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.