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A review by monkeelino
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
5.0
(In progress... notes & such below to be severely edited...)
Charmed and absorbed. That about sums up my reaction to finally reading Proust. Perhaps I had put it off for so long simply because I wanted to read all of the volumes in close succession. Certainly, I had heard the stories of readers who'd given up or needed multiple attempts to get through sometimes even just the first volume. My experience was nothing like this. By page 30, I was hooked.
Pxviii: “It is only art, or rather the meditations to be found in art, that Proust urges as the means of regaining time, of recovering what is otherwise and always lost.”
Part 1-Combray
Sleep confuses reality; starts with him imagining himself as whatever he’s reading; but the night is also torture for an invalid who can’t sleep
Love of a child setting the foundation for romantic love
Memory of the heart vs memory of the mind
Grandma’s gift always cultural/educational to the point of even her furniture gifts being antique but sometimes ready to fall apart
Caste being almost like the Hindu system; only marriage transverses caste line
P14: “... in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice: I preferred not to see them…”
P23: “But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people.”
P33 “The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.
P37, Françoise’s code of what might or might not be done
Pgs 40-41---fantastic passage on love as a child compared to love as an adult (foreshadowing Swann as the one who would best understand); the pain of waiting for a reunion or attention from one’s love interest
Time and history may erase the location of our memories, but they persist and memory and time requires a quiet to be heard and recognized
P49: “Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.”
“But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father’s presence. ...In reality their echo has never ceased; and it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them anew…”
Memory of the intellect (“voluntary memory”) vs memory of the heart
P59: “And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.”
Memory embedded in the senses (taste & smell)
P63: “But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structures of recollection.”
P93: “Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.” (M. Legrandin recognizes the narrator as an artist and is perhaps the first to mention it to him, to encourage it; others often see what we ourselves fail to and the merest comment may set us off on lifelong paths)
P116: “But none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a real person arouse in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the image was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of real people would be a decided improvement.”
P117: “And once the novelist has brought us to this state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid and more abiding than those which come to us in sleep, why then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which only we should have so spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slow course of their development prevents us from perceiving them. It is the same in life; the heart changes, and it is our worst sorrow; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.” [Fiction is more real than reality--language penetrates to the soul!]
P125: G-pa busts on the Jews; narrator’s friends are not the best “type”
P128: “...our impulsive emotions have but little influence over the course of our actions and the conduct of our lives; and that regard for moral obligations, loyalty to friends, patience in finishing our work, obedience to a rule of life, have a surer foundation in habits solidly formed and blindly followed than in these momentary transports, ardent but sterile.”
[writers & readers derive a kind of calming affirmation upon meeting like-mindedness in text; commenting on Bergotte in the following passage…] p133: “...it was suddenly revealed to me that my own humble existence and the realms of the true were less widely separated that I had supposed, that at certain points in they actually coincided, and in my newfound confidence and joy I had wept upon his printed page as in the arms of a long-awaited father.”
P139: “The belief that a person has a share in an unknown life to which his or her love may win us admission is, of all the prerequisites of love, th eon which it values most highly and which makes it set little store by all the rest.” [how does this apply to Swann and Odette? Example used is how ladies fall for men in uniform because the uniform trumps looks by promising a special life of gallantry/service/etc.]
Nursery rhymes I was deprived of as a child (p172):
Frogs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails,
And dirty sluts in plenty,
Smell sweeter than roses in young men’s noses
When the heart is one-and twenty.
P176 Legrandin speaks volume with but a wink!
P207: “...indeed it is remarkable how people never fail to arouse admiration for their moral qualities in the relatives of those with whom they are having carnal relations.” M Vinteuil
P217--narrator seems surprisingly unphased by his aunt’s death, yet is this not his first experience of death?
P260: “Whether it is because the faith which rates has ceased to exist in me, or because reality takes shape in the memory alone, the flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers.”
P261: no mistress ever sent the narrator to bed with as much contentment as his mother’s kiss because her intention was solely for him; no doubt or questioning of his mother; no other love holds such certainty (although he’s gay, so I wonder whether this is ever acknowledged in the text or whether a man’s love differs in any way from a woman’s)
P262: “When, on a summer evening, the melodious sky growls like a tawny lion, and everyone is complaining of the storm, it is the memory of Méséglise way that makes me stand alone in ecstasy, inhaling, through the noise the falling rain, the lingering scent of invisible lilacs.”
