human contradictions—it fades at the approach of death.