Powerless

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them...


This is why you can't argue with a zealot.

The complexity of circumstances

There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning...


The irony comes with those who are not, shall we say, rigid in their own virtue at all, yet remain sanctimonious in their condemnation of some alleged vice or another. Because Proust's comment here relates to a character--M. Vinteuil--whose daughter is widely suspected of being a lesbian (the word of course is not uttered), a certain recent vice president (ah! "vice" president!) of the U.S. comes to mind.

Dispatch from a bygone world

They held that one ought to set before children, and that children showed their own innate good taste in admiring, only such books and pictures as they would continue to admire when their minds were developed and mature. No doubt they regarded aesthetic merits as material objects which an unclouded vision could not fail to discern, wiwthout one's needing to nurture equivalents of them and let them slowly ripen in one's own heart.


The narrator is talking about his grandmother's sisters. It is the kind of observation that reminds us just how long ago this book was written, and what a bygone world he is reporting from. It can be easy to forget that when so many of his psychological insights seem not just up to date but sometimes, still, ahead of us. But here he gives us a glimpse of a mindset that predates our modern view of childhood. It is as fascinating as it is at once laughable and poignant--the knowledge that children have always been raised by adults convinced they know what they're doing, and yet if the adult lacks entirely any sense that a child is a being in development, then the adult is blind and the child, often, damaged.

White as a cloud

Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would creep up, white as a cloud, furtive, lustreless, suggesting an actress who does not have to "come on" for a while, and watches the rest of the company for a moment from the auditorium in her ordinary clothes, keeping in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself.


Proust is the master of the over-extended metaphor. He could have left this one early; the moon as an actress who doesn't have to come on for a while is effective in itself, it would seem. But one senses that Proust's metaphors unfold with so much detail in his own head that he can't help but reveal them to the depths that his brain has taken them, length and clarity of sentence be damned. It's almost like he doesn't trust our imaginations to be as rich as his. I can't say he's not justified in this opinion. While part of me is annoyed when he feels the need to spin his metaphors beyond normal bounds, part of me is ever fascinated by where he takes them, and by the greater spell they end up casting. Not only is his moon an actress who does not come on for a while, she sits in the auditorium, watching the play she is otherwise in "in her ordinary clothes." Will you look at a moon in the day sky the same way again?

Sick with longing

The name Swann had for me become almost mythological, and when I talked with my family I would grow sick with longing to hear them utter it; I dared not pronounce it myself, but I would draw them into the discussion of matters which led naturally to Gilberte and her family, in which she was involved, in speaking of which I would feel myself not too remotely exiled from her; and I would suddenly force my father (by pretending, for instance, to believe that my grandfather's appointment had been in our family before his day, or that the hedge with the pink hawthorn which my aunt Leonie wished to visit was on common land) to correct my assertions, to say, as though in opposition to me and of his own accord: "No, no, that appointment belonged to Swann's father, that hedge is part of Swann's park." And then I would be obliged to catch my breath, so suffocating was the pressure, upon that part of me where it was for ever inscribed, of that name which, at the moment I heard it, seemed to me fuller, more portentous than any other, because it was heavy with the weight of all the occasions on which I had secretly uttered it in my mind.


One thing that's tricky with Proust is how, in the first books, he describes childhood feelings and emotions with excessively grown-up words and phrases and sentences. It can create a kind of disconnect or strangeness for the reader until you get used to it. Surely the child that he was did not think in these precise terms, and yet at the same time, so potently does he describe his obsessions that it is only, clearly, a childhood state he is describing. I think, for instance, many of us can relate to that sort of "charged" feeling around a certain person, or even a fictional character, that we might have had as a kid in one instance or another. For most of us, it's easy to forget the nature of that half-embarrassed half-enthralled state of mind, and the extent of the obsession. Proust here connects it to one of his archetypal emotions--longing--and does an effective job at describing the literally altered state to which it brought him, for better or worse.

She wanted to want to

She would have liked to see Swann and Tansonville again; but the mere wish to do so sufficed for all that remained of her strength, which its fulfillment would have more than exhausted.


