proust thread

Change to "led me" (back here)

PS: there's a footnote somewhere in the same series, with the author's marginalia from above: "This is bad writing"--but he didn't change that one!

Mandell is doing a translation iof vol 2 and is tweeting some choice phrases.

The first few times we arrived there, the sun would just have set, but there would still be light; in the restaurant’s garden, where the lamps hadn’t yet been lit, the day’s heat was subsiding and settling, as if at the bottom of a vase,

— Charlotte Mandell (@avecsesdoigts) May 9, 2023

Listening for the first time to music that is even a little complicated, one can often hear nothing in it. And yet, later in life, when I had heard the whole piece two or three times, I found I was thoroughly familiar with it. So the expression "hearing something for the first time" is not inaccurate. If one had distinguished nothing in it on the real first occasion, as one thought, then the second or the third would also be first times; and there would be no reason to understand it any better on the tenth occasion. What is missing the first time is probably not understanding but memory. Our memory span, relative to the complexity of the impressions that assail it as we listen, is infinitesimal, as short-lived as the memory of a sleeping man who has a thousand thoughts which he instantly forgets, or the memory of a man in his dotage, who cannot retain for more than a minute anything he has been told. Our memory is incapable of supplying us with an instantaneous recollection of this multiplicity of impressions. Even so, a recollection does gradually gather in the mind; and with pieces of music heard only two or three times, one is like the schoolboy who, though he has read over his lesson a few times before falling asleep, is convinced he still does not know it, but can then recite it word for word when he wakes up the following morning.... Not only does one not immediately discern a work of rare quality; but even within such a work, as happened to me with the Vinteuil sonata, it is always the least precious parts that one notices first. So not only was I wrong in my belief that, since Mme Swann had played over for me the most celebrated phrase, the work had nothing more to reveal to me (the result of which was that, for a long time afterward, showing all the stupidity of those who expect that their first sight of Saint Mark's in Venice will afford them no surprise, because they have seen the shape of its domes in photographs, I made no further attempt to listen to it); but, more important, even after I had listened to the whole sonata from beginning to end, it was still almost entirely invisible to me, like those indistinct fragments of a building that are all one can make out in the misty distance. Therein lies the source of the melancholy that accompanies our discovery of such works, as of all things which can come to fruition only through time. When I came eventually to have access to the most secret parts of Vinteuil's sonata, everything in it that I had noticed and preferred at first was already beginning to be lost to me, carried away by habit out of the reach of my sensibility. Because it was only in successive stages that I could love what the sonata brought to me, I was never able to possess it in its entirety-- it was an image of life. But the great works of art are also less of a disappointment than life, in that their best parts do not come first.

so awesome

I think if you took bits out of that bit apart: whether on memory, time, aesthetics...might be a bit crummy by themselves, but aligned to his life as he (or his character) is living and aggregated in the way he does, with some of the themes in the novel, it can stop in your tracks like little else can.

^^^ extremely otm

which translation is this one from

I reread The Prisoner last week; I forgot how much it faffs around.

Reminds me to mention this:
https://akirarabelais.bandcamp.com/album/a-la-recherche-du-temps-perdu

A sort of extensive volume-by-volume sound collage of the music from the time/place of each of the books.

which translation is this one from

james grieve (penguin)

