This lost country composers do not actually remember, but
each of them remains all his life somehow attuned to it; he is wild with joy
when he is singing the airs of his native land, betrays it at times in his
thirst for fame, but then, in seeking fame, turns his back upon it, and it is
only when he despises it that he finds it when he utters, whatever the subject
with which he is dealing, that peculiar strain the monotony of which—for
whatever its subject it remains identical in itself—proves the permanence of
the elements that compose his soul. But is it not the fact then that from those
elements, all the real residuum which we are obliged to keep to ourselves,
which cannot be transmitted in talk, even by friend to friend, by master to
disciple, by lover to mistress, that ineffable something which makes a
difference in quality between what each of us has felt and what he is obliged
to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in which he can communicate
with his fellows only by limiting himself to external points common to us all
and of no interest, art, the art of a Vinteuil like that of an Elstir, makes
the man himself apparent, rendering externally visible in the colours of the
spectrum that intimate composition of those worlds which we call individual
persons and which, without the aid of art, we should never know? A pair of
wings, a different mode of breathing, which would enable us to traverse
infinite space, would in no way help us, for, if we visited Mars or Venus
keeping the same senses, they would clothe in the same aspect as the things of
the earth everything that we should be capable of seeing. The only true
voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit
strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the
eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each
of them beholds, that each of them is; and this we can contrive with an Elstir,
with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.
Marcel Proust
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