He is referring to his aunt, but more to the point, he is talking again about longing. Proust is an expert in longing, having examined its every facet under a most powerful metaphysical microscope. To Proust all longing is at root implacable. This particular twist is subtle and poignant, a particular kind of impossible longing, mobiusly turned back on itself, both existing and negating its existence at the same time. His aunt's desire to visit Swann at Tansonville could not be fulfilled, she had not strength for it. So she allowed herself to be satisfied merely wanting to go. More precisely, she wanted to want to, but didn't actually want to. And who among us doesn't know what that's like?

Meeting Gilberte, pt. 2

I loved her; I was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to hurt her, to force her to keep some memory of me.


Our intrepid narrator, as yet unnamed, is a bit of a neurotic. To say the least. What becomes almost touching over time, however, is how little he makes an effort to hide his neuroses from his readers. And it's not because he is unaware of his audience. He writes rather directly to the audience most of the time. But he pulls no punches on himself. When he has thoughts or feelings that most of us might keep carefully to ourselves, he carefully exposes them. Think what you will of him, he is himself enough not to worry about that, or, simply, not to be able to be any other way.

Those bright eyes

Her black eyes gleamed, and since I did not at that time know, and indeed have never since learned, how to reduce a strong impression to its objective elements, since I had not, as they say, enough "power of observation" to isolate the notion of their color, for a long time afterwards, whenever I thought of her, the memory of those bright eyes would at once present itself to me as a vivid azure, since her complexion was fair; so much so that, perhaps if her eyes had not been quite so black--which was what struck one most forcibly on first seeing her--I should not have been, as I was, so especially enamored of their imagined blue.


Phew. A lot to unpack here. "I did not at that time know, and indeed have never since learned": what's going on with that? What an odd way to phrase that. Normally if you note that you didn't know something at some point in the past you are simultaneously acknowledging that you have since learned. Proust instead phrases it to accentuate his own perceived shortcoming. And yet as his reader, you feel compelled to disagree, sort of. That is, you have by now, 150 pages in, been bombarded with his efforts to describe things both in his outer and inner worlds. So it would seem obvious that he can do what he says he can't--that is, reduce a strong impression to its objective elements. Isn't that what the whole book is sort of about? But then again, he may not believe that he's doing that at all. He is lost in his own subjectivity--and by implication telling us all that we are lost in our own--and so despairs of ever making that translation from subjective to objective.

But, in any case, for him to accuse himself of lacking enough "power of observation" seems almost a purposeful joke. And yet at the same time he is here noting a powerful truth that is perhaps one of his gargantuan novel's most abiding themes: that we are ever prisoner to our own memories, which themselves are inescapably divorced--sometimes in small ways, sometimes in large ways--from what actually happened. His idea that the very blackness of Gilberte's eyes was itself what caused him to remember--and love--them as bright blue strikes me as an incredibly complex metaphor for something that I can't quite put my finger on.

Meeting Gilberte

Suddenly I stood still, unable to move, as happens when we are faced with a vision that appeals not to our eyes only but requires a deeper kind of perception and takes possession of the whole of our being.


This is when our intrepid narrator first lays eyes on the first (of a series) of girls/women about whom he will obsess, obsessively. Maybe it's just me, but I don't find Proust's descriptions of his emotional state regarding women to ring true. I find them fascinating, don't get me wrong. But he doesn't too often sound like a boy (or a man) in love with a girl (or a woman). And I'm not just talking about his homosexuality; it's more his strange outsider-ness at work. His was an idiosyncratic psyche. He saw and felt differently than the people around him. As became apparent in this book a long time ago, and we're only at page 153.

Mysterious longing

And then I returned to the hawthorns, and stood before them as one stands before those masterpieces which, one imagines, one will be better able to "take in" when one has looked away for a moment at something else; but in vain did I make a screen with my hands, the better to concentrate upon the flowers, the feeling they aroused in me remained obscure and vague, struggling and failing to free itself, to float across and become one with them. They themselves offered me no enlightenment, and I could not call upon any other flowers to satisfy this mysterious longing.


