«Je ne dis pas non, répondit Swann étonné. Ce que je reproche aux journaux c’est de nous faire faire attention tous les jours à des choses insignifiantes tandis que nous lisons trois ou quatre fois dans notre vie les livres où il y a des choses essentielles.
If in the previous pages we discussed absence and distance in the context of light and stars, these ten pages seemed to dwell on their relationship to writing. First, we have Swann's opposition to the reading of newspapers that breed a thirst for novelty-- but of a highly abbreviated form, where people are reduced to sorts of cliches absent of depth, where the distance between those people's lives and thoughts and one's own is magnified rather than lessened. Swann instead reads to the great-aunts from Saint-Simon, but they, newspaper-readers and they are, and thereby egalitarians, disprove of the aristocratic cult contained within the Memoires. Two different kinds of reading and deciphering the world.
This excerpt was preceded by a long passage on how difficult it is to read Swann's real place in the world, as well as the Narrator's grandfather's obsessions with the names of great men whom those Swann (supposedly, according to the newspaper) frequents used to know.
Lastly we have the letter that the Narrator leaves with his mother in the hopes that it will prompt her to return to him in his room more quickly. The unanswered letter stands in for the larger effort by which the narrator attempts to use language to traverse the gap between the loved object and his mother. Unbeknownst to him at the time (but interjected by the narrator) Swann himself has spent a large part of his life, in his love with Odette, reading-- or rather-- misreading the world in a similar fashion.
Language obscures more than it communicates.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Monday, August 29, 2011
Du Cote de Chez Swann pp. 9-20
Bientôt minuit. C'est l'instant où le malade, qui a été obligé de partir en voyage et a dû coucher dans un hôtel inconnu, réveillé par une crise, se réjouit en apercevant sous la porte une raie de jour. Quel bonheur, c'est déjà le matin! Dans un moment les domestiques seront levés, il pourra sonner, on viendra lui porter secours. L'espérance d'être soulagé lui donne du courage pour souffrir. Justement il a cru entendre des pas; les pas se rapprochent, puis s'éloignent. Et la raie de jour qui était sous sa porte a disparu. C'est minuit; on vient d'éteindre le gaz; le dernier domestique est parti et il faudra rester toute la nuit à souffrir sans remède.
We remember Proust as someone interested in time, in its effects and its illusions, but if this is so it seems to me that perhaps he is above all interested in the light year, or maybe the time that it takes a single ray to reach the earth, the fact that we on earth may still be looking up at a night-sky shot through with stars long dead whose lost lights are just now reaching us.
In the very opening pages of Proust, we are already given a contradictory notion of darkness and light, and of the boundaries between them. Darkness is a place of illusion and imagination, and not merely does the Narrator, in his dark bed, confuse sleep and wakeness, past and present, reality and imagination, memory and future, but light itself, like the light that the invalid sees from the cracked door, which he believes betokens an end to suffering but in reality is merely the beginning of it, is equally illusory. The young Narrator is both bedazzled and afraid in front of the magic lantern's story book display of characters whose selves he will never know, can gaze at only as he does stars. Instead, he wishes to return to the lamp that only sheds light on that which is already familiar to him. Indeed, if Proust's work can be said to be luminous, it is not in the sense that light provides solace or even the ability to see clearly, but rather that, like stars or fires or magic lanterns, it draws us outside our own shapeless darkness filled only by our thoughts and fantasies, and into the realization of another world glowing with its own combustion, but one we will perhaps never truly know.
I remember nights along the bridges of Paris, the lights of the city in the dark water, their twinkling hard and mineral like. Or running in the evenings along the beach of Lake Michigan under the streetlights that illuminated fogs of flies, running towards the lighted skyscrapers, the flashing ferris wheel of the piers. Nights in Berkeley with the bone whiteness of the buildings flashing against the darkness of the hills. It strikes me that I, moth-like, am drawn to these places precisely because when all the sky grows black and the windows become little pinpricks like earthly stars, I feel properly excluded from these cities which I see only thanks to such light. In the day time, the windows beckon me in, provide me with illusion that I can penetrate to the interiority of things. But at night time, they emit a radiance that allows me to see their gleaming insides, only at the cost of never being inside.
