Readings: Don't Play that Song

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In the section “Swann in Love” from the novel Swann’s Way, Proust depicts the protagonist Swann as he is stricken to the heart by a “little phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata”. Swann hears--as he wanders among the guests at a society gathering, mooning over the absent Odette--a “little phrase that spoke to him of the vanity of his sufferings”:

Its destiny was linked, for the future, with that of the human soul, of which it was one of the special, the most distinctive ornaments. Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is without existence; but, if so, we feel that it must be that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, are nothing either. We shall perish, but we have for our hostages these divine captives who shall follow and share our fate. And death in their company is something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain.
xxxxxxxx~ Swann's Way, Marcel Proust; tr. C. K. Scott Moncrieff

I don’t know how he can bear to listen. There are songs I can’t play. Boxes I can’t open. Letters I dare not read, ever again--or dispose of either. Ergo: Don't Play that Song
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Readings: Channeling Proust

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For some weeks now I’ve been inching my way through two weighty novels. The first is Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, and the second is Green Mars, the second volume of Kim Stanley Robinson’s outstanding sci-fi trilogy about the colonization of Mars. I’ve also read other, shorter, works during this period; but these two dense and amazing novels have been my constant throughout. Every day, three or four pages of the one, followed by four or five pages of the other.

Perhaps because I’m reading them in this manner, and because in Proust I’m now into the section “Swann in Love,” which delves in great depth into the psycho-social mores of French high society, the following passage from Green Mars that I read early this morning struck me as particularly “Proustian’:


Sax had noticed…in his student years…that there were people who would score high on any intelligence test, and were very good at their work, but who at the same time could walk into a room of people and within an hour have many of the occupants of that room laughing at them or even despising them. Which was not very smart. Indeed the most giddy of high school cheerleaders, say, managing to be friendly with everyone and therefore universally popular, seemed to Sax to be exercising an intelligence at least as powerful as any awkward brilliant mathematician’s—the calculus of human interaction being so much more subtle and variable than any physics, somewhat like the emerging field of math called cascading recombinant chaos, only less simple. So that there were at least two kinds of intelligence, and probably many more: spatial, aesthetic, moral or ethical, interactional, analytic, synthetic, and so forth. And it was those people who were intelligent in a number of different ways who were truly exceptional, who stood out as something special.

If we cast one of Robinson's cheerleaders in the role of Odette, Mars, it seems, is not so very different from Combray, after all.
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Quote du Jour: more Proust

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The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them; they can aim at them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one after another, without interruption into the bosom of a family, will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician.
X XXX~ Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, tr. C.K. Scott Moncrieff

If only.
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Quote(s) du Jour: some Proust

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In tipping my hat to both the artistic (painterly) sensibilities of Marcel Proust himself, and to the mastery of his translator, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, I offer first the steeple of Saint-Hilaire through the young eyes of the narrator,

And on one of the longest walks we ever took from Combray there was a spot where the narrow road emerged suddenly on to an immense plain, closed at the horizon by strips of forest over which rose and stood alone the fine point of Saint-Hilaire’s steeple, but so sharpened and so pink that it seemed to be no more than sketched on the sky by the finger-nail of a painter anxious to give to such a landscape, to so pure a piece of ‘nature,’ this little sign of art, this single indication of human existence.

and then through the venerable eyes of his grandmother:

“My dears, laugh at me if you like; it is not conventionally beautiful, but there is something in its quaint old face which pleases me. If it could play the piano, I am sure it would really play.” And when she gazed on it, when her eyes followed the gentle tension, the fervent inclination of its stony slopes which drew together as they rose, like hands joined in prayer, she would absorb herself so utterly in the outpouring of the spire that her gaze seemed to leap upwards with it; her lips at the same time curving in a friendly smile for the worn old stones of which the setting sun now illumined no more than the topmost pinnacles, which, at the point where they entered that zone of sunlight and were softened and sweetened by it, seemed to have mounted suddenly far higher, to have become truly remote, like a song whose singer breaks into falsetto, an octave above the accompanying air.

Gorgeous. Somehow, it seems that one obtains such perspectives only in Europe.

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Readings: Proust

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I am now forty pages into the first section of Swann's Way, and determined, after a lifetime of failed attempts, to finally read the whole thing.

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