#proust

“Proust’s Famous Cork-Lined Room: Retrospect”

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/prousts-famous-cork-lined-room-159928

I might cover one of my walls…

My two main uni projects over christmas

The self portrait is (as always) based on Holbein - specifically his painting of Margaret Wyatt, because we Margarets have to stick together

I had to illustrate the proust madeleine scene for uni and I don’t know how I feel about this yet…

I haven’t read the book so I was taking a lot of creative liberty with appearances

It’s meant to represent the sort of intense, immersive childhood memories that get triggered by taste and smell

What do you think?

Sentivo che le cose stavano per mettersi male, e ripresi precipitosamente a parlare di vestiti.

(cit. Proust, Alla ricerca del tempo perduto)

I recently resumed In Search of Lost Time: Vol. III The Guermantes Way, and find myself once again enthralled by the range, pattern, pace, and sweep of Proust’s sentences. Hardly a page goes by that I don’t feverishly copy one down in my journal–which, as I’m sure you can imagine, slows down the pace of my reading.

Here are two sentences that range in style and achievement. The first is a wonderful example of Proust’s great ability to illustrate ideas through rather abstract similes. 

“The immobility of that thin face, like that of a sheet of paper subjected to the colossal pressure of two atmospheres, seemed to me to be held in equilibrium by two infinites which converged on her without meeting, for she held them apart. Indeed, looking at her, Robert and I, the two of us did not see her from the same side of the mystery.”

The following passage from a few pages later shows Proust continuing a  description of the characters’ inner thoughts, while recognizing a perfunctory need to advance simple plot action:

“But what would be the use of plying Rachel with questions when he already knew that her answer would be merely silence, or a lie, or something extremely painful for him to hear, which would yet explain nothing. The porters were shutting the doors; we hurriedly climbed into a first-class carriage; Rachel’s magnificent pearls reminded Robert that she was a woman of great price; he caressed her, restored her to her place in his heart where he could contemplate her, interiorised, as he had always done hitherto–save during this brief instant in which he had seen her in the Place Pigalle of an Impressionist painter–and the train moved off.”

I love how the pace quickens as we move from the exterior world of the train station, to the interior world of Robert’s thoughts, and ultimately the narrator’s speculation and judgement of Robert’s predicament. The materiality of Rachel’s pearls serves as another entry point for the interior world of Robert’s thoughts. The real world and all of its abrupt movements punctuate the inner dream and illusion, grounding or returning Robert and the narrator to the real. You get a sense or premonition here that Robert will experience great difficulty in passage across this  boundary between his desire-fueled image of Rachel, and the forces of the real world, the “Rachel when from the Lord” of the streets. This is exactly the boundary illustrated in the simile above, the “two infinites which converged on her without meeting.”

Du côté de chez Swann, by Proust / Clouds

Un petit coup au carreau, comme si quelque chose l'avait heurté, suivi d'une ample chute légère comme de grains de sable qu'on eût laissé tombé d'une fenêtre au-dessus, puis, la chute s'étendant, se réglant, adoptant un rythme, devenant fluide, sonore, musicale, innombrable, universelle : c'était la pluie.

Quand par les soirs d'été le ciel harmonieux gronde comme une bête fauve et que chacun boude l'orage, c'est au côté de Méséglise que je dois de rester seul en extase à respirer, à travers le bruit de la pluie qui tombe, l'odeur d'invisibles et persistants lilas.

Aries: “Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.” 
Taurus: “Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.“
Gemini: “The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.” 
Cancer: “Love is space and time measured by the heart.” 
Leo: “Our desires interweave with one another; and in the confusion of existence, it is seldom that a joy is promptly paired with the desire that longed for it.” 
Virgo: “It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.”
Libra: “The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.”
Scorpio: “The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.”
Sagittarius:“Mystery is not about traveling to new places but about looking with new eyes.” 
Capricorn: “We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.” 
Aquarius:“But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.” 
Pisces:“If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time.”