“For it may be that I might have inferred from them that
life teaches us to dimmish the value of what we read, and show us that the
things which the writer comments to the us were never worth very much; yet I
might equally well have come to the opposite conclusion, that reading teaches
us to place a higher value on life, a value which we did not know how to appreciate, and the true extent of which we come to realize only through the
book” (26-27).
“Goncourt knew how to listen, as he knew how to see: I did not” (28).
At least he is starting to realize his level of self centeredness.
“The artists who gave us the greatest vision of elegance
have gleamed the elements of them from the homes of people who were seldom the
leaders of fashion of their epoch . . . “ (29).
“In society (and this social phenomenon is merely one
application of a much more general psychological law) novelties, blameworthy or
not arouse horror only if they have not been assimilated and surrounded by reassuring
elements” (34-35)
“The one walked on, and nothing else interrupted the monotonous
tramp of one’s constitutional in the rustic darkness” (46) – Paris during the
blackouts during the war.
Bloch to war.
“Two men who moved in society, finding themselves the sole survivors
on a desert island, where there was no need to demonstrate their good manners
to anyone, would recognize each other by these marks of their upbringing . . .
And these social graces, whatever else they signify are an indication of
significant mental shackles. Anyone
unable to cast them off will always remain merely a society man.” (50-51).
Pg 55-56 he actually seems to be talking about what we would
today call toxic masculinity and this ties in with the previous pages comments
about Saint-Loup - the simplicity of
passion and duty without the grandstanding.
He also ties it into how society views gay men - as making up for being gay by being
masculine. Which considering that Proust
himself was gay is interesting. And
Saint-Loup is bi or gay, but Marcel the narrator seems straight. So alternate history?
Saint Loup = war a la King Arthur.
Pg 63 Gilberte’s daughter.
Hill 307 – Lost Battalion connection? Cher Ami pigeon story. Is that the reference?
“It must be said, however, that although war had not
increased Saint-Loup’s intelligence, this intelligence, developing according to
laws in which heredity played a major part, had taken on a polish that I had
never before seen in him” (72).
Marcel is like Mom, thinking he is better than everyone
else.
Carp a la Chambord looks good. And Marcel does like some very expensive
wine. I mean, we are talking over a thousand
dollars for some of this. I looked it up.
On Saint -Loup “And he had remained charming and pink, as he
had been at Balbec, beneath all his golden hair” (74).
“Few people having spoken with Bergotte, nobody recognized
the tone of his voice, which was different from his written style. This oral fertilization is so uncommon in
that I wanted to mention it here. It
never produces anything, however, except sterile flowers” (82).
“The real brainwashing is what we tell ourselves because
hope, which is one form of the instinct of national self-preservation, if we
are really a living member of the nation” (88).
“The truth is that people see everything through the news of
their newspapers, and how could they do otherwise given that they are not
personally acquainted with people or the events concerned?” (101).
Yep, still true.
“But isn’t the destruction of so many marvelous young men,
once incomparable polychrome statues themselves, also vandalism? Isn’t a town which will no longer have any
beautiful men in it like a town with all its statues smashed?” (110).
On war – “It is an illness which, whenever, it seems to have
been warded off at one point, reappears somewhere else.” (111).
Rheims and Amiens Cathedrals were hit and there are photos
of the shells or bombs actually hitting them.
The destruction is different than that of WWII but still somewhat
shocking.
“The whole of that mixture of living history and art that
was France is being destroyed, and the process is not over yet” (113). And this has happened in Iraq, Gaza, Sudan,
Syria, Jewish society in Europe during WWII, the destruction of the Buddhas in Afghanistan,
I mean the list doesn’t stop.
“Cathedrals should be adored until such time as their preservation
becomes dependent on our denying the truth that they teach” (112). Makes me think of people who claim they are
so holy and religious yet post some of the most hateful shit you can see on the
internet. But also - do we value a building more than a human
life.
Marcel seems to have become everyone’s confessor.
So one bottle of wine is like 1300 plus dollars on wine.com
but you can only buy three at a time. I
am so moving in the wrong circles. Does
a $1300 bottle taste that different from a twenty, if the years are the
same? I would like to know. Does anyone
know?
And yes some cheap wine, does in fact, taste cheap.
The comments about how people look at the stores and news
depending on the newspaper – also how when people talk about immigration
without really looking at why people are fleeing a country. Too much of generalizations.
The comments about WWI are making me think of the WW I poets
like Wilfred Owen and Sassoon.
The whole spy on the S&M club is a bit something.