Certes je leur trouvais du charme à ces brillantes projections qui semblaient émaner d'un passé mérovingien et promenaient autour de moi des reflets d'histoire si anciens. Mais je ne peux dire quel malaise me causait pourtant cette intrusion du mystère et de la beauté dans une chambre que j'avais fini par remplir de mon moi au point de ne pas faire plus attention à elle qu'à lui-même. L'influence anesthésiante de l'habitude ayant cessé, je me mettais à penser, à sentir, choses si tristes. Ce bouton de la porte de ma chambre, qui différait pour moi de tous les autres boutons de porte du monde en ceci qu'il semblait ouvrir tout seul, sans que j'eusse besoin de le tourner, tant le maniement m'en était devenu inconscient, le voilà qui servait maintenant de corps astral à Golo. Et dès qu'on sonnait le dîner, j'avais hâte de courir à la salle à manger, où la grosse lampe de la suspension, ignorante de Golo et de Barbe-Bleue, et qui connaissait mes parents et le bœuf à la casserole, donnait sa lumière de tous les soirs; et de tomber dans les bras de maman que les malheurs de Geneviève de Brabant me rendaient plus chère, tandis que les crimes de Golo me faisaient examiner ma propre conscience avec plus de scrupules.
We remember Proust as someone interested in time, in its effects and its illusions, but if this is so it seems to me that perhaps he is above all interested in the light year, or maybe the time that it takes a single ray to reach the earth, the fact that we on earth may still be looking up at a night-sky shot through with stars long dead whose lost lights are just now reaching us.
In the very opening pages of Proust, we are already given a contradictory notion of darkness and light, and of the boundaries between them. Darkness is a place of illusion and imagination, and not merely does the Narrator, in his dark bed, confuse sleep and wakeness, past and present, reality and imagination, memory and future, but light itself, like the light that the invalid sees from the cracked door, which he believes betokens an end to suffering but in reality is merely the beginning of it, is equally illusory. The young Narrator is both bedazzled and afraid in front of the magic lantern's story book display of characters whose selves he will never know, can gaze at only as he does stars. Instead, he wishes to return to the lamp that only sheds light on that which is already familiar to him. Indeed, if Proust's work can be said to be luminous, it is not in the sense that light provides solace or even the ability to see clearly, but rather that, like stars or fires or magic lanterns, it draws us outside our own shapeless darkness filled only by our thoughts and fantasies, and into the realization of another world glowing with its own combustion, but one we will perhaps never truly know.
I remember nights along the bridges of Paris, the lights of the city in the dark water, their twinkling hard and mineral like. Or running in the evenings along the beach of Lake Michigan under the streetlights that illuminated fogs of flies, running towards the lighted skyscrapers, the flashing ferris wheel of the piers. Nights in Berkeley with the bone whiteness of the buildings flashing against the darkness of the hills. It strikes me that I, moth-like, am drawn to these places precisely because when all the sky grows black and the windows become little pinpricks like earthly stars, I feel properly excluded from these cities which I see only thanks to such light. In the day time, the windows beckon me in, provide me with illusion that I can penetrate to the interiority of things. But at night time, they emit a radiance that allows me to see their gleaming insides, only at the cost of never being inside.
Certes je leur trouvais du charme à ces brillantes projections qui semblaient émaner d'un passé mérovingien et promenaient autour de moi des reflets d'histoire si anciens. Mais je ne peux dire quel malaise me causait pourtant cette intrusion du mystère et de la beauté dans une chambre que j'avais fini par remplir de mon moi au point de ne pas faire plus attention à elle qu'à lui-même. L'influence anesthésiante de l'habitude ayant cessé, je me mettais à penser, à sentir, choses si tristes. Ce bouton de la porte de ma chambre, qui différait pour moi de tous les autres boutons de porte du monde en ceci qu'il semblait ouvrir tout seul, sans que j'eusse besoin de le tourner, tant le maniement m'en était devenu inconscient, le voilà qui servait maintenant de corps astral à Golo. Et dès qu'on sonnait le dîner, j'avais hâte de courir à la salle à manger, où la grosse lampe de la suspension, ignorante de Golo et de Barbe-Bleue, et qui connaissait mes parents et le bœuf à la casserole, donnait sa lumière de tous les soirs; et de tomber dans les bras de maman que les malheurs de Geneviève de Brabant me rendaient plus chère, tandis que les crimes de Golo me faisaient examiner ma propre conscience avec plus de scrupules.
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