PARTII: Swann In Love
P271: More concerned about how the lower classes see him than his own class; spent his time with women he already found attractive--almost the opposite of his artistic tastes (liked “women whose beauty was of a distinctly vulgar type”)
P297-299: Swann finds a kind of creative rebirth and awakening upon hearing Vinteuil’s andante in his sonata for piano and violin); music associated with love; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinteuil_Sonata
The odd social gatherings at the Verdurin’s, especially the Cottards
Odette looks like Zipporah http://aboutmarcelproust.blogspot.com/2012/03/odettes-likeness-to-botticelli-fresco.html (Odette embodies the art aesthetics Proust appreciates and thus each heightens the other---his love of art increases his love of her and his love of her increases his love of art. Emotion magnifies memory and art magnifies emotion. And yet Odette is described as dressing quite oddly, almost like a cubist nightmare in ruffles and bows and such, as if fashion were a type of armor.)
P323: “...he was no longer the same man, was no longer alone even---that a new person was there beside him, adhering to him, amalgamated with him, a person whom he might, perhaps, be unable to shake off, whom he might have to treat with circumspection, like a master or an illness. And yet, from the moment he had begun to feel that another, a fresh personality was thus conjoined with his own, life had seemed somehow more interesting.”
P326-7: “Among all the modes by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as this guest of feverish agitation that sweeps over us from time to time. For then the die is cast, the person whose company we enjoy at that moment is the person we shall henceforward love. It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when---in this moment of deprivation---the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage---the insensate, agonising need to possess exclusively.”
The possessor becomes the possessed! P334: we invest this power in others to the extent they seem to be in another universe entirely and take us there with them
P335 odette’s fave music: Valse de Roses, the Pauver Four of Tagliafico
Love is also a way of capturing time and memory, especially feeling; p338: “For Swann was once more finding in things, since he had fallen in love, the charm that he had found when, in his adolescence, he had fancied himself an artist; with this difference, that the charm that lay in them now was conferred by Odette alone. He felt the inspirations of his youth, which had been dissipated by a frivolous life, stirring again in him, but they all bore now the reflection, the stamp of a particular being; and during the long hours which he now found a subtle pleasure in spending at home, alone with his convalescent soul, he became gradually himself again, but himself in thraldom to another.”
P408; jealousy turns his viewpoint 180; describes the life with the Verdurins as “beneath the lowest run of the social ladder, the nethermost circle of Dante.”
P424; love creates its own reality, but jealousy just as quickly turns paradise to nightmare; seems to go from lust/passion to possession/jealousy and then back to affection/tenderness
P448: “To know a thing does not always enable us to prevent it, but at least the things we know we do hold, if not in our hands, at any rate in our minds, where we can dispose of them as we choose, and this gives us the illusion of a sort of power over them.” [But our mind will also torture us with things and imagine jealousy often seems more painful than that which has been confirmed.]
P486 The Princess seems to enjoy Swann’s company precisely because he is not “cheerful”
P491: At that time he had been satisfying a sensual curiosity in discovering the pleasures of those who live for love alone. He had supposed that he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows also; yet how small a thing the actual charm of Odette was now in comparison with the fearsome terror which extended it like a cloudy halo all around her, the immense anguish of not knowing at every hour of the day and night what she had been doing, of not possessing her wholly, always and everywhere!” [uh, if you’re gonna play with fire… ]
P504: “People don’t know when they’re happy. One is never as unhappy as one thinks. ...and he said to himself that people did not know when they were unhappy, that one is never as happy as one thinks.”
P510: “Like many other men, Swann had a naturally lazy mind and lacked imagination. He knew perfectly well as a general truth that human life is full of contrasts, but in the case of each individual human being he imagined all that part of his or her life with which he was not familiar as being identical with the part with which he was.”
P511: “...he loved sincerity, but only as he might love a pimp who could keep him in touch with the daily life of his mistress.” (he seems amazed---how could Odette be a harlot when she likes flowers and good tea!)
Pgs516-519: fantastic passage on jealousy’s fear becoming reality; the mind/heart trying to heal itself, even turning toward the source of pain at the same time it is trying to process things; specifics make reality worse than the imagination, potentially--”two or three times” phrase really gets to Swann
P522: Swann realizes he’s a hypocrite given his own behavior; ignorance becomes a life raft after the first flooding of partial truth
P529: “For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.” (Swann is growing new buds of affection and love in Odette’s presence just as she has killed off old ones.)
