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?