7.15.2011
7.14.2011
Biographical essay
Here's a short biographical essay by Charles Matthews at his Proust-reading weblog.
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Combray 09.09 ~~ Swann in Love 01.10 ~~ Place Names: The Name 05.10 ~~ Madame Swann at Home 06.10 ~~ Place Names: The Place 03.11 ~~ The Guermantes Way 04.12 ~~ Sodom and Gomorrah 08.14 ~~ The Captive 05.16 ~~ The Fugitive 07.17 ~~ Time Regained 07.18 ~~ FIN 08.19 ~~
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Also
- 182 Days of Marcel Proust (summaries)
- Bnf Paris: photos, articles, notebooks
- Cork-Lined Room (online group)
- Guided Walks with Proust (Marylin Bender)
- Kolb-Proust Archive for Research @ U. of IL (most of his letters, in French)
- La Recherche, Audio files in French
- La Recherche, English (Moncrieff, 2 v)
- La Recherche, English text
- La Recherche, in French, multi-format
- La Recherche, in French, searchable
- La Recherche: Graphic novels (Stéphane Heuet)
- Laws of Night & Honey (essays)
- On Proust & the editions (Dan Ford)
- Proust @Pinterest (Marcelita Swann)
- Proust Ephemera (Chris Taylor; uncollected short pieces)
- Proust Ink (Carter class, shop, blog)
- Proust Matters (Sharon Girard)
- Proust Notes (Hannah Gerson)
- Proust Reader (essays, excerpts, art)
- Reading Proust In Foxborough
- Shattuck: Proust's Way, chapter 1
- Temps Perdu (Calkins site archive)
- Vermeer's "little yellow wall"
- Waggish Reads (essays)
- Wikipedia
- Wikipedia France
Followers
What we feel...
is the only thing that exists for us, and we project it into the past, or into the future, without letting ourselves be stopped by the fictitious barriers of death. (V 712)
Of Albertine
"...I felt that I was touching no more than the sealed envelope of a person who inwardly reached to infinity." (V 520)
Our true nature....
But the true nature which we repress continues nevertheless to abide within us. (V 387)
Her intense & velvety gaze
fastened itself, glued itself to the passer-by, so adhesive, so corrosive, that you felt that, in withdrawing, it must tear away the skin. (V 193)
Choices....
We must constantly choose between health and sanity on the one hand, and spiritual pleasures on the other. I have always been cowardly enough to choose the former. (V 159)
Snobbery...
is a grave disease, but it is localized and so does not utterly corrupt the soul. (V 8)
Personality
Of the different persons who compose our personality, it is not the most obvious that are the most essential. (V 5)
On Brichot
He talked with the same irritating fluency, but his words no longer struck a chord, having to overcome a hostile silence or disagreeable echoes; what had changed was not what he said, but the acoustics of the room and the attitude of the audience. (IV 475)
Memory
... Every fresh glimpse is a sort of rectification, which brings us back to what we, in fact, saw. (II 678)
During that ridiculous age...
In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we know little peace of mind. II 423
What the milk-girl brought...
I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness. II 318
Lies....
... it was what gave her away; she had not taken into account that this fragmentary detail of the truth had sharp edges that could fit only into the contiguous fragments of the truth from which she had arbitrarily detached it, edges which, whatever the fictitious details in which she might embed it, would always reveal, by their excess of material and their unfilled empty areas, that its proper place was elsewhere.
On Reading....
Upon the sort of screen, patterned with different states and impressions, which my consciousness would quietly unfold while I was reading, and which ranged from the most deeply hidden aspirations of my heart to the wholly external view of the horizon spread out before my eyes at the foot of the garden, what was from the first the most permanent and the most intimate part of me, the lever whose incessant movements controlled all the rest, was my belief in the philosophic richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate these to myself, whatever the book might be.
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