Wholly Platonic satisfaction

It was an invitation which, two years earlier, would have incensed M. Vinteuil, but which now filled him with so much gratitude that he felt obliged to refrain from the indiscretion of accepting. Swann's friendly regard for his daughter seemed to him to be in itself so honourable, so precious a support that he felt it would perhaps be advisable not to make use of it, so as to have the wholly Platonic satisfaction of preserving it.


This is a very Proustian psychological wrinkle. I'm not sure how many people actually think like this--how much, that is to say, Proust continually and vigorously projected his own mini-neuroticisms onto his characters. But that may be besides the point. The mere process of his teasing out such observations--as here, with the composer Vinteuil, who was so moved by Swann's support that he preferred not to engage it--is itself the marvel. This long and winding book is full of such moments.

Powerless

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them...


This is why you can't argue with a zealot.

The complexity of circumstances

There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning...


The irony comes with those who are not, shall we say, rigid in their own virtue at all, yet remain sanctimonious in their condemnation of some alleged vice or another. Because Proust's comment here relates to a character--M. Vinteuil--whose daughter is widely suspected of being a lesbian (the word of course is not uttered), a certain recent vice president (ah! "vice" president!) of the U.S. comes to mind.

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?

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?