The man's on a roll. This is right on the heels of the last entry, and he's still trying to unpack the unearthly allure of those hawthorns. This passage may nearly serve as a microcosm of the entire 4,200-some-odd-page affair: the narrator observing, lacking quite the words to describe but trying (at great length) anyway, intermittently focusing on small episodes, but no, everything still floats away in a wordy blur of emotion, and he (and we) are left, in the end, with nothing more (or less) than Mysterious Longing.

Inexhaustible profusion

But it was in vain that I lingered beside the hawthorns--inhaling, trying to fix in my mind (which did not know what to do with it), losing and recapturing their invisible and unchanging odor, absorbing myself in the rhythm which disposed their flowers here and there with the lightheartedness of youth and at intervals as unexpected as certain intervals in music--they went on offering me the same charm in inexhaustible profusion, but without letting me delve any more deeply, like those melodies which one can play a hundred times in succession without coming any nearer to their secret.

More ultimate Proust: the narrator lingering over a pleasing aroma, trying to grab onto that which cannot be grabbed. He is left only with words.

Silence and immobility

Quartering the topmost branches of one of the tall trees, an invisible bird was striving to make the day seem shorter, exploring with a long-drawn note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility, that one felt it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.


One can read In Search of Lost Time for a while before discovering that Proust has a sense of humor. And were I more Proust-like myself, I would invent the perfectly convoluted, almost-but-not-quite-incomprehensible metaphor to both describe and explain his softly ironic comic touch. But I surrender before even trying. I'll just note that he makes me smile sometimes, and usually by surprise.

Deep thoughts, pt. 2

...; certain places persist in remaining surrounded by the vassals of their own especial sovereignty, and will flaunt their immemorial insignia in the middle of a park, just as they would have done far from any human interference, in a solitude which must everywhere return to engulf them, springing up out of the necessities of their exposed position and superimposed on the work of man's hands.


This finishes the sentence begun in the previous post. And this is classic Proust: thick words, proceeding thickly, just as sure of their overarching sentiment as the reader, reading it, is unsure. Sometimes I have the patience to go back and re-read sentences like this in an effort to get at least a little closer to unlocking the essence of what he was trying to say. Other times I take a deep breath and say fuck it. Life is sometimes too short to be clear about every last one of Proust's crazy sentences.

His most artificial creations

Overshadowed by the tall trees which stood close around it, an ornamental pond had been dug by Swann's parents; but, even in his most artificial creations, nature is the material upon which man has to work...


A few interesting things here. First, the grammar is wrong--and I of course can't tell if that's the fault of the author or the translator. I'm guessing the author. (I should at some point look this up in the newer, Enright translation; as noted earlier, I'm using the Kilmartin for the first two books.) And the grammar mistake throws off the reader, rendering the author's point a bit more initially cryptic, a bit more to slog through. The mistake is putting the word "nature" after the comma, resulting in a misplaced pronoun: the phrase "even in his most artificial creations" refers to "man," not "nature." Proust might have more clearly written "even in man's most artificial creations, nature is the material upon which he has to work."

And yet that way also seems not quite right. Either that or I've gotten used to Proust's roundabout ways of expressing thoughts, to the point where the roundaboutedness may indeed be part of the thought, may add some ineffable insight to that being expressed merely words.

The last interesting thing about this sentence fragment is that it goes on and on from there; the rest of the paragraph expands upon this thought in an increasingly dense way. He might have merely stopped at "has to work," instead of placing a semi-colon there and going on. And yet then it would not be Proustian. I'll look at the rest of the passage next time. The only way I can absorb some of this stuff is in small doses.

Illumination

But in summer, when we came back to the house, the sun would not have set; and while we were upstairs paying our visit to aunt Léonie its rays, sinking until they lay along her window-sill, would be caught and held by the large inner curtains and the loops which tied them back to the wall, and then, split and ramified and filtered, encrusting with tiny flakes of gold the citronwood of the chest-of-drawers, would illuminate the room with a delicate, slanting, woodland glow.


