Reading Proust for Fun: Time Regained (vol VI p 217-30)

9.12.2021

Time Regained (vol VI p 217-30)

Pavia p 217 | Gabriel Davioud, (French architect, 1823–81), Trocadero, Jardin des Champs-Élysées.

p 218 | Charterhouse of Pavia = Carthusian monastery of Pavia (Italy) Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian

p 218 | Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431-1506), Italian painter.

p 218 | Passy is an area of Paris, in the 16th arrondissement, on the Right Bank, traditionally home to many of the city's wealthiest residents.

p 219 | The Bois de Boulogne is a large public park on the western edge of the 16th arrondissement of Paris, near the suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt and Neuilly-sur-Seine. It was created between 1852 and 1858 during the reign of the Emperor Louis Napoleon.

p 229-30 | Ferdinand Barbedienne (French artist, 1810-92). Bronze worker, reproduced ancient and modern sculptures in bronze.

Alone

...She had suddenly handed back to me the thoughts, the griefs which, from the days of my infancy, I had entrusted for all time to her keeping. She was not yet dead. I was already alone. And even those allusions which she had made... assumed an air of being without point or occasion, fantastic, because they sprang from the nullity of this very being who tomorrow possibly would have ceased to exist, for whom they would no longer have any meaning, from that nullity, incapable of conceiving them, which my grandmother would shortly be. (III 425)

Alas!

in the freshest flower it is possible to discern those just perceptible signs which to the instructed mind already betray what will, by the desiccation or fructification of the flesh that is today in bloom, be the ultimate form, immutable and already predestined, of the autumnal seed... One had only to see, by the side of any of those girls, her mother or her aunt, to realise the distance over which, obeying the internal gravitation of a type that was generally frightful, these features would have travelled in less than thirty years, until the hour when the face, having sunk altogether below the horizon, catches the light no more. (II 643)

Seeing yourself in Time

Théoriquement on sait que la terre tourne, mais en fait on ne s’en aperçoit pas, le sol sur lequel on marche semble ne pas bouger et on vit tranquille. Il en est ainsi du Temps dans la vie.

The second suspicion, nothing more, really, than a variant of the first, was that I was not situated somewhere outside of Time, but was subject to its laws, just like people in novels who, for that reason, used to depress me when I read of their lives, down at Combray, in the fastness of my wicker chair. In theory, one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one’s life. And to make its flight perceptible novelists are obliged, by wildly accelerating the beat of the pendulum, to transport the reader in a couple of minutes over ten, or twenty, or even thirty years. At the top of one page we have left a lover full of hope; at the foot of the next we meet him again, a bowed old man of eighty, painfully dragging himself on his daily walk about the courtyard of an almshouse, scarcely replying to what is said to him, oblivious of the past. In saying of me, “He is no longer a child,” “His tastes will not change now,” and so forth, my father had suddenly made me see myself in my position in Time, and caused me the same kind of depression as if I had been, not yet the enfeebled old man, but one of those heroes of whom the author, in a tone of indifference which is particularly galling, says to us at the end of a book: “He very seldom comes up now from the country. He has finally decided to end his days there.”

Bereft...

Since my inclinations attracted me towards Literature, he did not dissuade me from that course; on the contrary, he spoke of it with deference, as of some venerable personage whose select circle, in Rome or at Dresden, one remembers with pleasure, and regrets only that one’s multifarious duties in life enable one to revisit it so seldom. He appeared to be envying me, with an almost rakish smile, the delightful hours which, more fortunate than himself and more free, I should be able to spend with such a Mistress. But the very terms that he used showed me Literature as something entirely different from the image I had formed of it at Combray, and I realized that I had been doubly right in abandoning my intention. Until now, I had reckoned only that I had no ‘gift’ for writing; now M. de Norpois took from me the ambition also.

Days are not all equal...

...These images, unreal, fixed, always alike, filling my nights and days, differentiated this period in my life from those that had gone before it (and might have been confused with it by an observer who sees things only from outside, that is to say, who sees nothing), as in an opera a melodic motif introduces something new that one could never have suspected if one had only read the libretto, still less if one had remained outside the theatre, only counting the minutes as they passed. And besides, even from the point of view, of mere quantity, in our lives the days are not all equal. To reach the end of a day, natures that are slightly nervous, as mine was, make use, like motor-cars, of different 'speeds.' There are mountainous, uncomfortable days, which take an infinite time to pass, and downward sloping days, through which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.

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.

Reading vs Doing

This dim freshness of my room was to the broad daylight of the street what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say, equally luminous, and presented to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which my senses, if I had been out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed in fragments only; and so was quite in harmony with my state of repose, which (thanks to the adventures related in my books, which had just excited it) bore, like a hand reposing motionless in a stream of running water, the shock and animation of a torrent of activity and life.

Reading Proust for Fun

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9.12.2021

Time Regained (vol VI p 217-30)

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