Literature

The entry earlier this evening was strangely related to much of what I found in the last volume of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. It may strike the reader who has followed this journal for its duration that Proust has always been a theme and it is simply because no one has written like him and n one is bound to write like him again. The mere fact that he wrote at all, and in the way that he did was a miracle of literature. The bed-ridden author read all of his life and spent every moment dreaming of possibilities and always dreamt of writing the perfect novel. Alongside Tolstoy`s Anna Karenina this novel could either seem full of high-mindedness of it could be seen as the more honest rendition of life as it should like to be.

And this concern that grows as time passes, this conviction I have that the language must be pushed to its limit is merely a result of this novel to which I do not intend to make comparison. As Proust ages and the memories of so many novels diffuse into a vast exploration of memory and love, abolishing time in the process and rendering humanity in undying light, in an incomparable effluence of honesty and prose. That Proust values art and culture so highly and hopes to convey the value of extending the self beyond the initial impressions, through metaphor, through shared experience, is exactly what makes him the eternal novelist. This is by far one of my favourite quotes:

"The grandeur of veritable art, to the contrary of what M. de. Norpois called "a dilettanteś amusement", is to recapture, to lay hold of, to make one with ourselves that reality far removed from the one we live in, from which we separate ourselves more and more as the knowledge which we substitute for it acquires a greater solidity and impermeability, a reality we run the risk of never knowing before we die but which is our real, our true life at last revealed and illumined, the only life which is really lived and which in one sense lives at every moment in all men as well as in the artist. But they do not see it because they do not seek to illuminate it. And thus their past is encumbered with innumerable "negatives" which remain usless because the intelligence has not "developed" them. To lay hold of our life, and also the life of others; for a writerś style and also a painter`s are matters not of technique but of vision. It is the revelation, impossible by direct and conscious means, of the qualititaive difference there is in the way which we look at the world, a difference which, without art, would remain forever each man`s personal secret. By art alone we are able to get outside of ourselves, to know what another sees of this universe which for him is not ours, the landscapes of which would remain as unknown as those of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it mutplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our disposal, differing more widely from each other than those which roll round the infinite and which, whether their name is Rembrandt or Ver Meer, send us their unique rays many centuries after the hearth from which they emanated is extinquished.

This labour of the artist to discover a means of apprehending beneath matter and experience, beneath words, something different from their appearance, is of an exactly contrary nature to the operation in which pride, passion, intelligence and habit are constantly engaged within us, when we spend our lives without self-communion, accumulating, as though to hide our true impressions, the terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life. In short, this complex art is precisely only living art. It alone expresses for others and makes our own life, that life which cannot observe itself, the outer forms of which, when observed, need to be interpreted and often read upside down in order to be laboriously deciphered. The work of our pride, our passion, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits must be undone by art which takes the opposite course and, returning to the depths where the real has its unknown being, makes us pursue it. It is, of course, a great temptation to recreate true life, to renew impressions. But courage of all kinds is required, even sentimental courage. For it means, above all, abrogating our most cherished illusions, ceasing to believe in the objectivity of our own elaborations and, instead of soothing ourselves for the hundredth time with the words "she was very sweet", reading into themm "I liked kissing her". Of course what I had experienced in hours of love every man experiences. But what one has experienced is like certain negatives which show black until they are placed under a lamp and they too must be looked at from the back; we do not know what a thing is until we have approached it with our intelligence. Only when intelligence illuminates it, when it has intellectualised it, we distinguish, and with how much difficulty, the shape of that which we have felt, and I realised also that the suffering I had formerly experienced with Gilberte in realising that our love has nothing to do with the being who inspires it is salutary as a supplementary aid to knowledge. (For, however short a time in our life while we are suffering that our thoughts, in a constant state of agitation and change, cause the depths within us to surge as in a tempest to a height where we see that they are subject to laws which, until then, we could not observe, because the calm of happiness left those depths undisturbed. Perhaps only in the case of a few great geniuses is it possible for this movement to be constantly felt without their suffering turmoil and sadness; but then again it is not certain, when we contemplate the spacious and uniform development of their serene achievements, that we are not too much taking for granted that the buoyancy of the work implies that of its creator, who perhaps, on the contrary, was continously unhappy.) But principally because if our love is not only for a Gilberte, what gives us so much pain is not that it is also love of an Albertine, but because it is a more durable part of our soul than the various selves which would selflessly retain it, a part of our soul which must, whatever the pain, detach itself from those beings so that we should understand and constitue their generality and impart the meaning of that love to all men, to the universal consciousness and not to one woman, then to another with the first one then another of our successive selves has desired to unite."

- Marcel Proust, "In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 12: Time Regained" (Chatto and Windus,1944), p247-9