It takes no great thought to know how to go to sleep, but habit is very useful, and even the absence of thought. But during these afternoons I lacked both. Before going to sleep, I spent so much time thinking that I would be unable to do so that even after I had gone to sleep a little of my thought remained. It was no more than a glimmer in almost total darkness, but it was enough to cast its reflection into my sleep-- first the idea that I could not sleep; then, as a reflection of this reflection, that it was in my sleep that I sensed I was not asleep; then, by a further refraction, my awakening... to a new state of drowsiness, in which I was trying to tell some friends who had entered the room that a moment ago, when I was asleep, I had thought I was awake. These shadows were barely distinguishable: it would have required a great deal of subtlety, wasted subtlety, to perceive them clearly. Similarly, later in my life, in Venice, long after the sun had set, thanks to the imperceptible echo of a last note of light held indefinitely over the canals as though sustained by some optical pedal, I saw the reflections of the palaces unfurled as if for eternity in an even darker velvet over the twilight grayness of the water. One of my dreams was the synthesis of what my imagination had often tried to envisage, during my waking hours, of a particular landscape by the sea and its medieval past. In my sleep I saw a Gothic citadel rising from a sea whose waves were frozen still, as in a stained-glass window. An inlet of the sea divided the town in two; the green water came right up to my feet; on the opposite shore it lapped around an Oriental church, and around houses that already existed in the fourteenth century, so that to move across to them would have been to go backward through the centuries. This dream in which nature had taken lessons from art, in which the sea had become Gothic, this dream in which I longed to reach, and believed I was reaching, the impossible, was one I felt I had often dreamed before. But since it is the nature of what we imagine in sleep to multiply itself in the past and to appear familiar even when it is new, I supposed I was mistaken. What I did notice, though, was that I frequently had this dream.

Those compressions that characterize sleep were reflected in mine, but symbolically: the darkness made it impossible for me to distinguish the faces of the friends who were in the room, for we sleep with our eyes shut; I, who carried on endless verbal arguments with myself while I dreamed, as soon as I tried to speak to these friends felt the words stick in my throat, for we do not speak distinctly in our sleep; I wanted to go to them and could not move my legs, for we do not walk when we are asleep, either; then, suddenly, I felt ashamed to be seen by them, for we sleep without our clothes. And so, with blind eyes, sealed lips, legs held captive, naked body, the image of sleep projected by my own sleep was like the great allegorical figures of Giotto, once given me by Swann, among which Envy is depicted with a serpent in her mouth.

https://i.imgur.com/hVbHzW1.jpeg

Tfw you're carrying on endless arguments with yourself while you dream.

marcel makes his move:

...it had not occurred to me that man, a creature clearly less rudimentary than the sea urchin or even the whale, nevertheless lacks a certain number of essential organs, and notably possesses none that will serve for kissing. For this absent organ he substitutes his lips, and thus perhaps manages to achieve a more satisfactory result than if he were reduced to caressing the beloved with a horny tusk. But the lips, designed to bring to the palate the taste that lures them, have to be content, without understanding their mistake or admitting their disappointment, with drifting over the surface and coming up against the barrier of the cheek's desirable impenetrability. And at the moment of actual contact with the flesh, the lips, even supposing they might become more expert and talented, would doubtless be unable to enjoy any more fully the flavor that nature prevents them from grasping spontaneously, for in the desolate zone in which they are unable to find their rightful nourishment they are alone, long since abandoned by the eyes and then the nose in turn. For a start, as my mouth began to move toward the cheeks my eyes had led it to want to kiss, my eyes changed position and saw different cheeks; the neck, observed at closer range and as if through a magnifying glass, became coarse-grained and showed a sturdiness which altered the character of her face.

Apart from the latest developments in photography-- which lay down at the foot of a cathedral all the houses that so often, from close up, seemed to us to be as high as towers, which deploy like a regiment, in file, in organized dispersion, in serried masses, the same monuments, bring together on the piazzetta the two columns that were so far apart a while back, distance the nearby Salute, and, on a pale and lifeless background, manage to contain an immense horizon beneath the arch of a bridge, in a single window frame, between the leaves of a tree in the foreground that is more vigorous in tone, frame a single church successively in the arcades of all the others-- I know of nothing that is able, to the same degree as a kiss, to conjure up from what we believed to be something with one definite aspect, the hundred other things it may equally well be, since each is related to a no less valid perspective. In short, just as in Balbec Albertine had often seemed different to me, now-- as if, by magically accelerating the speed of the changes of perspective and coloring a person offers us in the course of our various encounters, I had tried to contain them all within the space of a few seconds in order to re-create experimentally the phenomenon that diversifies a person's individuality and to draw out separately, as from a slipcase, all the possibilities it contains-- now what I saw, in the brief trajectory of my lips toward her cheek, was ten Albertines...

