‘Inaccuracies and incompetence in no way reduce self-assurance. The opposite is more usual: self-esteem works its beneficent miracle and, since few of us can enjoy intimacy with the great or a familiarity with higher learning, those who are excluded from these can still see their own position as the most enviable; the point of view we have from the social tier we occupy makes each of us believe it is the best, for we can see not only many who are worse off than ourselves and to be pitied, but also the great, whom we can name and condemn without knowing them, misjudge and disdain without understanding them.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 351
‘if you can explain why Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit is a vital piece of work without resorting to pomposity or cuteness, then you can easily do the same for a book by Ian McEwan.’
Miranda Sawyer, Observer Music Monthly, September 2003. Full text at the Observer website.
‘Photography acquires a certain dignity, which it does not normally have, when it is not just a reproduction of reality, but can show us things which no longer exist.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 345.
‘each vice, like each of the professions, requires and acquires a special knowledge which we are not displeased at being able to display.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 323
‘The joys we most dread losing are those which have remained outside us, beyond the reach of our heart.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 316
‘It was only when I was alone that I would be swept on occasion by one of those impressions which brought with them such deeply satisfying feelings. But I only had to be in the presence of someone else, talking with a friend for instance, for my mind to face the wrong way, occupying itself with thoughts directed towards the other person rather than towards myself; and thoughts going in that other direction never afforded me any enjoyment.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 315
‘the use of ‘intellectual’ as a noun became widespread in 1898, an acute phase of the Dreyfus Affair’
James Grieve, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’ (Penguin, 2002), n.39
‘He was one of those ‘intellectuals’ whose ready admiration keeps them immersed in books, satisfying a hunger for ideas’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 312
‘This road was similar to many another French road of the same kind, first a steep climb, then a long gentle downward slope. At the time, it did not impress me as having any great charm; I was just glad to be on the way home. But in later years, it did come to be a source of other joys, by staying in my memory as a starting-point giving immediate access to all similar roads which I would travel in the future, on a short outing or a longer journey, and which because of it were able to take a short-cut to my heart. For as soon as the later carriage or motor turned into one of those roads which resembled a stretch of the one I had driven along in Mme de Villeparisis's carriage, what adjoined my then consciousness, as contiguously as though it was my most recent past, abolishing all the intervening years, was the impressions in my mind on those late afternoons, after the horses' heads had been set towards Balbec, when we drove through the lovely smell of leaves into the rising mists and could see the sunset, beyond the next village, through the trees, looking just like one of the next wooded localities along that road, but rather too distant for us to reach it before nightfall. These impressions, mingling with the ones I would be experiencing in that other place, on that similar road, and surrounded by all the accessory feeling which were common to both states, and only by them - the sensation of breathing freely, curiosity, the enjoyment of being lazy, a good appetite, cheerfulness - would grow in volume, take on the consistency of a particular type of pleasure, almost of a way of existence, one which I seldom had occasion to revisit but within which reawakened memories blended a physically perceived reality with enough remembered, fancied, ungraspable reality for these places I was passing through to give me, not just an aesthetic experience, but a heady desire, however fleeting, to live there for ever. How often the mere breath of trees in full leaf has made me see the act of sitting on a bracket-seat opposite Mme de Villeparisis, as she acknowledges the greeting of the Princess of Luxembourg passing by in her carriage, then driving home to dinner at the Grand-Hôtel, as among those inexpressible joys of life which neither the present nor the future can ever bring back, which can be tasted once and once only!.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), pp. 299-300
‘I gazed at the three trees, which I could see quite clearly; but my mind suspected they hid something on which it could have no purchase, as our fingertips at the full stretch of our arm may from time to time barely touch but not quite grasp objects which lie just out of reach. So one rests for a moment before trying harder, with the arm outstretched, in the hope of catching hold at last. However, for my mind to be able to pause and summon up the effort required, I would have had to be unaccompanied ... I could sense in this moment the presence of one of those pleasures which, though they require the mind to work upon itself, reduce to insipidity the sweets of the mental idleness which makes one prefer to abandon the effort. It was a pleasure which came to me seldom, and its object always lay beyond my mental scope, requiring me to create it myself; but on each occasion when it did come, I would have the feeling that all the things which had happened to me since the last time were more or less devoid of significance, and that, for my real life to begin at last, I must now attend to nothing but this unique reality ... I sat there for a moment thinking of nothing; then, with the fresher impetus of pent-up consciousness, I managed to leap further in the direction of the trees, or rather towards the inner part of me where I could see them. Once again I could detect, just behind them, the same