Pg 161 acknowledges
hi feelings about Swan and Bergotte was the reason he loved Gilberte, so he has
some self awareness.
“. . . in the same way that one likes somebody whom one
enjoys enraging everyday by beating them at dominoes” (165).
The butler “He waited for bad news like a child waiting for
an Easter-Egg, hoping that they would go
badly enough to fright Francoise but not so badly as to cause him actual
suffering” (166).
“In this book, which there is not one fact that is not fictitious
not one real character concealed under a
false name, in which everything has been made up by me in accordance with the
needs of my exposition, I have to say to the honor of my country, that Françoise’s
millionaire relatives alone, who came out of their retirement to help their niece
when she was left without support, that they and they alone are real living
people. And convinced as I am that their
modesty will bot be offended by it, for the simple reason that they will never
read this book, and being unable to mention the names of the many others who
must have acted in a similar way, as a result of whom France survived, I take a
childlike an deeply felt pleasure in transcribing their real names here: appropriate
enough, they are called by the very French name of Larivière.” (168)
That was such an unexpected and lovely passage.
Pg 169 Saint-Loup killed in the war.
Pg 170 links the shortness of Albertine’s and Saint-Loup’s
lives.
“And now it was they who were dead, and they whose first and
final images I could compare, separated as they were by such a short span of
time, the final image of each, in front of the trench, floating in the river,
set against the first image which, in the case of Albertine was precious to me
now only by its association with that of the sun sinking into the sea” (171).
Saint-Loup’s death fears more symbolic than Albertine’s
which felt for more of an example of fridiging.
Saint-Loup’s death and its manner is the passing of an era. Things changed after WWI.
“The only painful memory is of the dead. And they rapidly decay and nothing remains,
even around their tombs, save the beauty of nature, silence, and the pure air”
(149).
“As for the inner book of the unknown signs (signs which
seemed to stand out as it were, in relief, and which my attention, exploring my
unconscious cast around for, stumbled over, and traced the shapes of, like a
diver feeling his way underwater), for the reading of which nobody else could
provide me with any rules, reading them becomes one of those acts of creation
in which nobody can take our place or even collaborate with us. So many people are discouraged from writing
because of this! There are almost no
tasks they will not take on in order to avoid it.” (205).
“ . . . they wanted to ensure the triumph of justice, to
rebuild the moral unity of the nation, they were much too busy to think about
literature. But these were simply
excuses because they did not have, or no longer had, genius, or to put it another
way, instinct. For instinct shows the
work we have to do and intelligence provide the pretexts for evading it” (205).
“Excuses have absolutely no place in art, mere intentions do
not count for anything, the artist has to listen to his instinct all the time,
with the result that art is the most real thing there is the most austere
school of life and the true Last Judgement.” (205-206).
“That book, the most painful of all to decipher is also the only one dictated to us by reality, the
only whose ‘impression’ has been made in us by reality itself. Whatever the idea that may have been left in
us by our life, their material outline, the trace of the impression they originally
made on us, is always the indispensable warrant of their truth, a possible truth, their choice is arbitrary. The book whose characters are forged within
us, rather then selected by us, is the only book we have. Not that the ideas which we form ourselves may
not be logically right, but that we do not know whether they are true. Only the impression, however, slight its
material may seem, however elusive its truth, can bring the mind to a more perfected
state, and give it pure happiness. An impression is for the writer what an experiment
is for the scientist, except that for the scientist the work of the
intelligence precedes it, and for the writer it comes afterward. Anything we have not had to decipher to bring
to light by our own effort, anything which was already visible.is not our
own. The only things that come from ourselves
are those we draw out of the obscurity within us, which can never be known by
other people” (206).
This section is
really his artistic philosophy and most be critiquing the work that came out
after WWI, after the end of the Belle Epoque.
“So I had already come to the conclusion that we have no
freedom at all in the force of the work of art that we cannot shape it
according to out wishes, but that as it pre-exists us, and both because it is
necessary and hidden, and because it is , as it were, a law of nature, we have
to discover it. But is not this discovery
which art can cause us to make, the discovery fundamentally of the thing that ought
to be most precious to us, and of which we normally remain unsure forever, our
true life, our reality as we have experienced it, which is often so different
from what we believe it to be that we are filled with happiness when some
chance event brings the real memory back to us?” (207).
“Some even wanted the novel to be a sort of cinematographic
stream of things. This was an absurd
idea. Nothing sets us further apart from
what ww have really perceived than that sort of cinema graphic approach” (209).
210-211 the power of memory when tied to a work of
literature – like remembering reading Handmaid’s Tale the first time.
