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.