Swann's Way: Translated by Rick Bennet (Vol. 1 of In Search of Lost Time)

by Marcel Proust

I did what grownups did when there are sufferings and injustices before them: I avoided it.

We humans are not a materially constituted whole, identical for everybody. Seeing a person we know, we fill out their physical appearance with our ideas of them. Those ideas so perfectly inflate the cheeks, so well follow the line of their nose, so clearly include their vocal nuances, that every time we think we’re seeing that face and hearing that voice, we’re seeing and hearing our ideas of them.

had, with an impious and secret hand, traced on her soul a first wrinkle and made appear there a first white hair.

So it is with our past. We try to evoke it, but it’s outside our intellect’s domain, unsuspected and hidden in our sensation of some material object, dependent upon the chance that we meet this object before we die.

Found? Created. I am in front of something that only I can make, only I can illuminate.

Because of her life’s inertia she lent an extraordinary importance to her slightest sensations, imbuing them with a spontaneity and energy which made it difficult to keep them to herself, and in absence of a confidant, she announced them to herself in a perpetual monologue.

He was one of those men with a literary and artistic side unexpressed in their career but benefiting their conversation.

But later I realized that the striking strangeness and special beauty of these frescoes was due to the symbol’s expression as something real, something actually undergone or materially manipulated, thus providing a more precise quality to the work and a more concrete quality to its teaching.

Along with the belief that I might discover truth in books, came the emotions risen by the actions in which I felt I took part, for those afternoons had more drama than sometimes does a lifetime.

It is true a book’s events and characters are not “real,” as Françoise said, but what we feel for the lives of real people occurs only by means of our imagination of them anyway.

It is only by our idea of a real person that we can be moved if misfortune strikes them; moreover, it is only by our idea of ourselves that we can be moved.

The novelist's art is in replacing the parts of real people’s souls, which we find impenetrable, with the parts of fictional beings which we can assimilate. It doesn’t then matter that the actions and emotions of these fictional beings are not “real,” because, being our creations, they, produced as we feverishly turn the book’s pages, are real to us.

And once the novelist has put us in the state where, as in all purely internal states, every emotion is multiplied, where their book disturbs us like a dream more lucid and lingering than those we have while sleeping, that novelist can release in us the joys and misfortunes which we might normally need years to know, the most intense of which we might not otherwise even perceive because they happen so slowly. Our heart, in life, may change with the worst pain, yet we’d onl...

As no such event occurred, the outcome of which she contemplated while playing solitaire, she sometimes, to make her life more interesting, manufactured dramas.

It was like any attitude or action in which someone’s deepest character is perhaps revealed: if it doesn’t relate to his previous words and we cannot confirm it by testimony he withholds, we are reduced to our own sense of what happened, so that we ask ourselves, faced with this isolated and sometimes incoherent memory, if we haven’t imagined it.

“There is a fine quality to silence, isn’t there?” he said. “To wounded hearts like mine, a novelist you will later read will claim that only shade and silence are appropriate.

We hardly think of it as a pleasure we shall have; rather, we call it a charm of hers; for one does not think of oneself then, but of leaving oneself.

making me understand that the small town of today was once very different, capturing my imagination with its ancient and incomprehensible face nearly concealed under the buttercups.

These dreams reminded me that if I wanted to be a writer, I needed to find subjects for conveying infinite philosophical significance; this need shut my brain down.

tore away the memory of their lines and surfaces as if they had been a kind of bark, revealing a little of what was within them, and I had a thought, new to me, and not a mere feeling but expressible, and the pleasure of having seen the steeples was so increased that I felt nearly drunk.

Sometimes I cannot at first tell from what country, time, or dream comes this landscape floating in my thoughts, but I stand on the deep earth of my memories when I think of the Méséglise and Guermantes ways.

Where a younger man might dream of possessing the heart of the woman he loved, an older man might choose to love the woman whose heart he possessed.

But as his daydreams became inseparable from his memories, what he had thought of as imperfections in her appearance became unimportant. She no longer had to fit his taste: she was the one he loved.

Swann’s memory provided him with a tentative transcript, so that as the piece continued, when the same impression returned, it was less elusive. He imagined its extent, its symmetry, its expressive value; he distinguished the phrase and it proposed a sensuousness he’d not before considered and which nothing else could make him feel.

He suffered thinking that the music passing so near did not know them. He regretted that it had a meaning and beauty apart from what they gave it, as when, with a gift of jewelry, we want the clarity of the gem to represent the essence of this love.

He reproached himself for not having before seen what the great artist had seen, and congratulated himself on now having an aesthetic justification for the pleasure he took in Odette.

