Interrospire’s Reviews > Swann’s Way > Status Update

"Maybe it is nothingness that is real and our entire dream is nonexistent, but in that case we feel that these phrases of music, and these notions that exist in relation to our dream, must also be nothing. We will perish, but we have for hostages these divine captives who will follow us and share our fate. And death in their company is less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps less probable."

I have found what I imagine was the motif for the Vinteuil Sonata, Trio elegiaque No. 2 in D minor 5:58

It's an odd experience to be swept over by a romance right as you read the section "Swann in Love", to not only recognize the text but feel your emotions and mental landscape reinvigorated through art. What I would find little more than teenage sentiment was given a rip through habit and tedium, Proust gets it.

"...the first word of calamitous news, whose accents can never afterwards be expunged from the memory, everything that bears upon it the imprint of actual, physical death, so terribly different from the logical abstraction of it's possibility) she would fall back on from time to time, to add interest to her life, upon imagining other, minor catastrophes,"

I am trying to read it slowly so that I can soak in the words, but I keep skipping ahead when I can feel he's making a point so I can enjoy it sooner lol.

"But for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness;..."