book needs a kill bill siren every time he thinks of a church (or a regiment)

I've often been reduced to caressing my beloved with a horny tusk.

knew that'd get you

If M. de Charlus's liking for me had been destroyed, his behavior could not have been more at variance with the fact, since, while assuring me that we had fallen out, he was making me stay and drink, offering to put me up for the night, and now arranging for me to be sent home. He looked as if he was dreading the moment he must leave me and find himself on his own again, the same sort of slightly anxious fear his sister-in-law and cousin Guermantes had seemed to me to be feeling an hour ago, when she had tried to force me to stay a little longer, with something of the same momentary fondness for me, the same effort to prolong the minute.

"Unfortunately," he continued, "the gift of making something that has been destroyed rebloom is not one I have. My affection for you is quite dead. Nothing can revive it. I don't think it would be unworthy of me to confess that I regret it. I always feel myself to be rather like Victor Hugo's Boaz: 'I am widowed and alone, and darkness falls upon me.'"

I walked back through the big greenish drawing room with him. I let drop a chance remark about how beautiful I thought it was. "Isn't it?" he replied. "One needs to have something to love. The paneling is by Bagard."

...

"There, now, I've actually forgotten the most important thing. In memory of your grandmother, I have had a rare edition of Mme de Sévigné bound for you. Which means that this will not be our last meeting. One must console oneself with the thought that complicated affairs are rarely settled in a day. Just look how long it took to negotiate the Congress of Vienna."

"But I could send someone round for it without disturbing you," I said to oblige him.

"Will you learn to hold your tongue, you little fool," he replied angrily, "and not push your grotesque behavior to the point of assuming that the likelihood of being received by me-- I don't say the certainty, for perhaps one of my servants will hand you the volumes-- is some trifling honor." He regained control of himself: "I do not wish to part from you on these words. No dissonance; before the eternal silence, a chord on the dominant!" It was for his own nerves that he seemed to dread a return home immediately after harsh words of discord. "You would not like to come to the Bois," he said in a tone that was not interrogative but affirmative, not, it seemed to me, that he did not want to make the offer, but because he was afraid that his pride would be injured by a refusal. "Well, there we are," he continued, still marking time, "it is the hour, as Whistler says, when the bourgeois go to bed"-- perhaps he wished now to exploit my own sense of pride-- "the moment to start taking a look at the world. But you don't even know who Whistler is."

Just look how long it took to negotiate the Congress of Vienna.

à la recherche du temps perdu, literally "it is the hour when the bourgeois go to bed"

But you don't even know French.

The Duc called the footman back in to find out whether the man he had sent to Cousin d'Osmond's for news had returned. His plan was as follows: since he rightly believed his cousin to be dying, he was anxious to obtain news of him before his actual death-- that is, before he was obliged to go into mourning. Once he was covered by the official certainty that Amanien was still alive, he would push off to his dinner, to the Prince's reception, to the fancy-dress party he was to attend as Louis XI and where he had a most titillating assignation with a new mistress, and put off any further inquiries until the next day, when his pleasure was over. Then he would don mourning if his cousin had passed away in the course of the evening. "No, M. le Duc, he is not back yet." "Damn and blast it! Nothing is ever done in this house until the last minute," shouted the Duc, thinking that Amanien might have "snuffed it" in time to be in the evening paper and to make him miss his party. He sent for Le Temps, in which there was nothing.

I think there's a running joke there with the Duc and these Larry David-ish missteps around the etiquette of death and bereavement.

"I have just, my dear Sir, heard your tragic news. I should like, as a mark of sympathy, to shake hands with your father." I made the excuse that I could not very well disturb him at the moment. M. de Guermantes was like a caller who turns up just as one is about to start on a journey. But he felt so intensely the importance of the courtesy he was shewing us that it blinded him to all else, and he insisted upon being taken into the drawing-room. As a general rule, he made a point of going resolutely through the formalities with which he had decided to honour anyone, and took little heed that the trunks were packed or the coffin ready.