And because he failed in his search of the little phrase for a meaning his intellect could grasp, he had to strip his soul of reason and pass through the dark filter of sound alone.

He began to realize there was an unappeased pain in the depths of the music’s sweetness, but it could not hurt him. What did it matter if the phrase told him that love was fragile, when his love was strong? He indulged in the sadness the music spread; he made Odette play the piece over and over, demanding that she not stop kissing him as she did.

"I believe there would be nothing more beautiful than poetry if the poets believed what they said. But often there is no one more calculating than these people. I had a friend who loved a poet. In his verses he spoke only of love, of heaven, of the stars.

"A slanderous statement spreads like a drop of oil,"

Moreover, perhaps she didn’t aspire to society because it was too far above the world she knew for her to properly conceive it.

But because he loved Odette, to try to share a soul with her, he tried to like what she liked.

“There was no chance of discovering the trick because the artist’s touch is even stronger than in Rembrandt’s Night Watch or Hals’ Regents. It’s all there, but also no, it isn’t, I swear. It looks all right, it goes to your head, takes your breath away and tickles you, all without you knowing how it’s done. It’s sorcery, it’s trickery, it’s miraculous,” and, bursting into laughter, “it’s dishonest!” then, solemnly raising his head and speaking in a deep bass note he tried to harmonize with his previous words, “It’s sincere.”

Because thinking of her gave the moments she was absent almost the same charm as those when she was present, to not miss her so much, he thought of her more.

And his hatred needing, like his love, to manifest in action, he liked to push his nasty imaginations further and further because, thanks to the deceits he lent to Odette, he hated her more and more, and if those deceits turned out true—and he tried to imagine that they would—they could give him a chance to punish her and satiate his growing rage.

Swann was not consciously aware of his love’s scope. When he tried to measure it, it sometimes seemed reduced to almost nothing. The near disgust he’d felt, before falling in love, for her exaggerated features and faded complexion, sometimes returned.

But that story, of the sort he would have thought most terrible to learn and impossible to believe of anyone else, once hearing, he accepted as true and, unable to ever forget, incorporated into his sadness.

Even when he couldn’t learn where she’d gone, it would have been enough if he could stay at her house waiting for her return, thus easing the intervening hours that a curse had made him believe were different from all others.

He’d exchanged his vague intellectualized love—safe because it possessed no actual love—for the chrysanthemum petals and “Maison Dorée” letterhead which were full of real love.

As the musicians weren’t yet so much playing the little phrase as prolonging the invocation of a miraculous apparition, Swann, who could no more see that spirit than he could see ultra-violet light, experienced a refreshing metamorphosis, as if a protective goddess was present, a lover’s confidant who, to reach only him in this crowd, had disguised itself as a creature purely sonorous. And as it passed, weightless and soothing as a perfume’s murmur, he scrutinized its message while involuntarily pursing his lips to kiss the harmonious and fleeting phantom.

But while we live we can no more forget them than we can doubt a lamp’s light changing everything in a room from which even the memory of darkness has vanished.

Perhaps nothingness is real and life a dream, so that these pieces of music, existing only in relation to our dream, are also nothing.

Swann thought he had imagined all her possible answers, but reality is no more limited by our imagination than is a knife’s stab limited by an overhead cloud, and those words, “two or three times,” though uttered into the air and made only of vibrations, were able to tear as if solid, cut as if touching flesh.

Love and jealousy are not binary conditions, but come on a continuum, like a painting where black blends into grey, grey into white; they are made of particles so small as to seem ephemeral, as the smooth swatch of paint is revealed, under a microscope, to be made of tiny flecks.

Instant ivy on our balcony; fleeting flora; colorless and sad one might think, but precious to me, as if it were Gilberte herself forming the shadow, promising the happiness of the possibility that she was already at the park waiting to say to me, “Let’s play tag; you’re on my team;” an illusion of plants softer and warmer than even moss would be; a perennial needing only sunlight to blossom in the heart of winter.

People so need to justify their passion—and find the qualities in their love’s object they’ve been taught are worthy of love—that they assimilate an imitation of those qualities into their reason for love, even if that reason opposes that which they’d sought when their love was spontaneous, as Swann had come to see Odette’s appearance in ways opposing his initial reactions to her.

This new truth, woven by the invisible seamstress of the truths I’d discarded, woven without regard for my desire that Gilberte’s hurtful actions have been unintentional, made me question what would be her actions tomorrow, because there is in the wake of honest interpretation a clarity against which our desires are helpless.

But when a faith’s source disappears, a fetish for its predecessor arises, stubborn enough to mask our inability to accept new ways, as if it were in that source, and not ourselves, that the divine had resided.