More.

If a little day-dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, dream all the time.

Marcel Proust

Happy Birthday, Proust

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.

Marcel Proust, born on this day in 1871, from Time Regained

The Questionnaire ...

1. The principal aspect of my personality:
2. The quality that I desire in a man:
3. The quality that I desire in a woman:
4. Your chief characteristic:
5. What I appreciate most about my friends:
6. My main fault:
7. My favorite occupation:
8. My dream of happiness:
9. What would be my greatest misfortune?
10. What I should like to be:
11. The country where I should like to live:
12. My favorite color:
13. My favorite bird:
14. My favorite prose authors:
15. My favorite poets:
16. My heroes in fiction:
17. My favorite heroines in fiction.
18. My favorite composers:
19. My favorite painters:
20. My heroes in real life:
21. My heroines in history:
22. My favorite names:
23. What I hate most of all:
24. Historical figures that I despise the most:
25. The military event that I admire most:
26. The gift of nature that I would like to have:
27. How I want to die:
28. My present state of mind:
29. Faults for which I have the most indulgence:
30. My motto:

Memory.

Anker, Old Man Drinking Tea, 1895

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? 

Suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.

Marcel Proust, from In Search of Lost Time

Thanks, Mum.

Life.

Instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover, life gives us something that we could hardly imagine.

Marcel Proust

Happy Birthday, Proust

Marcel Proust was born on this date in 1871.

We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things. The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable.  The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust

Corresponded.

Hill, Amiens Cathedral, 1918

Seeking more fuel from art, Proust started reading John Ruskin, whose influential The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851-53) revived popular interest in medieval art. Proust’s fascination coincided with the British critic’s death in 1900, and he wrote a long obituary on Ruskin in Gazette des Beaux-Arts. He then embarked on a Ruskin-translation project, working with his mother, who knew English much better than he did, and consulting with Marie Nordlinger, a British cousin of his close friend Reynaldo Hahn. The translation project took six years and led Proust to visit French cathedral cities as well as Venice and Padua where he saw, for the first time, Italian art and architecture.

The Ruskin-Proust marriage was productive but complicated. Proust, born of a Jewish mother and raised Catholic by atheist parents, did not share Ruskin’s religious faith or moral puritanism. Their tastes in art differed, too. The doctrinaire Ruskin publicly decried the paintings of James McNeill Whistler while Proust, whose tastes in visual art were more or less random, hung Whistler’s portrait of Thomas Carlyle in his bedroom.

But Ruskin found in art a force equal to the natural and organic worlds it mirrored, and that equilibrium, combined with his conviction that art’s meaning must exceed its sensual pleasures, corresponded to Proust’s growing unease with fin de siècle decadence, art-for-arts sake, and trendy forms of arty obscurantism – not least his own tendencies toward those excesses.

Being a sort of spiritual empiricist, Ruskin understood how medieval art and architecture documents human apprehensions of timelessness. In particular, the critic’s writing on Amiens’ Notre Dame Cathedral charts how the Church’s art and architecture concertize Biblical narratives and Christian prophecies. These ideas nudged Proust closer to his own reconsideration about the nature of time.

CONNECT

More.

If a little day-dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, dream all the time.

Marcel Proust

Happy Birthday, Proust

Blanche, Marcel Proust, 1892

Marcel Proust was born on this date in 1871.

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory.

The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do [with great artists]; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.

Marcel Proust

Fly.

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

Breathes.

Zwintscher, Clara Rilke-Westhoff , 1902

There comes in all our lives a time, towards which you still have far to go, when the weary eyes can endure but one kind of light, the light which a fine evening like this prepares for us in the stillroom for darkness, when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence.

Marcel Proust

Authentic.

Thank you, Wrath of Gnon.

Happy birthday, Proust.

Marcel Proust was born on this day in 1871.

We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.  The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable.  The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust

See.

Vermeer, The Astronomer (detail), 1668

Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.

Marcel Proust

Rhythm.

Monet, Morning on the Seine in the Rain, 1898

A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand were being sprinkled from a window overhead; then the fall spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable, universal. It was the rain.

Marcel Proust

Discern.

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book.

Marcel Proust

Calendars.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book. Everything that filled them for others, so it seemed, and that we dismissed as a vulgar obstacle to a divine pleasure; the game for which a friend would come to fetch us at the most interesting passage; the troublesome bee or sun ray that forced us to lift our eyes from the page or to change position; the provisions for the afternoon snack that we had been made to take along and that we left beside us on the bench, without touching while above our head the sun was diminishing in force in the blue sky; the dinner we had to return home for, and during which we thought only of going up immediately afterward to finish the interrupted chapter, all those things which reading should have kept us from feeling anything but annoyance at, it has on the contrary engraved in us so sweet a memory of (so much more precious to our present judgment than what we read then with such love), that if we still happen today to leaf through those books of another time, it is for no other reason than that they are the only calendars we have kept of days that have vanished, and we hope to see reflected on their pages the dwellings and pond which no longer exist.

Marcel Proust

Happy birthday, Proust.

Marcel Proust was born on this day in 1871.

Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.

Marcel Proust

Discovery.

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us. The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable.  We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill the gap. We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take us or spare us.  The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust

Behold.

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

Life.

Instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover, life gives us something that we could hardly imagine.

Marcel Proust