The one author whom M. de Guermantes considered "perfectly proper" was the gentleman who wrote the death notices in Le Gaulois. He at least contented himself with citing the name of M. de Guermantes at the head of those persons noticed "among others" at the funerals where the Duc had signed the list. When the latter preferred that his name should not appear, instead of signing he sent a letter of condolence to the deceased person's family, assuring them of the deep sadness that he felt. Should this family then have inserted in the newspaper, "Among the letters received, let us cite that from the Duc de Guermantes," etc., this was not the fault of the gossip writer but of the son, brother, or father of the person deceased, whom the Duc described as arrivistes, and with whom he was determined to have no further dealings (what he called, being unclear as to the meaning of these locutions, "having a bone to pick").

I have read only up through Sodom and Gomorrah, but Proust's depiction of Charlus' behavior is fascinating, if repellent. I had to take a break before moving on; there are only so many dinner parties one can read about at one go.

It's worth reading a Proust biography just for the frenemy relationship between Proust and Montesquiou, a main inspiration for Charlus.

Charlus was the only thing that made wading through most of that dinner party shit bearable---I kept hoping for him show up again and do his thing---well played, Marcel (just in case some of us juveniles don't find those olde swells so endlessly fascinating)

i enjoy the psycho duke, the "turkish ambassadress" who's always wrong, and saint-loup's q-pilled mom

"What's that affair up there with the pickets?" asked Mme Verdurin, indicating to M. de Cambremer a superb carved escutcheon above the fireplace. "Are they your arms?" she added, with ironic disdain. "No, they're not ours," replied M. de Cambremer. "We bear Or with three bars embattled, counter-embattled Gules of five pieces each charged with a trefoil of the field. No, those are the arms of the Arrachepels, who weren't of our stock, but from whom we inherited the house, and those of our line have never wanted to change it. The Arrachepels-- Pelvilains in the old days, so it's said-- bore Or with five piles couped Gules. When they intermarried with the Féternes, their coat of arms changed but remained cantoned with twenty crosses crosslet with pile pery fitchy Or with dexter a vol ermine." "So much for you," said Mme de Cambremer under her breath.

Yet this simple situation suffices to demonstrate that even that universally decried thing, which would nowhere find anyone to defend it, "gossip," has, whether we are ourselves its object, so that it then becomes particularly disagreeable, or whether it teaches us something we did not know about a third person, its psychological value. It prevents the mind from falling asleep over the factitious view that it takes of what it believes things to be like, which is only their outward appearance. It turns this inside out with the magical dexterity of an idealist philosopher and quickly offers us an unsuspected corner of the reverse side of the fabric. Could M. de Charlus have imagined these words spoken by a certain fond female relative: "How can you expect Mémé to be in love with me? You're forgetting I'm a woman!" Yet she had a genuine, deep attachment to M. de Charlus. Why be surprised, then, that in the case of the Verdurins, on whose affection and kindness he had no right to rely, the remarks that they made when far away from him (and it was not only remarks, as we shall see) should have been so unlike what he imagined them to be, that is to say the simple echo of those that he heard when he was there? These last alone decorated with fond inscriptions the little ideal pavilion into which M. de Charlus sometimes went in order to dream on his own, when he would introduce his imagination for a moment into the idea that the Verdurins had of him. The atmosphere there was so sympathetic, so cordial, the respite so comforting, that, when M. de Charlus, before going to sleep, had come there for a moment to relax from his cares, he never re-emerged without a smile. But for each of us a pavilion of this kind is double: facing what we think is the only one, there is the other, customarily invisible to us, the real one, symmetrical with the one that we know yet very different, whose decoration, where we would recognize nothing of what we were expecting to see, would alarm us as being formed of the odious symbols of an unsuspected hostility. How aghast M. de Charlus would have been had he found his way into one of these adverse pavilions, by virtue of some piece of gossip, as if by one of those servants' staircases where obscene graffiti have been chalked on the doors of the apartments by disgruntled tradesmen or dismissed domestics!... Thus M. de Charlus lived deluded, like the fish that believes the water in which he is swimming extends beyond the glass of his tank, which offers him his reflection, whereas he does not see beside him, in the shadows, the amused passerby who is following his antics, or the all-powerful pisciculturalist who, at the unforseen and fatal moment... will pull him ruthlessly out from the medium in which he had liked living, to toss him into another one. Whole nations, what is more, insofar as they are simply collections of individuals, can provide examples, vaster yet identical in each of their parts, of this profound, obstinate, and disconcerting blindness.

