Extracts from notebooks
Idleness or doubt or impotence taking recourse in uncertainty regarding the art form. Ought it to be a novel, a philosophical study, am I a novelist? What gives me consolation is that Baudelaire created his Poèmes en prose and Les Fleurs du mal on the same subjects, that Gérard de Nerval put in a piece of poetry and in a passage in Sylvie the same Louis XIII châteaux, Virgil's myrtle, etc. In reality these are weaknesses, when we read great writers we license any shortcomings that do not meet our ideal because they have more value than their work.
*
You trees have nothing more to say to me, my heart is becoming cooled, no longer listens to you, my eye coldly verifies the the line that you divide into parts of shadow and light, it is men that inspire me now, that other part of my life where I would have sung to you will never come back.
*
I am the sole being that I can never forget.
*
Man of letters near Cabourg working with the hope of seeing friends from former times, to appear grand to them by what he does, then the thought that his friends substitute them selves for them, he never sees them.
*
For forty years literature dominated by the contrast between gravity of expression and the frivolity of the thing said (end of Madame Bovary).
*
All is fictitious, laborious so because I have no imagination but everything is filled with a sense that I have long carried within myself, for too long because my thought has forgotten, my heart has grown cold, I have fashioned for it with difficulty these awkward directions which imprison it but from which warmth emanates.
*
Work makes us a little purer. Sometimes feeling myself to be close to my end I tell myself, feeling the child growing inside me, and not knowing whether I shall ever be able to summon the strength to bring it into the world, I say to it with a sad and gentle smile: "Will I ever see you?".
*
This mediocrity of mine prevents the state necessary to being a writer being brought back, so by understanding it it also prevents writing.
*
That which occurs however obscurely at the depths of consciousness, before being realized in a work, before bringing it out into the open it is necessary to make it traverse an intermediary region between our subconscious and our exterior, our intelligence, but how to lead it there, how to apprehend it. One may spend hours trying to bring back the first impression, the ungraspable sign that gave that impression and which said: "fathom my depths", without summoning it back, without forcing its return to us. And that is what all art is, it is the only art. The only thing worth expressing is that which has become visible in the depths and usually, except for when illuminated by light, or in moments of exceptional clarity and animation, these depths are obscure.This depth, this inaccessibility to us is the only token of their value - at the same time as a certain joy. It matters little what it is about. A church steeple that is imperceptible during the day has more value than a complete theory of the world.
*
I have no more found beauty in solitude than in society, I have found it when by chance to such an insignificant impression, the repeated sound of the horn of my motor car wanting to overtake another, that it came to attach itself spontaneously to an anterior impression of the same nature which gave it a sort of consistency, of density, and which demonstrated to me that the greatest joy that the mind can experience is to contain something that is general and that completely fills it. Certainly such moments are rare, but they rule our whole life.
*
Because we prefer the things of which a book, or the voice of someone has more authority than the written word, has initially spoken to us before we see it. So we can make a duplicate of it in our heart, hold it, rekindle it within ourselves, adorn it with all the notions of perfection that we carry within ourselves, give it an individuality, and finally to yearn to deliver us up close by those churches that we have endowed with so much power that our eyes, if we had only opened them in their presence, would not have been able to convey.
*
Thus the face that now seemed to him less pretty had never been more dear to him.
*
Music. A world that is for us the ultra-violet that we only perceive through the ears, a world which remains in shadow (I must forget ideas).
*
We are sincere when we say: "How pleased I am to see you";we are more so when we say: "I was very pleased to see you", and that sounds sad.
*
For the final
part:
In short we have recognized things whose names
we never knew. Somebody speaks to us of love, talent etc. and we
are eager to discover them just as, if we read a novel, we
persuade ourselves that it is a particular region because there
is in fact a river there, but it is not so.
*
I went to sleep clutching my sorrow like am urn filled with tears that I had not shed, and when I awoke I found it in the same place, heavy and pressing against my heart.
*
The vanity, the diversity we seek for in vain in love, in travel, is offered to us by music.
*
I see things clearly in my thoughts, as far as the horizon. But those alone that are far from the other side of the horizon, I apply to myself in order to describe them.
*
My aunt asked the newspapers for news of battle with this need of others' activity which betrays the otherwise too idle imagination of inactive people.
*
His conversation was like those provincial newspapers that without revealing their authors are made up from extracts from the Paris papers.
*
Compare my book to Françoise's beef: it must have absorbed all of its juices.
*
To say about Swann no longer thinking about Forcheville all the time (or better at the End of the Book): events only have reality in ourselves; they are also spiritual creatures; how they only persist in so far as they are able to nourish out thoughts in which they survive, the duration of their existence is not long. Initially they evolve, little by little they lose the original quality that gave them their charm or their power to make us suffer; then they die and we remember nothing of them save a name that has no resemblance to them.
*
Just as the colours of the spectrum exteriorize for us the intimate composition of stars that we will never see, so the colours of the painter, the harmonies of the musician allow us to understand that qualitative difference of sensations which is the greatest pleasure and the greatest suffering in the lives of each of us and which remains for ever unknown because it remains independent of that which we can relate (facts, things) which are the same for everyone. But thanks to the harmony of Franck, Wagner, Chopin, to the colour of Ver Meer (sic), Rembrandt, Delacriox, we are truly transported into unknown skies flying from start to star. More so than if we had been given wings; for what gives to us the uniformity of things is the permanence of our senses, and if we were to travel to Mars or Venus, things would appear to us no differently because they would always be the visions of our own eyes. The true fountain of Youth, the true new realms, would not be to visit unknown countries, but to allow a new music to come to us.
*
It is in this
way that the letters of the name that was so dear to me had first
of all been materially like in the game called Alphabet, where we
lay out letters made of wood, by the girl who I loved then
without me being able to foresee that this name that I had clung
to could ever be less than dear to me.
But the present inscribes to us thus the words of which we
only know later what our future will make of them. And a chain
winds around our whole existence binding that which is already
dead to what is real life.
Fragments from Proust's notebooks; the first dating from 1908 and 1909 but with some later notes. The three other notebooks date from subsequent years.