"Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it." V2 pg 83
Rare indeed.
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#Proust #ProustBeforeIDie
and as to the above quote.... Same, dude. Same.
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Yay for you! I am reading 5-10 pages a day, maybe 5 days a week, depending on my other commitments. :-) I hope you post some comments and/or quotes.
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The beginning of Within a Budding Grove (Vol 2) Proust aptly illustrates the struggle of trying to discern if a person--in this case Swann--has changed or if he was indeed always the way he was right then.
I confess I feel his pain.
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#Proust #ProustBeforeIDie
Swann's Way has a tiny reference to tea toward the end so might be seen as a complete piece in itself. However, to me it seems more like the scene is set, we've met the characters and gotten their background, and now the real drama (I hesistate to use "action") begins.
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The speaker is so in love with Gilberte he's brought to a literal standstill by the sight of her butler taking the dog out. Francoise, the caregiver, would ask him "What's wrong with you now?"p591
Some might find that question funny. But the last word--now--screams volumes. #Proust #ProustBeforeIDie
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I had to press pause on the Barthes/Briggs read because of all the Proust mentions. I'm almost finished with Swann's Way and will be on to Budding Grove tomorrow.
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"At the period when I was in love with Gilberte, I still believed that Love did really exist outside ourselves...." p569
Ah youth!
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"To get through each day, natures that are at all highly strung, as was mine, are equipped, like motor-cars, with different gears. There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an inifinite time to climb, and downward sloping days...." p.555
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Same.
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"The countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be"p555 Swann's Way
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It's just as true about our states of mind as well. I wonder if the original French brings out that double meaning.
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On Odette's inadvertant admissions: "...he could never forget. His soul carried them along, cast them aside, then cradled them again in its bosom, like corpses in a river. And they poisoned it" (p526)
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"He [Swann] marvelled at the terrible re-creative power of his memory" (p.523)
Don't we all at one time or another? Over and over again.
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#KateBriggs24
Reading Briggs and Barthes has pushed me back into Proust. I can't help but feel I'm missing so much of what Barthes says in The Preparation of the Novel because I've never finished In Search of Lost Time.
Sigh. #Proust #ProustBeforeIDie
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#Proust, #ProustBeforeIDie When Swann and the princess chat at the party, I feel like I know them--which, of course, is the point. Making jokes that only the important people get--usually at someone else's expense--seems a poor form of entertainment. And yet this party scene? So good.
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Swann's manufactured emotions regarding Odette--his swings from adoration to hatred and back again--remind me that Odette manufactured their relationship in the first place. She spoke to him using words that assumed a relationship where there was none--until there was one.
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Proust goes on to describe how this pain differs from phyiscal pain, and how physical can can diminish and be forgotten. Then he writes this, "In this case the mind, merely recalling the pain, created it afresh." p.391
Would that it were not so.
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Swann maintained a "resistance to complete conversion, the like of which they had never come across in anyone before." p354.
Swann is so busy telling himself tales, convincing himself of so many lies, he cannot handle any conditioning/ programing from others.
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Swann "tried not to counteract those vulgar ideas, that bad taste which she [Odette] displayed on every possible occasion, and which in fact he loved, as he could not help loving everything that came from her..." p348
This, like so much of Proust, will take some unpacking.
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Proust's description of Swann haunts me: "Swann--whose eyes, although delicate interpreters of painting, whose mind, although an acute observer of manners, must bear for ever the indelible imprint of the barrenness of his life...." p 336
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#Proust #ProustBeforeIDie
pg 330 is Swann and Odette's first kiss. And I am struck by Swann's pause: "He had wanted to leave time for his mind to catch up with him, to recognise the dream which it had so long cherished and to assist at its realisation, like a relative invited as a spectator."
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"Odette played [the piano] vilely" p335.
Is there anything that Swann admires about Odette? While he twists through justification after justification about his relationship with Odette, the descriptions are fraught with dubious asides.
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Swann's frantic search for Odette stemmed"an anguish "which, when resolved,"might almost be called happiness." And we're told "it was to that hour of anguish that he owed the importance which Odette had since assumed in his life." p334
One random act can hold so much power.
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#Proust #ProustBeforeIDie
Swann is captivated by the music more than Odette.
And the more we read about Swann, the more he sounds like he is his own work of art--a painter's study of how to be a polite gentleman. And as a delicate work of art (isn't all art delicate?) I fear Swann will break.
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Yes! and we will get there. #ProustBeforeIDie
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#Proust #ProustBeforeIDie
The portrait of love Proust paints is chilling..."But at the time of life, tinged already with disenchantment, which Swann was approaching, ...a man can content himself with being in love for the pleasure of loving without expecting too much in return" p277
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"And so my mind would become littered (as my room was with the flowers that I had gathered on my walks, or the odds and ends that people had given me) with a mass of disparate images--the play of sunlight on a stone, a roof, the sound of a bell..." p253
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"May you always see a blue sky overhead, my young friend... even when the time comes, as it has come for me now, when the wood are all black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself as I do, by looking up at the sky." 168
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"And from that instance I did not have to take another step; the ground moved foward under my feet.... Habit had come to take me in her arms and carry me all the way up to my bed like a little child." pg 160
--a beautiful bauble from #Proust
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"...being still at the age in which one believes that one gives a thing real existence by giving it a name..." (125) Proust is an old soul.
This fragment of a a larger thought sent me down a rabbit hole about how Sartre says things do not exist until they are named.
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