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.