This is how he died: after a mild uremic attack he had been ordered to rest. But a critic having written that in Vermeer's View of Delft (lent by the museum at The Hague for an exhibition of Dutch painting), a painting he adored and thought he knew perfectly, a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it in isolation, like a precious work of Chinese art, of an entirely self-sufficient beauty, Bergotte ate a few potatoes and went out to the exhibition. As he climbed the first set of steps, his head began to spin. He passed several paintings and had an impression of the sterility and uselessness of such an artificial form, and how inferior it was to the outdoor breezes and sunlight of a palazzo in Venice, or even an ordinary house at the seaside. Finally he stood in front of the Vermeer, which he remembered as having been more brilliant, more different from everything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic's article, he now noticed for the first time little figures in blue, the pinkness of the sand, and finally the precious substance of the tiny area of wall. His head spun faster; he fixed his gaze, as a child does on a yellow butterfly he wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. "That is how I should have written," he said to himself. "My last books are too dry, I should have applied several layers of color, made my sentences precious in themselves, like that little patch of yellow wall." He knew how serious his dizziness was. In a heavenly scales he could see, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He could feel that he had rashly given the first for the second. "I would really rather not," he thought, "be the human interest item in this exhibition for the evening papers." He was repeating to himself, "Little patch of yellow wall with a canopy, little patch of yellow wall." While saying this he collapsed onto a circular sofa; then suddenly, he stopped thinking that his life was in danger and said to himself, "It's just indigestion; those potatoes were undercooked." He had a further stroke, rolled off the sofa onto the ground as all the visitors and guards came running up. He was dead. Dead forever? Who can say? Certainly spiritualist experiments provide no more proof than religious dogma of the soul's survival. What we can say is that everything in our life happens as if we entered it bearing a burden of obligations contracted in an earlier life; there is nothing in the conditions of our life on this earth to make us feel any obligation to do good, to be scrupulous, even to be polite, nor to make the unbelieving artist feel compelled to paint a single passage twenty times over, when the admiration it will excite will be of little importance to his body when it is eaten by the worms, like the little piece of yellow wall painted with such knowledge and such refinement by the never-to-be-known artist whom we have barely identified by the name of Vermeer.

He was dead. Dead forever? Who can say?

ha, I think Bergotte is one of a few characters who have a habit of dying and coming back to life in the unfinished novel

"Ah! The Hague! What a gallery!" cried by M. de Guermantes. I said to him that he had doubtless admired Vermeer's Street in Delft. But the Duke was less erudite than arrogant. Accordingly he contented himself with replying in a tone of sufficiency, as was his habit whenever anyone spoke to him of a picture in a gallery, or in the Salon, which he did not remember having seen. "If it's to be seen, I saw it!"

Reminds me that I got an alert about a new book by Benjamin Moser about the Dutch Masters that looks good.

