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.