Tag: Proust

Girl as Seen from Train / Vision of Alternate Life – Proust Quote

I needed her to notice me. She did not notice me, so I hailed her. Her tall person was topped by a face with a complexion so golden-pink that I seemed to be seeing her through the radiance of a stained-glass window. She turned and walked back toward me: I could not look away from her face, which, as it neared and grew larger, was like a sun that did not dazzle the stare, no matter how close it came, which you could look straight at as it deluged you with its blaze of glorious golds and reds. Her eye, which had a piercing gaze, met mine; but just then, as the guard and stationmaster were shutting the doors, the train started to move. In broad daylight now, I watched as she walked away from the station and along her footpath: I was traveling away from the dawn. Whether my excitement had been caused by the girl, or whether it had been the cause of much of the enjoyment afforded me by the nearness of her, she was so much a part of my feeling that my desire to see her again was above all the longing to retain something of that excitement, not to let it die, not to be severed forever from the one who, though she was unaware of this, had been part of it. It was not just that this feeling was pleasant. It was especially because (as the tightening of a string or the more rapid vibration of a nerve produces a different note or color) it gave a sharper tone to what I saw, gave me a part to act in an unknown and infinitely more interesting world; and for as long as the gathering speed of the train allowed me to see the beautiful milkmaid, she was like a part of some other life, separated from the one I knew by a narrow borderline, another life, in which the feelings transmitted to me by things were not the usual ones, and the leaving of which felt like a sort of inner death.

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2
Marcel Proust

Proust on Adolescence

But the salient feature of the absurd age I was at – an age which for all its alleged awkwardness, is prodigiously rich – is that reason is not its guide, and the most insignificant attributes of other people always appear to be consubstantial with their personality. One lives among monsters and gods, a stranger to peace of mind. There is scarcely a single one of our acts from that time which we would not prefer to abolish later on. But all we should lament is the loss of the spontaneity that urged them upon us. In later life, we see things with a more practical eye, one we share with the rest of society; but adolescence was the only time when we ever learned anything.

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (In Search of Lost Time)
Marcel Proust

In Praise of Bad Music – Proust Quote

Detest bad music if you will, but don’t hold it in contempt. As it is played and sung much more often and much more passionately than good music, so much more than the latter has it gradually been filled with the dreams and tears of mankind. For that reason you should venerate it. Its place, insignificant in the history of art, is huge in the sentimental history of societies. Respect for – I do not say love for – bad music is not merely a form of what might be called the charity of good taste or its scepticism, it is, more than that, the awareness of the importance of the social role of music. How many melodies, worthless in the eyes of an artist, become the confidants chosen by a whole host of romantic young men and of women in love.

Pleasures and Days
Marcel Proust

Remembering Youth from a Distance – Proust Quote

But for a little while now, I have begun to hear again very clearly, if I take care to listen, the sobs that I was strong enough to contain in front of my father and that broke out only when I found myself alone again with Mama. They have never really stopped; and it is only because life is now becoming quieter around me that I can hear them again, like those convent bells covered so well by the clamor of the town during the day that one would think they had ceased altogether but which begin sounding again in the silence of the evening.

Swann’s Way
Marcel Proust

The Moon in the Daytime – Proust Quote

Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would pass white as a cloud, furtive, lusterless, like an actress who does not have to perform yet and who, from the audience, in street clothes, watches the other actors for a moment, making herself inconspicuous, not wanting anyone to pay attention to her.

Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time) (pp. 162-163). Lydia Davis translation