The Guermantes Way -Marcel Proust
Despite all the tittle-tattle throat coat name-dropping of these pages there is a lucidity that is beyond the proper noun, a wisdom that is pervasive, subtle, couchant in the almost two thousand pages of fetes, salons, cordials and constitutionals. But, why so many words? And when is the poor boy going to come of age, nubile, effeminate, wrath-leashing whimpering nameless Marcel with the syntax of a thousand hungry puppies and the vocabulary of a sesquipedalian, who, as yet, has yet to make up his mind about the direction of a single sentence not to mention, effusively, a resolution of his own. My faith in Proust remains, I admit, due partly to the fact that there is so much still to read of this story. Can I call it a story, or is it a florid, gilt-cornered punctilious address book. Surely, I will read on.
“And for this reason it is the really beautiful works [of art] that, if we listen to them with sincerity, must disappoint us most keenly, because in the storehouse of our ideas there is none that responds to an individual impression.”
“’The Duchesse de Guermantes,’ as though it were a name that was just like other names.”
“Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art.”
“I believed that there was such a thing as knowledge acquired by the lips.”
“It has even been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.” Which reminds one of Jeremiah 3:16, “’Then it shall come to pass, when you are multiplied and increased in the land in those days,’ says the Lord, ‘that they will say no more, ‘The ark of the covenant of the Lord.’ It shall not come to mind, nor shall they remember it, nor shall they visit it, nor shall it be made anymore. At that time Jerusalem shall be called The Throne of the Lord.”
and then back to Proust,
“This remark of Bloch’s was of no great interest, but I remembered it as proof that sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.”
“In these early poems, Victor Hugo is still a thinker, instead of contenting himself, like Nature, with providing food for thought.”
I guess all of these examples are counter to my claiming Proust as an embellishing cataloguer, which, of course, he’s not, but my sentiment still holds.
