Finding Time Again: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 7 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Marcel Proust

Just as a geometrician, stripping things of their physical qualities, sees only their linear substratum, so what people said escaped me, because what interested me was not what they wanted to say, but the manner in which they said it, in so far as this revealed their character or their absurdities; or, rather, the object that had always been the aim of my researches, because it gave me a specific pleasure, was the point that was common to one being and another. It was only when I glimpsed this that my intelligence—thitherto sleeping, even behind the apparent alertness of my conversation, the animation of which masked from the others a complete intellectual torpor—set out joyously in pursuit, but what it was then pursuing—for example, the identity of the Verdurin salon in different places and at different times—was situated at a somewhat deeper point, beyond appearances themselves, in a zone set slightly further back. Thus the visible, reproducible charm of individuals escaped me, because I did not have the ability to dwell on it, like a surgeon who will see, beneath the sleek surface of a woman’s belly, the internal disease which is gnawing at it. However often I dined out, I did not see the other guests, because when I thought I was looking at them, I was in fact radiographing them. It followed from this that, by combining all the observations I had been able to make of the guests at a dinner, the pattern of the lines I had traced formed a cluster of psychological laws in...