familiar but imprecise object, which I could not quite take hold of. Meanwhile, as the carriage rolled on, I could see them coming nearer. Where had I set eyes on them before? In the countryside near Combray, there was no such place with an opening to a drive. Nor did the place they reminded me of fit anywhere into the countryside round a German spa where I had gone one year with my grandmother. Did this mean they belonged to years of my past life which were so distant that the landscape surrounding them had been utterly wiped out, and that, like those passages one recognizes with sudden excitement in a text one fancied one had never read, they were the only scrap left from the forgotten story-book of my early childhood? Or did they belong to one of those places one glimpses in dreams, always the same places, or so they were in my dreams, where their strange aspect was only sleep's translation of the efforts I kept making while awake, either to see through the appearance of a place to a mystery which I sensed lay beyond it (which had so often happened along the Guermantes Way), or to restore mystery to a place which I had longed to see and which, once I had been there, had turned into something quite superficial, as Balbec had? Were they perhaps a very recent image, a small fragment from a dream of only the night before, but already so faded that it seemed to derive from much longer ago? Or perhaps I had never seen them anywhere; and though I thought they were a memory to be recalled, were they in fact only an invitation to comprehend an idea, concealing behind themselves, like certain trees or clumps of grass glimpsed along the Guermantes Way, a meaning which was every bit as obscure and ungraspable as a distant past? Or else, might it actually be that they concealed no idea at all, and that it was only an impairment of my eyesight, making me see double in time as one can see double in space? ... I saw them as ghosts from my past, beloved companions from childhood, sometime friends reminding me of shared moments. Like risen shades, they seemed to be asking me to take them with me, to bring them back to the realm of the living. In their näive and passionate gesticulations, I read the impotent regret of a loved one who, having lost the power of speech, knows that he will never be able to let us know what he wants, and that we can never deduce his meaning. Soon, at a crossroads, the carriage left them behind. Like my life itself, it was carrying me away from what seemed the only truth, from what would have made me truly happy.
I watched the trees as they disappeared, waving at me in despair and seeming to say, 'Whatever you fail to learn from us today you will never learn. If you let us fall by this wayside where we stood striving to reach you, a whole part of your self which we brought for you will return for ever to nothing.' ... When the carriage went round a corner, I lost sight of them somewhere behind me; and when Mme de Villeparisis asked me why I looked so forlorn, I was as sad as though I had just lost a friend or felt something die in myself, as though I had broken a promise to a dead man or failed to recognize a god.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), pp. 297-299
‘It was not only her body I was after, it was the person living inside it, with whom there can only be one mode of touching, which is to attract her attention, and one mode of penetration, which is to put an idea into her mind.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 295
‘To make out the shape of a church in the lump of grocery in front of which I stood required an effort that made me re-examine the very notion of a church: as can happen to a schoolboy who, by being made to translate a sentence into another language, divests it of shapes with which he is familiar and comes to grasp its meaning more closely, the concept of a church, which I hardly ever needed when faced with most of the steeples I looked at, was now indispensible to me.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), pp. 294-295
‘I have never met in real life any girls as desirable as the ones I saw when in the company of some important personage who baffled all my ingenious attempts to get rid of him.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 292
‘Proust's novel grew out of a projected essay on Sainte-Beuve, which criticized the critic for letting his judgment of writing be influenced by his knowledge of the writer. The superiority of Bergotte the writer over Bergotte the speaker is [a] reflection of this criticism.’
James Grieve, n. 30 to his translation of Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’
‘At that late morning moment, when rays of sunlight came in from more than one aspect and seemingly from other times of day, breaking the angles of the walls, setting side by side on the chest of drawers a reflection from the beach and a wayside altar of colours as variegated as flowers along a lane, alighting brightly on the wainscot with the warm tremble of folded wings ready to fly away, warming like bath-water a country mat by the little courtyard window, which the sunshine festooned like a vine, adding to the charm and the decorative complexity of the furnishings by seeming to peel away the flowered silk of the armchairs and unpick their braidings, that room where I loitered for a moment before dressing for our outing was a prism in which the colours of the light from outside were dispersed, a hive in which all the heady nectars of the day awaiting me were still separate and ungathered but already visible, a garden of hopes shimmering with shafts of silver and rose petals.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), pp. 283-284
‘It is very comfortable to be a Zionist in West Bank settlements such as Beit El and Ofra. The biblical landscape is charming. You can gaze through the geraniums and bougainvilleas and not see teh occupation. Travelling on the fast highway that skirts barely a half-mile west of the Palestinian roadblocks, it's hard to comprehend the humiliating experience of the despised Arab who must creep for hours along the pocked, blockaded road assigned to him. One road for the occupier, one road for the occupied.
