I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies etc – our life – hides from us, made invisible by our laziness, which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly.
But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! If only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves as the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India.
The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.
The value of a novel is not limited to its depiction of emotions and people akin to those in our own life, it stretches to an ability to describe these far better than we would have been able, to put a finger on perceptions that we recognise as our own, yet could not have formulated on our own.
…Proust’s assertion that the greatness of works of art has nothing to do with the apparent quality of their subject matter, and everything to do with the subsequent treatment of that matter. And hence his associated claims that everything is potentially a fertile subject for art and that we can make discoveries as valuable in an advertisement for soap as we can in Pascal’s Pensees.
We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it by ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare us.
Perhaps the greatest claim one can therefore make for suffering is that opens up possibilities for intelligent, imaginative enquiry – possibilities which may quite easily be, and most often are, overlooked or refused.
Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.
Pyschoanalytic literature tells of a woman who felt faint whenever she sat in a library. Surrounded by books, she would develop nausea and could gain relief only by leaving their vicinity. It was not, as might be supposed, that she was averse to books, but rather that she wanted them and the knowledge they contained far too strongly, wanted to have read everything on the shelves at once – and because she could not, needed to flee her unbearable ignorance by surrounding herself with a less knowledge-laden environment.
A precondition to becoming knowledgeable may be a resignation to, and accommodation with, the extent of one’s ignorance, an accommodation which requires a sense that this ignorance need not be permanent, or indeed need not be taken personally, as a reflection of one’s inherent capacities.
Why would one be unable to chat, as opposed to write at the level of In Search of Lost Time? In part, because of the mind’s condition as an intermittent organ, forever liable to lose the thread or be distracted, generating vital thoughts only between searches of mediocrity of, stretches in which we are not really “ourselves”, during which it may be no exaggeration to say that we are not quite all there as we gaze at passing clouds with a vacant, childlike expression. Because the rhythm of a conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
Furthermore, conversation allows us little room to revise our original utterances, which ill suits our tendency not to know what we are trying to say until we have had at least one go at trying to say it; whereas writing accommodates and is largely made up of rewriting, during which original thoughts – bare inarticulate strands – are enriched and nuanced over time.
Given the effort and strategic intelligence he devoted to friendship, it shouldn’t surprise us. For instance, it is often assumed, usually by people who don’t have many friends, that friendship is a hallowed sphere where what we wish to talk about effortlessly coincides with others’ interests. Proust, less optimistic than this, recognised the likelihood of discrepancy, and concluded that he should always be the one to ask questions, and address himself to what was on your mind rather than risk boring you with what was on his.
The images of glamour simply did not match the realities of aristocratic life. He recognised that he was better off staying at home, that he could be as happy talking to his maid as to the Princesse Caraman-Chimay.
…Chardin had shown him that the kind of environment in which he could lived could, for a fraction of the cost, have many of the charms he had previously associated with palaces and the princely life. No longer would he feel painfully excluded from an aesthetic realm, no loner would he be so envious of smart bankers with gold-plated coal tongs and diamond-studded door handles. He would learn that metal and earthenware could also be enchanting, and common crockery as beautiful as precious stones. After looking at Chardin’s work, even the humblest rooms in his parents’ flat would have the power to delight him, Proust promised: “When you walk around a kitchen, you will say to yourself, this is interesting, this is grand, that is beautiful, like a Chardin.”
I have tried to show how the great painters initiate us into a knowledge and love of the external world, how they are the ones ‘by who our eyes are opened’, opened, that is, on the world.
Though we usually assume that seeing an object requires us to have visual contact with it, and that seeing a mountain involves visiting the Alps and opening our eyes, this may only be the first, and in a sense the inferior, part of seeing, for appreciating an object properly may also require us to recreate it in our mind’s eye.
…It emphasises the extent to which physical possession is only one component of appreciation. If the rich are fortunate in being able to travel to Dresden as soon as the desire to do so arises, or buy a dress just after they have seen it in catalogue, they are cursed because of the speed with which their wealth fulfils their desires.
..When we feel interest to be so dependent on the exact locations where certain great artists found it, a thousand landscapes and areas of experience will be deprived of possible interest, for Monet only looked at a few stretches of the earth, and Proust’s novel though long, could not comprise more than a fraction of human experience. Rather than learn the general lesson of art’s attentiveness, we might seek instead the mere objects of its gaze, and would then be able to do justice to the parts of the world which artists had not considered.
To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.
Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside.
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