Inexhaustible profusion

But it was in vain that I lingered beside the hawthorns--inhaling, trying to fix in my mind (which did not know what to do with it), losing and recapturing their invisible and unchanging odor, absorbing myself in the rhythm which disposed their flowers here and there with the lightheartedness of youth and at intervals as unexpected as certain intervals in music--they went on offering me the same charm in inexhaustible profusion, but without letting me delve any more deeply, like those melodies which one can play a hundred times in succession without coming any nearer to their secret.

More ultimate Proust: the narrator lingering over a pleasing aroma, trying to grab onto that which cannot be grabbed. He is left only with words.

Silence and immobility

Quartering the topmost branches of one of the tall trees, an invisible bird was striving to make the day seem shorter, exploring with a long-drawn note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility, that one felt it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.


One can read In Search of Lost Time for a while before discovering that Proust has a sense of humor. And were I more Proust-like myself, I would invent the perfectly convoluted, almost-but-not-quite-incomprehensible metaphor to both describe and explain his softly ironic comic touch. But I surrender before even trying. I'll just note that he makes me smile sometimes, and usually by surprise.

Deep thoughts, pt. 2

...; certain places persist in remaining surrounded by the vassals of their own especial sovereignty, and will flaunt their immemorial insignia in the middle of a park, just as they would have done far from any human interference, in a solitude which must everywhere return to engulf them, springing up out of the necessities of their exposed position and superimposed on the work of man's hands.


This finishes the sentence begun in the previous post. And this is classic Proust: thick words, proceeding thickly, just as sure of their overarching sentiment as the reader, reading it, is unsure. Sometimes I have the patience to go back and re-read sentences like this in an effort to get at least a little closer to unlocking the essence of what he was trying to say. Other times I take a deep breath and say fuck it. Life is sometimes too short to be clear about every last one of Proust's crazy sentences.

His most artificial creations

Overshadowed by the tall trees which stood close around it, an ornamental pond had been dug by Swann's parents; but, even in his most artificial creations, nature is the material upon which man has to work...


A few interesting things here. First, the grammar is wrong--and I of course can't tell if that's the fault of the author or the translator. I'm guessing the author. (I should at some point look this up in the newer, Enright translation; as noted earlier, I'm using the Kilmartin for the first two books.) And the grammar mistake throws off the reader, rendering the author's point a bit more initially cryptic, a bit more to slog through. The mistake is putting the word "nature" after the comma, resulting in a misplaced pronoun: the phrase "even in his most artificial creations" refers to "man," not "nature." Proust might have more clearly written "even in man's most artificial creations, nature is the material upon which he has to work."

And yet that way also seems not quite right. Either that or I've gotten used to Proust's roundabout ways of expressing thoughts, to the point where the roundaboutedness may indeed be part of the thought, may add some ineffable insight to that being expressed merely words.

The last interesting thing about this sentence fragment is that it goes on and on from there; the rest of the paragraph expands upon this thought in an increasingly dense way. He might have merely stopped at "has to work," instead of placing a semi-colon there and going on. And yet then it would not be Proustian. I'll look at the rest of the passage next time. The only way I can absorb some of this stuff is in small doses.

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."