This cannot work. Even if the Arabs lower their heads and swallow their shame and anger for ever, it won't work. A structure built on human callousness will inevitably collapse in on itself. Note this moment well: Zionism's superstructure is already collapsing like a cheap Jerusalem wedding hall. Only madmen continue dancing on the top floor while the pillars below are collapsing.’
Avraham Burg, The Guardian, Sept 15 2003. Full text at the Guardian website.
‘The fear of a future deprived of the faces and voices of those we love, those who today give us our dearest happiness, rather than diminishing, may in fact be made worse by the thought that the pain of that deprivation is to be compounded by something which at the moment seems even more unbearable: our no longer being affected by it as a pain, but being indifferent to it; for that would mean our actual self had changed, and not just that we had lost the delight in our parents' presence, the charm of a mistress, the warmth of a friend; it would mean that our affection for them had been so utterly obliterated from our heart, of which it is an integral part today, that we would be able to take pleasure in a life spent without them, horrible though that seems at present; it would amount to a death of our self, albeit followed by a resurrection, but a resurrection in the form of a different self, whose love will remain for ever beyond the reach of those parts of the former self which have gone down to death.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 250
‘As our attentiveness furnishes a room, so habit unfurnishes it, making space in it for us.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 245
‘Every now and then, when our little train stopped at one or other of the halts on the Balbec line, I was struck by the strangeness of their names - Incarville, Marcouville, Doville, Pont-à-Couleuvre, Arambouville, Saint-Mars-le-Vieux, Hermonville, Maineville; whereas, had I read them in a book, I would have been struck by their obvious points of similarity with the names of certain places in the neighbourhood of Combray. To the ear of a musician, two phrases which have several notes in common may appear quite dissimilar, if they are coloured by different harmonies or orchestrations. And in the dismal litany of these names, which were full of sand and salt and too much empty, breezy space, with the startling syllable ville shrilling about them like a seabird, there was nothing to call to mind names like Roussainville or Martinville which, because I had heard them said so often by my great-aunt, over the dinner-table or in the 'parlour', had taken on a subdued patina of charm, an essence perhaps compounded of the taste of jam, the aroma of the wood-fire, the smell of the paper in a book by Bergotte and the colour of the free-stone house opposite, and which to this day, when they drift up like gas-bubbles from the depths of memory, retain their full specific virtue, though they have to traverse one after the other the many different layers of other mediums before reaching the surface.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), pp. 240-241
‘with Balbec it felt as though, by going there, I had broken open a name which should have been kept hermetically sealed, and into which, through the breach which I had been ill-advised enough to make, replacing all the images I had allowed to escape form it, a horse-tram, a café, people crossing the square, a branch of the Savings Bank, under the irresistable forces of external pressure and air suction, had rushed into the vacuum left in the syllables, which had now closed upon them, turning them into a frame for the porch of my Persian church, and would never again be rid of them.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 239
‘my mind, which had rescued the Virgin of the porch from the reproductions I had seen, protecting her for ever from any vicissitudes which might jeopardise them, letting her stand unscathed amid their annihilation, ideal, full of her universal value, was now amazed to see that the statue it had so often sculpted was reduced to nothing but its own shape in stone, cheek by jowl with an election notice, no less reachable than it, no less touchable with the tip of my cane, rooted to the square, inseparable from the junction with the high street, incapable of hiding from any eyes looking out from the café or the horse-tram depot, her face sharing half of the rays of the setting sun - and soon, in a few hours, half of those of the street-lamp - with the local branch of the Savings Bank, and assailed, also like it, by the smells from the pastrycook's kitchens, subjected so utterly to the tyranny of the Particular that, if I had felt like writing my name on the stone, it would have been this fabled Virgin, she whom until then I had endowed with a general existence and an inaccessible beauty, the unique (which meant, alas, the only) Virgin of Balbec, who would have been unable to avoid showing to all admirers who came to gaze upon her the mark of my piece of chalk and the letters of my name scrawled upon her body, which was stained with the same soot as the neighbouring houses, she whom, like the church itself, I now found transformed from the immortal work of art that I had longed to see into a little old woman in stone, whose height I could measure and whose wrinkles I could count.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), pp. 238-239.
‘We commonly live with a self reduced to its bare minimum; most of our faculties lie dormant, relying on habit; and habit knows how to manage without them.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 235.