“ . . . the way a book opened along the spine, the texture
of the paper many have retained within it as vivid a memory of the way I imagined
Venice then, and of any wish to go there as, as the book’s actual sentences”
(212).
Pg 213- I have the type of library that he describes here
basically.
“The idea of popular art, like that of a patriotic art,
seemed to me if, indeed not dangerous, certainly laughable” (215).
“When we read, we are seeking to be taken out surroundings,
and workers are as curious about princes as princes are about workers” (215).
“I slowly became aware that the essential book, the only
true book, was not something the writer needs to invent, in the usual sense of
the word, so much as to translate, because it already exists within each of
us. The writer’s task and duty are those
of a translator.” (217).
“How could a purely descriptive literature have any value at
all when reality lies hidden beneath the surface of little things of the sort
it documents (grandeur in the distant sound of an airplane, or in the outline
of the steeple of Saint-Hilarie, the past in the taste of a madeleine, etc) so
that the things have no meaning in themselves until it is disentangled from
them?” (222).
“Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only
life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells with all ordinary people
as much as in the artist. But they do
not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it” (223).
“It is only though art that we can escape from ourselves and
know how another person sees a universe which not the same as our own” (223).
“Where life walls us in, the intellect cuts a way out, for
although there may be no cure for love that is not reciprocated, the investigation
of one’s suffering does provide a way out, even if only be revealing its likely
consequences. The intelligence does not recognize
closed situations in life, with no way out” (234).
Pg 244-245 Swann as the start of everything.
Pg 246 the idea of alternate fates (which what the books are)
“By itself, it was not more capable of rendering you third-rate
than a heroic war was capable of making a third-rate poet sublime” (249). Referring to the WWI Poets here?
“And the Princesse de Guermantes’s’ drawing-room was
illuminated, forgetful and flowery , like a peaceful cemetery. There, time had not only brought about the
ruin of the creatures of a former epoch, it had made possible, had indeed
created, new associations” (282).
Mime Verdurin moves up in the world.
Dude, you have so not forgotten Albertine, you talk about
her all the time.
I thought La Berma had died in last book.
Duc G falls for Odette.
Swann’s granddaughter marries beneath her according to the
narrator.
The amount of art criticism in this volume was intense.
The party – how old is he there? 40?
50?
It is a bit confusing regarding the time sequence, dreamlike. Like Bergotte dying but then being
alive.
I still feel that Marcel does not like women. There is something condescending about how he
talks about them in general.
His father just seems to have disappeared, faded.
All I want to do is read.
I miss John, The
series makes me think about John and Consent by Vanessa Springora. Kim’s feelings of pleasure about making her
mom and sister laugh at the wild life place are not silly. They are important because of the joy that we
make in others. I keep thinking about taking John places, like Montreal and how
happy that made him until he stopped going because he wanted to monitor Mom and
make sure she didn’t die – she kept telling him so much about how her afib
could give her stroke that he believed anything that would upset her would kill
her. Thinking about him because this series
confronts and thinks about death. Proust
confronting his own illness and life.
Wrestling with his own morality.
Those brown butter madeleines were so good.
Why don’t I feel like I belong anywhere? Marcel doesn’t either.
I’m so angry at John for dying. I guess that is better than being angry at my
parents for his dying. Maybe it’s
not. I don’t know.
Proust does not seem to be struggling with anger even
fate. He’s angry at time. He wants a pause button for his personal use. He’s more interested in how times plays with
our minds (our perceptions of time as well) , how it develops, and how fast or
slow it seems to go.
He should watch LL Cool J in The Deep Blue Sea.
I wish John had had more time.
It feels like there all these books I want to read now. Basically re-read now. And then I feel guilty for not reading more
fantasy.
WTF is wrong with me?
It is about a lost time or losing that time, the charge over
years.
It is also quite catty
Its like he is a gossip columnist.
Some of those photos of Proust on Pinterest make look like a hoot.
What would he think about social media, or would he see it
as leveling? Would he see it as deterioration
of society?
Would he see it as a time waster? Is it totally a time waster?
His comments about war still ring true today, sadly. And the comments about the news as well.
Wonder what he would make of Fox News?
I think he would hate Book Tok, to be honest. His criticism suggests this.
I wonder how he would feel about movie blockbusters.
For someone who says that he doesn’t think about Albertine,
he thinks about Albertine a lot.
But I’m not sure that he ever really loved her. Obsession and love are not always the same
thing. His relationship with Gilberte in
the last two books feels more solid and real than that with Albertine. She feels like a thing, not so much a person.
More philosophy than a seven volume novel.
I need to read more Simone Weil.
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