Time Regained (In Search of Lost Time #7)

by Marcel Proust

Dreyfusism was now integrated into a range of respectable and normal things. As for wondering what intrinsic merit it had, nobody gave it any greater consideration now, in accepting it, than formerly, when they had condemned it. It was no longer shocking. That was all that mattered.

And the reader understands that this sharpness is just grief as it appears in men who do not want to appear to feel grief, a fact which would be simply ridiculous if it were not also ugly and terribly sad, because it is the way that people who think that grief does not matter, who think that there are more important things in life than partings, etc., experience grief,

Tell me now, M. de Charlus said to me, you know Cottard and Cambremer. Every time I see them they tell me about Germany’s extraordinary lack of psychology. Between you and me, do you think they concerned themselves about psychology before, or even that they are capable of showing any competence in it now?

Do not sacrifice men for the sake of stones, the beauty of which derives precisely from their having for a moment embodied human truths. –

France which prides itself on justice, and is right to pronounce words of justice, but which is also gentle France, and ought to pronounce words of mercy, even if only for her own children, and so that the flowers when they bloom again may light up other things than tombs.

“Now that Germany has determined upon war, the die has been cast”, the truth is that every morning war is declared anew. Thus those who wish to continue it are as guilty as those who started it, perhaps more so, for the latter may not perhaps have foreseen the full horror of it.

For like many highly strung people she was exasperated by other people’s emotional volatility, probably because it was too much like her own.

When we read, we are seeking to be taken out of our surroundings, and workers are as curious about princes as princes are about workers.

I slowly became aware that the essential book, the only true book, was not something the writer needs to invent, in the usual sense of the word, so much as to translate, because it already exists within each of us. The writer’s task and duty are those of a translator.

Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as in the artist.

It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing only a single world, our own, we see it multiplied, and have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, all more different one from another than those which revolve in infinity and which, centuries after the fire from which their rays emanated has gone out, whether it was called Rembrandt or Vermeer, still send us their special light.

It is only out of a habit derived from the insincere language of prefaces and dedications that writers talk about ‘my reader’. In reality each reader, when he is reading, is uniquely reading himself.

The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument which he offers the reader to enable him to discern what without this book he might not perhaps have seen in himself. The recognition within himself, by the reader, of what the book is saying, is the proof of its truthfulness, and vice versa,

But other characteristics (such as inversion) may mean that the reader needs to read in a particular way in order to read properly; the author should not take offence at this, but instead should allow the reader the greatest possible freedom by saying to him: ‘Look for yourself, try whether you see better with this lens, or that one, or the other one.’

Think how many great cathedrals have been left unfinished! One feeds a book like that, one strengthens its weak parts, one looks after it, but eventually it grows up, it marks our tomb, and protects it from rumours and, for a time, from oblivion.

If the idea of death during this period had, as we have seen, cast a gloom over love, the memory of love had for a long time now helped me not to be afraid of death. For I understood that dying was not something new but quite the reverse, that since my childhood I had already died a number of times.

Even those who were well disposed towards my perception of the truths which I intended subsequently to engrave within the temple congratulated me on having discovered them with a ‘microscope’, when on the contrary I had used a telescope to make out things which were indeed very small, but only because they were situated a long way away, each of them a world in itself.

Then, as I thought of all the events which had to be set in place between the moment when I heard those sounds and this party at the Guermantes’, I was frightened to think that the bell could still be ringing in me without my being able to do anything to alter the shrillness of its tinkling, since, no longer remembering very clearly how it faded away, and wanting to rediscover this, and to listen to it properly, I had to try to block out the sound of the conversations which the masks were holding all around me. In order to try to hear it at closer quarters, I was forced to go back down into myself. It must therefore be that this tinkling was always there, and also, between it and the present moment, the whole of this past, unrolled indefinitely, which I did not know that I was carrying. When it tinkled, I already existed, and for me still to be able to hear the tinkling there must have been no break in continuity, I must not have ceased for a moment, not taken a rest from existing, from thinking, from being conscious of myself, because this moment from long ago still stuck to me, so that I could still find it again, still go back to it, simply by going more deeply back into myself.

I felt a sense of tiredness and fear at the thought that all this length of time had not only uninterruptedly been lived, thought, secreted by me, that it was my life, that it was myself, but also that I had to keep it attached to me at every moment, that it supported me, that I was perched on its vertiginous summit, and that I was unable to move without its collaboration, without taking it with me. The date at which I heard the sound of the garden bell at Combray, so distant and yet still within me, was a benchmark in that vast dimension which I did not know I had. I felt giddy at the sight of so many years below me, yet within me, as if I were miles high.