‘Forgetting that beauty and happiness are only ever incarnated in an individual person, we replace them in our minds by a conventional pattern, a sort of average of all the different faces we have ever admired, all the different pleasures we have ever enjoyed, and thus carry about with us abstract images which are lifeless and uninspiring because they lack the very quality which something new, something different from what is familiar, always possesses, and which is the quality inseparable from real beauty and happiness. So we make our pessimistic pronouncements on life, which we think are valid, in the belief that we have taken account of beauty and happiness, whereas we have actually omitted them from consideration, substituting for them synthetic compounds which contain nothing of them. Likewise, a well-read man, hearing of the latest 'great book', can give a jaded yawn, assuming the work to be a sort of composite derived from all the fine works he has ever read. But the fact is that a great book is not just the sum of existing masterpieces; it is particular and unforeseeable, being made out of something which, because it lies somewhere beyond that existing sum, cannot be deduced simply from acquaintance with it, however close.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), pp. 234-235.
‘Sunrises are a feature of long train-journeys, like hard-boiled eggs, illustrated papers, packs of cards, rivers with boats straining forward but making no progress.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 233.
‘I had learned that whatever I longed for would be mine only at the end of a painful pursuit; and that this supreme goal could be achieved only on condition that I sacrifice to it the pleasure I had hoped to find in it.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 225.
‘one of those vast bleak skies, dense with portents of pent-up tragedy, resembling certain skies of Mantegna's and Veronese's, fraught with their quasi-Parisian modernity, an apt backdrop to the most awesome or hideous of acts, such as the Crucifixion or a departure by train.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 224.
‘Habit weakens all things; but the things which are best at reminding us of a person are those which, because they were insignificant, we have forgotten and which have therefore lost none of their power. Which is why the greater part of our memory exists outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the mustry air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn's first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having not use for it, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again. Outside us? Inside us, more like, but stored away from our mind's eye, in that abeyance of memory which may last for ever. It is only because we have forgotten that we can now and then return to the person we once were, envisage things as that person did, be hurt again, because we are not ourselves any more, but someone else who once loved something that we no longer care about. The broad daylight of habitual memory gradually fades our images of the past, wears them away until nothing is left of them and the past becomes irrecoverable. Or rather, it would be irrecoverable, were it not that a few words (such as 'chief under-secretary at the Postmaster General's') had been carefully put away and forgotten, much as a copy of a book is deposited in the Bibliothèque nationale against the day when it may become unobtainable.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 222.
‘It was a social class which ... was peculiar in that, though existing apart from the society of the rich, it was of course a moneyed class, but one in which money had become tractable and had taken to responding to artistic ideas and purposes - it was malleable money, poetically refined money, money with a smile.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 215.
‘She was accompanied by a whole retinue: Swann was there, as were four or five other club-men who had either dropped in to see her that morning or whom she had just encountered. And as the blacks and greys of this disciplined formation executed their almost mechanical movements, lending an inert frame to Odette, they made the woman, the only one with any intensity in her gaze, appear to be staring past them all, looking straight ahead as though leaning out of a window, and made her stand out, fragile and fearless, in the nudity of her gentle colours, as though she was a creature of a different species or of some mysterious descent, with a suggestion of something warlike about her, all of which enabled her single person to counter-balance her numerous escort. Beaming with smiles, contented with the lovely day and the sunshine, which was not yet too warm, with all the poise and confidence of a creator who beholds every thing that he has made and sees it is very good, and knowing (though vulgar passers-by might not appreciate this) that her outfit was more elegant than anyone else's, she wore it for herself but also for her friends, naturally, without show but also without complete indifference, not objecting if the light bows on her bodice and skirt drifted slightly in front of her, like pets whose presence she was aware of but whose caprices she indulged, leaving them to their own devices as long as they stayed close to her.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 212.
‘The friendliness of a person we no longer care for, though it may seem too much to our indifference, might have been deemed too little by our love. The affectionate words, the suggestion of a meeting, make us think of the joy they might have led to, but not of all the other joys by which we would have wanted them to be immediately followed, and which that very eagerness of ours might well have prevented from ever coming to pass. So it is not certain that the happiness which comes too late, at a time when one can no longer enjoy it, when one is no longer in love, is exactly the same happiness for which we once pined in vain. There is only one person - our former self - who could decide the issue; and that self is no longer with us.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 205.