Sometimes his descriptions are so expressive that the moment fills my inner space with a vividness that seems fully sensory. He is as captivated by quality of light as a painter is, using words instead of brushes to capture his impressions.

Landscape ethics

My father raised the subject again at our subsequent meetings, torturing him with questions, but it was labor in vain; like that scholarly swindler who devoted to the fabrication of forged palimpsests a wealth of skill and knowledge and industry the hundredth part of which would have sufficed to establish him in a more lucrative but honorable occupation, M. Legrandin, had we insisted further, would in the end have constructed a whole system of landscape ethics and a celestial geography of Lower Normandy sooner than admit to us that his own sister was living within a mile or two of Balbec...


Yes this sentence continues, but I'm cutting it off here; it's already too rich. I don't remember why M. Legrandin does not want to tell Marcel's father about his sister. But I love the analogy here, and how Proust never hesitates to veer off into an extended, involved comparison at once too crazily detailed to sound natural and yet, at the same time, all but perfect.

Cineraria blue

"There are tints in the clouds this evening, violets and blues, which are very beautiful, are they not, my friend?" he said to my father, "a blue, especially, more floral than aerial, a cineraria blue, which it is surprising to see in the sky."


M. Legrandin is talking about the sky again, and in so doing blends two of Proust's obsessions: the sky, and flowers. In "Combray" in particular he turns his eyes often to the sky, and clouds, and the rays of the sun, noticing and describing in detail; and throughout Swann's Way he is almost mystically attracted to flowers. How nice of his character to here, then, to describing the color of the sky as "cineraria blue."

Strange accident of fortune

"No, I don't know them," he said, but instead of vouchsafing so simple a piece of information, so very unremarkable a reply, in the natural conversational tone which would have been appropriate to it, he enunciated it with special emphasis on each word, leaning forward, nodding his head, with at once the vehemence which a man imparts, in order to be believed, to a highly improbable statement (as though the fact that he did not know the Guermantes could be due only to some strange accident of fortune) and the grandiloquence of a man who, finding himself unable to keep silence about what is to him a painful situation, chooses to proclaim it openly i order to convince his hearers that the confession he is making is one that causes him no embarrassment, is in fact easy, agreeable, spontaneous, that the situation itself--in this case the absence of relations with the Guermantes family--might very well have been not forced upon, but actually willed by him, might arise from some family tradition, some moral principle or mystical vow which expressly forbade his seeking their society.


I've been building up to this, but here we have an archetypal Proustian sentence-paragraph. This one--unlike many others--is actually understandable from beginning to end, and reasonably grammatical. But how thick with emotional and psychological information it is! These sentences of his exhaust me to unpack; and as I am--as already noted--no scholar, I fortunately don't have to. But what we have here is the kind of minute, multi-layered interior observation that surely must be called Proustian. A sentence like this at once assures the reader that this is in fact a novel and not a memoir, because my god how could one actual person understand this much about the internal reality of another actual person; and yet likewise strikes the mind as far more memoir-like than novel-like because, my god, what novelist would create a narrator with this idiosyncratically observant of the overlapping emotions of the characters around him?

Peculiar physiognomy

We are very slow to recognize in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the model which is labeled "great talent" in our museum of general ideas. Simply because that physiognomy is new and strange, we can find in it no resemblance to what we are accustomed to call talent. We say rather originality, charm, delicacy, strength; and then one day we realize that it is precisely all this that adds up to talent.


Proust is here in the middle of discussing the writer Bergotte, a fictional creation who was apparently supposed to be something of a combination of the novelist Anatole France and the philosopher Henri Bergson, both of whom the real Marcel much admired. And the narrator Marcel surely takes his reading seriously. In this observation it sounds like he is settling a score with critics who maybe did not appreciate his favorites with the praise he wanted to hear. Obviously the word "talent" holds some special meaning for him.