Bergotte is one of a few characters who have a habit of dying and coming back to life in the unfinished novel

the slippage caused by proust's geographical+chronological+historical errors and accidental retcons, even in the published volumes, rly suits the book

(feel the same way about the polyphonic translation tbh but how would i know)

Yes, totally. That along with the fact that it's basically impossible to hold more than a fraction of the story in your memory at any given time, and the way that the narrator constantly multiplies the hypothetical explanations and motivations for any given event - the book has all these distorting layers which make it endlessly perplexing. Even though in another sense Proust is a very clear writer.

the book has all these distorting layers

He was mistaken. He did see her again, one more time, a few weeks later. It was while he was asleep, in the twilight of a dream. He was walking with Mme. Verdurin, Dr. Cottard, a young man in a fez whom he could not identify, the painter, Odette, Napoleon III, and my grandfather, along a path that followed the sea and overhung it steeply sometimes very high up, sometimes by a few yards only, so that one climbed and descended again constantly; those who were descending again were already no longer visible to those who were still climbing, what little daylight remained was failing, and it seemed then as though a profound darkness was going to sweep over them at any moment.... Odette turned her wrist, looked at a little watch, and said: "I have to go..." After one second, it was many hours ago that she had left them. The painter remarked to Swann that Napoleon III had vanished an instant after she had. "They certainly must have arranged it together," he added. "They must have met at the bottom of the hill, but they didn't want to say good-bye at the same time for the sake of appearances. She's obviously his mistress." The unknown young man began to cry. Swann tried to comfort him. "Really, she's doing the right thing," he told him, drying his eyes and taking off his fez so that he would be more comfortable. "I told her a dozen times she should do it. Why be sad about it? He above all would understand her." Thus did Swann talk to himself, for the young man he had not been able to identify at first was also himself; like certain novelists, he had divided his personality between two characters, the one having the dream, and another he saw before him wearing a fez.

The lie, the perfect lie, about people we know, about the relations we have had with them, about our motive for some action, formulated in totally different terms, the lie as to what we are, whom we love, what we feel with regard to people who love us and believe that they have fashioned us in their own image because they keep on kissing us morning, noon and night — that lie is one of the few things in the world that can open windows for us on to what is new and unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses for the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known.

Have y’all seen the doc about the Buenos Aires reading group, have I mentioned it before?

Haven't seen it yet. I want to find a group like that.

"Ah! The Hague! What a gallery!"

otm

But you don't even know what The Hague is.

Meh

Mlle Vinteuil acted as she did simply out of sadism, which does not excuse her, but comforted me a little when I thought about it afterward. She must have understood, I would say to myself, that all this was just an illness, a form of madness, and not the true delight in wickedness that she wanted it to be. But if she was able, later, to think of this for herself, it must have eased her suffering as it had formerly spoiled her pleasure. "That wasn't me," she must have said, "I was out of my mind. I can still pray for my father, and not despair of his goodness." However, it is possible that this idea, which must have come to her during her pleasure, did not occur to her during her suffering. I wished I could have put it into her mind.

lol "le roman d'albertine" is so diseased (slyly acknowledged by long woody allen style pontification to albertine about dostoevsky). get a grip marcel!! write the book already!!

Bergotte is one of a few characters who have a habit of dying and coming back to life in the unfinished novel... the narrator constantly multiplies the hypothetical explanations and motivations for any given event... the book has all these distorting layers

gasped at this (another de fourcheville dream!):

Two days later I was delighted to think that Bergotte must have greatly admired my article, which he could not have read without jealousy. Yet after a while my joy subsided. In fact Bergotte had not written me a word. I had simply wondered whether he would have liked the article, fearing that he had not. The question that I had asked myself was answered by Mme de Forcheville, who had replied that he admired it greatly, finding it worthy of a great writer. But she told me this while I was asleep: it was a dream. Almost all our dreams answer the questions that we have asked ourselves with complex affirmations and scenarios involving several characters, but they fade with the dawn.

irl lol @ all the tenses here:

I then came back to a Paris very different from the one to which I had already returned on an earlier occasion, as we shall see shortly,

Found this essay to be pretty terrible.

If you had the time and there was nothing stopping you would you read this book?

https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/reading-and-time/

that's paywalled but this line is very funny:

Thanks to a few features of Proust’s distinctive style, reading In Search of Lost Time inevitably takes at least twice or even three times as long as this.

"this" is three days. yes, nine days, that's about how long it takes to read Proust