PART 3:PLACE-NAMES, THE NAME
P546: “I longed for nothing more than to behold a stormy sea, less as a mighty spectacle than as a momentary revelation of the true life of nature; or rather there were for me no mighty spectacles to save those which I knew to be not artif
Charmed and absorbed. That about sums up my reaction to finally reading Proust. Perhaps I had put it off for so long simply because I wanted to read all of the volumes in close succession. Certainly, I had heard the stories of readers who'd given up or needed multiple attempts to get through sometimes even just the first volume. My experience was nothing like this. By page 30, I was hooked.
Pxviii: “It is only art, or rather the meditations to be found in art, that Proust urges as the means of regaining time, of recovering what is otherwise and always lost.”
Part 1-Combray
Sleep confuses reality; starts with him imagining himself as whatever he’s reading; but the night is also torture for an invalid who can’t sleep
Love of a child setting the foundation for romantic love
Memory of the heart vs memory of the mind
Grandma’s gift always cultural/educational to the point of even her furniture gifts being antique but sometimes ready to fall apart
Caste being almost like the Hindu system; only marriage transverses caste line
P14: “... in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice: I preferred not to see them…”
P23: “But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people.”
P33 “The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.
P37, Françoise’s code of what might or might not be done
Pgs 40-41---fantastic passage on love as a child compared to love as an adult (foreshadowing Swann as the one who would best understand); the pain of waiting for a reunion or attention from one’s love interest
Time and history may erase the location of our memories, but they persist and memory and time requires a quiet to be heard and recognized
P49: “Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.”
“But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father’s presence. ...In reality their echo has never ceased; and it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them anew…”
Memory of the intellect (“voluntary memory”) vs memory of the heart
P59: “And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.”
Memory embedded in the senses (taste & smell)
P63: “But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structures of recollection.”
P93: “Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.” (M. Legrandin recognizes the narrator as an artist and is perhaps the first to mention it to him, to encourage it; others often see what we ourselves fail to and the merest comment may set us off on lifelong paths)
P116: “But none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a real person arouse in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the image was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of real people would be a decided improvement.”
P117: “And once the novelist has brought us to this state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid and more abiding than those which come to us in sleep, why then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which only we should have so spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slow course of their development prevents us from perceiving them. It is the same in life; the heart changes, and it is our worst sorrow; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.” [Fiction is more real than reality--language penetrates to the soul!]
P125: G-pa busts on the Jews; narrator’s friends are not the best “type”
P128: “...our impulsive emotions have but little influence over the course of our actions and the conduct of our lives; and that regard for moral obligations, loyalty to friends, patience in finishing our work, obedience to a rule of life, have a surer foundation in habits solidly formed and blindly followed than in these momentary transports, ardent but sterile.”
[writers & readers derive a kind of calming affirmation upon meeting like-mindedness in text; commenting on Bergotte in the following passage…] p133: “...it was suddenly revealed to me that my own humble existence and the realms of the true were less widely separated that I had supposed, that at certain points in they actually coincided, and in my newfound confidence and joy I had wept upon his printed page as in the arms of a long-awaited father.”
P139: “The belief that a person has a share in an unknown life to which his or her love may win us admission is, of all the prerequisites of love, th eon which it values most highly and which makes it set little store by all the rest.” [how does this apply to Swann and Odette? Example used is how ladies fall for men in uniform because the uniform trumps looks by promising a special life of gallantry/service/etc.]
Nursery rhymes I was deprived of as a child (p172):
Frogs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails,
And dirty sluts in plenty,
Smell sweeter than roses in young men’s noses
When the heart is one-and twenty.
P176 Legrandin speaks volume with but a wink!
P207: “...indeed it is remarkable how people never fail to arouse admiration for their moral qualities in the relatives of those with whom they are having carnal relations.” M Vinteuil
P217--narrator seems surprisingly unphased by his aunt’s death, yet is this not his first experience of death?
P260: “Whether it is because the faith which rates has ceased to exist in me, or because reality takes shape in the memory alone, the flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers.”
P261: no mistress ever sent the narrator to bed with as much contentment as his mother’s kiss because her intention was solely for him; no doubt or questioning of his mother; no other love holds such certainty (although he’s gay, so I wonder whether this is ever acknowledged in the text or whether a man’s love differs in any way from a woman’s)
P262: “When, on a summer evening, the melodious sky growls like a tawny lion, and everyone is complaining of the storm, it is the memory of Méséglise way that makes me stand alone in ecstasy, inhaling, through the noise the falling rain, the lingering scent of invisible lilacs.”