A spiritual border

When I saw an external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, surrounding it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever touching its substance directly; for it would somehow evaporate before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body that is brought into proximity with something wet never actually touches its moisture, since it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation.


Proust is partial to complex metaphysical metaphors. This one arose out of his recounting how he enjoyed reading at the summer house in a hooded wicker chair under a particular chestnut tree, but the context isn't that important, because once he launches into the stratosphere, metaphorically speaking, he often loses me. In fact, to borrow a bit from the metaphor in question, I sometimes feel like his overactive brain is its own sort of spiritual border, getting in between his actual thoughts and the reader's understanding of them. This bit about the border and the evaporation both tantalizes me and escapes me.

The sublime face of true goodness

And quite possibly, this lack (or seeming lack) of participation by a person's soul in the virtue of which he or she is the agent has, apart from its aesthetic meaning, a reality which, if not strictly psychological, may at least be called physiognomical. Since then, whenever in the course of my life I have come across, in convents for instance, truly saintly embodiments of practical charity, they have generally had the cheerful, practical, brusque and unemotioned air of a busy surgeon, the sort of face in which one can discern no commiseration, no tenderness at the sight of suffering humanity, no fear of hurting, the impassive, unsympathetic, sublime face of true goodness.


Often he needs many lines to make his point. Even when it doesn't run to extraordinary lengths, his wordiness can easily try one's patience. As already seen, sometimes the sentence is simply too long. Other times, however, the depth grows with the length. Strip Proust of his wordiness and you, sometimes, strip him of his stentorian meaning.

A great patch of open sky

"The only thing wanting is the necessary thing, a great patch of open sky above your life, little boy," he added, turning to me. "You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist's nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs."


The speaker is M. Legrandin, who is an engineer by trade but better known as In Search of Lost Time develops as a writer of some renown in the universe of the book. Never mind the complications of whether Legrandin is a sincere talent or an effete snob, there are two striking things about this line he abruptly delivers to Marcel, the narrator, who, in reminiscence, is a boy at the time. First, it's a complete non-sequitur. And yet realistic in that way that adults will suddenly re-direct their conversation to a nearby child. Second, the narrator leaves it entirely alone: Legrandin says it out of the blue, the paragraph ends, and the narrator moves on to something else entirely.

Which oddly but maybe not inadvertently draws all the more attention to Legrandin's pronouncement.

Four-dimensional Proust

...all this made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of the town: an edifice occupying, so to speak, a four-dimensional space--the name of the fourth being Time--extending through the centuries its ancient nave, which, bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which it emerged triumphant...


This is from a (very) long sentence, over 40 lines of text, the full length of an entire (long) paragraph. I resisted the urge to type the whole thing. His long sentences are legendary and, truth be told, a bit ridiculous. He worked and worked over the text, from what I've read, but I've also read that he actually wasn't as disciplined in terms of sentence structure as you might expect someone to be who a) revised and revised and revised; and b) wrote a lot of long sentences.

I like this fragment because of his writing about time as the fourth dimension in a way that sounded like he was just trying the idea out, as if it might in fact be new to readers. Apparently the idea had been floating around since the late 19th century, but it was, still, a novel concept when he was writing Swann's Way in the early 1910s.

The vast structure

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.


Okay, so maybe it's one of the more over-intellectualized excuses for writing an extended flashback in the history of literature, but it's quite a tour de force nonetheless. When I first started reading the book, many years ago (I started it probably three different times before finally sticking with it), I was enduringly frustrated by Proust's obscure sense of time. You have to kind of learn to love that if you're going to read it all the way through. One is never sure when anything is happening. He goes backwards and forwards, from general (e.g. childhood) to specific (e.g. one particular encounter on one particular day) and back again without much warning.

In the end, one grows to see that he is "simply" (although it's very complicated) reflecting how the mind works. Everything is jumbled together. We can consciously go in to retrieve one particular thing, but it's always stuck onto other things, often seemingly unrelated. The entire madeleine episode in fact takes place in the vaguest of time and places--he identifies it as simply as "one day in winter," "many years" since he had thought about his family's country home in Combray. He writes continually about the real world and yet continually, only, relentlessly, through the filter of his own individual being. Which is all any of us have.

The abyss, part two

Ten times over I must assay the task, must lean down over the abyss. And each time the cowardice that deters us from every difficult task, every important enterprise, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of today and my hopes for tomorrow, which can be brooded over painlessly.


He pulls no punches on himself; when he speak globally, he's not just talking to us. Although that's part of it. "The cowardice that deters us from every difficult task": ouch.

The dark region

What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.


Proust was a 20th-century thinker long before others caught up with him--a pre-post-modern, if that makes sense. For him the mind is always turning onto itself, wondering what it will find, and realizing that it is all one big invention.

Losing the magic

I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself. The drink has called it into being, but does not know it, and can only repeat indefinitely, with a progressive diminution of strength, the same message which I cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call it forth again and to find it there presently, intact and at my disposal, for my final enlightenment. I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth. But how?


This is a direct continuation of the passage from the previous post. And one more short section directly follows this one, which I'll save for the next post. I like being able to carve his dense prose into shorter segments. It helps me focus more on what he's saying. Sometimes he just plain exhausts me before I can absorb any meaning.

Extraordinary thing

And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?


I do regret the archaic translation here. For the first two books I have this 1982 edition; from that point onward, I've been reading the updated '92 version that joins Enright to Moncrieff and Kilmartin and cleans up some of the needlessly stuffy language, the "whences" and "morrows" and such. This in any case is the moment we've all been waiting for, when the madeleine is dunked in the tea and the narrator's world is rocked. More of this internal craziness in the next entry.

A labour in vain

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.


Okay then. He's just set up the famous madeleine, and not a moment to soon, as this well-known episode happens in the very next paragraph. Note how he has more or less told us very near the beginning that the entire book--him searching back in time to tell us about his life--is in some way a "labour in vain." Didn't stop him, though.

Habit, and not the last time we'll hear of it

Habit! that skillful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.


Needless to say it would be good to be reading all this in French. But I drew the line at learning French merely to be able to read Proust in it. And so I am not sure if in the original language the words "habit" and "habitable" are related. A clever pun/insight if so. In any case, Proust writes often and articulately on the concept of "habit" and how it affects behavior, emotion, personality itself.

The immobility of things

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them.


Always in Proust the awareness of how our minds affect our environments, and vice versa.

The tyranny of rhyme

My mother had to abandon her quest, but managed to extract from the restriction itself a further delicate thought, like good poets whom the tyranny of rhyme forces into the discovery of their finest lines.

Envy becomes pity

Whenever she saw in others an advantage, however trivial, which she herself lacked, she would persuade herself that it was no advantage at all, but a drawback, and would pity so as not to have to envy them.


He offers these psychological insights effortlessly. It would be obnoxious except that he is so willing likewise to display his own flaws with equal astuteness.

Everyone is different, and here's maybe why

But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people.


I wonder over and over what M. Proust would have made of Twitter.

In the beginning

For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say to myself: "I'm falling asleep."

So begins the book (via Moncrieff/Kilmartin; 1982 Vintage Books edition), and so begins this blog. I am reading Proust on my own, and have been for a couple of years at this point. I'm nearing the end of Sodom and Gomorrah now, and have been meaning to collect some of my favorites sentences and/or passages in one place.

So I'm going back to the beginning, the first volume, and will post some lines here maybe every day, or every few days, or when the mood strikes, perhaps with comment, perhaps not. I will proceed in order, from Swann's Way onward, but idiosyncratically, skipping only to sentences that caught my eye and ear, for whatever reason. And I might occasionally go backwards, if I miss something, or discover something after the fact.

Reading Proust is a prodigious undertaking and seems to require more than simply closing the cover when done. So this is what I will do. But I am no scholar. Just an interested reader with a decent education behind me. And a lot of Proust, still, ahead of me.