PARTII: Swann In Love
P271: More concerned about how the lower classes see him than his own class; spent his time with women he already found attractive--almost the opposite of his artistic tastes (liked “women whose beauty was of a distinctly vulgar type”)
P297-299: Swann finds a kind of creative rebirth and awakening upon hearing Vinteuil’s andante in his sonata for piano and violin); music associated with love; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinteuil_Sonata
The odd social gatherings at the Verdurin’s, especially the Cottards
Odette looks like Zipporah http://aboutmarcelproust.blogspot.com/2012/03/odettes-likeness-to-botticelli-fresco.html (Odette embodies the art aesthetics Proust appreciates and thus each heightens the other---his love of art increases his love of her and his love of her increases his love of art. Emotion magnifies memory and art magnifies emotion. And yet Odette is described as dressing quite oddly, almost like a cubist nightmare in ruffles and bows and such, as if fashion were a type of armor.)
P323: “...he was no longer the same man, was no longer alone even---that a new person was there beside him, adhering to him, amalgamated with him, a person whom he might, perhaps, be unable to shake off, whom he might have to treat with circumspection, like a master or an illness. And yet, from the moment he had begun to feel that another, a fresh personality was thus conjoined with his own, life had seemed somehow more interesting.”
P326-7: “Among all the modes by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as this guest of feverish agitation that sweeps over us from time to time. For then the die is cast, the person whose company we enjoy at that moment is the person we shall henceforward love. It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when---in this moment of deprivation---the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage---the insensate, agonising need to possess exclusively.”
The possessor becomes the possessed! P334: we invest this power in others to the extent they seem to be in another universe entirely and take us there with them
P335 odette’s fave music: Valse de Roses, the Pauver Four of Tagliafico
Love is also a way of capturing time and memory, especially feeling; p338: “For Swann was once more finding in things, since he had fallen in love, the charm that he had found when, in his adolescence, he had fancied himself an artist; with this difference, that the charm that lay in them now was conferred by Odette alone. He felt the inspirations of his youth, which had been dissipated by a frivolous life, stirring again in him, but they all bore now the reflection, the stamp of a particular being; and during the long hours which he now found a subtle pleasure in spending at home, alone with his convalescent soul, he became gradually himself again, but himself in thraldom to another.”
P408; jealousy turns his viewpoint 180; describes the life with the Verdurins as “beneath the lowest run of the social ladder, the nethermost circle of Dante.”
P424; love creates its own reality, but jealousy just as quickly turns paradise to nightmare; seems to go from lust/passion to possession/jealousy and then back to affection/tenderness
P448: “To know a thing does not always enable us to prevent it, but at least the things we know we do hold, if not in our hands, at any rate in our minds, where we can dispose of them as we choose, and this gives us the illusion of a sort of power over them.” [But our mind will also torture us with things and imagine jealousy often seems more painful than that which has been confirmed.]
P486 The Princess seems to enjoy Swann’s company precisely because he is not “cheerful”
P491: At that time he had been satisfying a sensual curiosity in discovering the pleasures of those who live for love alone. He had supposed that he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows also; yet how small a thing the actual charm of Odette was now in comparison with the fearsome terror which extended it like a cloudy halo all around her, the immense anguish of not knowing at every hour of the day and night what she had been doing, of not possessing her wholly, always and everywhere!” [uh, if you’re gonna play with fire… ]
P504: “People don’t know when they’re happy. One is never as unhappy as one thinks. ...and he said to himself that people did not know when they were unhappy, that one is never as happy as one thinks.”
P510: “Like many other men, Swann had a naturally lazy mind and lacked imagination. He knew perfectly well as a general truth that human life is full of contrasts, but in the case of each individual human being he imagined all that part of his or her life with which he was not familiar as being identical with the part with which he was.”
P511: “...he loved sincerity, but only as he might love a pimp who could keep him in touch with the daily life of his mistress.” (he seems amazed---how could Odette be a harlot when she likes flowers and good tea!)
Pgs516-519: fantastic passage on jealousy’s fear becoming reality; the mind/heart trying to heal itself, even turning toward the source of pain at the same time it is trying to process things; specifics make reality worse than the imagination, potentially--”two or three times” phrase really gets to Swann
P522: Swann realizes he’s a hypocrite given his own behavior; ignorance becomes a life raft after the first flooding of partial truth
P529: “For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.” (Swann is growing new buds of affection and love in Odette’s presence just as she has killed off old ones.)
PART 3:PLACE-NAMES, THE NAME
P546: “I longed for nothing more than to behold a stormy sea, less as a mighty spectacle than as a momentary revelation of the true life of nature; or rather there were for me no mighty spectacles to save those which I knew to be not artif