‘there is a difference between the mode of sorrow caused by the obsessive thought of the loved one and the sorrow brought back to mind by certain memories: a nasty thing said, a verb once used in a letter. Let it be said here ... that the first of these modes is not nearly as cruel as the second. This is because our impression of the woman, living for ever within us, is enhanced by the halo which our adoration constantly creates for her, and is tinged if not by the glad promises of recurrent hope, at least by the peace of mind of lasting sadness ... Though our image of the whole person we love is lit by the glow of a generally optimistic mind, this is not the case with the individual memory of the hurtful words spoken on a particular occasion or the unfriendly letter ...: it feels as though these fragments, however minute they are, contain the whole person, amplified to a power well in excess of what she has in the usual imagined glimpses we have of her, entire though she is in them. Unlike the loved image of her, we have never gazed at the terrible letter with the untroubled eyes of melancholy and regret; the moment we spent reading it, devouring it, was fraught with the awful anguish of unexpected catastrophe. The difference in the making of these sorts of sorrows is that they come from the outside world and take the shortest and most painful route to the heart. The image of the woman we love, though we think it has a pristine authenticity, has actually been often made and remade by us. And the memory that wounds is not contemporaneous with the restored image; it dates from a very different time; it is one of the few witnesses to a monstrous past. Since this past goes on existing, though not inside us, where we have seen fit to replace it by a wondrous golden age, a paradise where we are to be reunited and reconciled, such memories and such letters are a reminder of reality; their sudden stab ought to make us realize how far we have strayed from that reality, and how foolish are the hopes with which we sustain our daily expectation.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), pp. 203-204.
‘in love, unlike war, the more one is defeated, the more one imposes harsh conditions; and one constantly tries to make them harsher, if one is actually in a position to impose any, that is.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 201.
‘we play certain favourite parts so often for the eyes of others,and we rehearse them so much in our hearts, that we come to rely more readily on the fictions of their evidence than on a reality which we have all but forgotten.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 171.
‘Gilberte was, of course, an only child; but there were at least two of her. Her father's nature and her mother's did not just mingle in her: it would be truer to say they were in rivalry within her, although even that is an inaccurate description, since it implies there might be a third Gilberte who found it irksome to be the periodic victim of the other two. But Gilberte was alternately one of the two and then the other, and never more than that single self at any given moment: that is, when she was the less good of the two, she was unable to regret it, since the better of the two Gilbertes, being momentarily absent, could have no knowledge of the lapse.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 141.
‘The fact is that a sound idea transmits some of its force even to its contradictor. With its share of the universal value of all mind, it takes root among other adjacent ideas, growing like a graft even in the mind of someone whose own idea it rebuts; and this latter person, drawing some advantage from the new juxtaposition, may round the idea out or adapt it, so that the final judgement on a matter is in some measure the work of the two people who were in disagreement. But the ideas which leave no possibility of a rejoinder are those which are not properly speaking ideas, those which, by being supported by nothing, find nothing to attach to in the other's mind: on one side, no brotherly branch is held out, and on the other, there is nothing but a vacuum.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), pp. 137-138.
‘The more the great writer grew in Bergotte at the expense of the man with the goatee, the more his individual life was taken over by all the other lives he imagined, which seemed to relieve him of the obligation of performing real duties, replacing it with the duty of imagining those other lives. But at the same time, because he imagined the feelings of others as vividly as if they had been his own, when circumstances brought him into at least temporary contact with someone much less fortunate than himself, rather than adopt his own point of view, he always put himself in the position of the person who was suffering; and this was a position in which he would have been horrified by the language of people who, when faced with the distress of others, go on being engrossed in their own petty concerns. In this way, he gave grounds for many a justified grudge and for enduring gratitude.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), pp. 134-135
‘habit is style-forming as well as character-forming; and the writer who, in the expression of his thought, becomes used to aiming only at a certain facility, sets bounds beyond which his talent will never go, just as surely as, by repeated recourse to a pleasure, to idleness or the fear of suffering, we pencil in, on a character which it is eventually impossible to touch up, the contours of our vices and the limits of our virtue.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 132
‘those who produce works of genius are not those who spend their days in the most refined company, whose conversation is the most brilliant, or whose culture is the broadest; they are those who have the ability to stop living for themselves and make a mirror of their personality, so that their lives, however nondescript they may be socially, or even in a way intellectually, are reflected in it. For genius lies in reflective power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 130
‘as anything new must first do away with the stereotype we are so used to that we have come to see it as reality itself, any new style of conversation, just like any originality in painting or music, will always seem convoluted and wearisome. We find its structuring figures so unwonted that the talker seems to be nothing more than a metaphor-monger, which fatigues the ear and hints at a lack of truthfulness. (Of course, the earlier speech-forms themselves were once images, which a listener unfamiliar with the world they described had difficulty in grasping. But they have long since come to be taken as the real world, the reliable world.)’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), pp. 127-128.
‘when Gilberte herself exclaimed, "You could never have imagined, could you, that the little girl you used to watch playing prisoners' base, without being on speaking terms with her, would one day be a great friend, whose house you can visit any day you like?", she spoke of a change which I could not help registering from the outside, but on which I had no inner purchase, as it was composed of two states which I could not focus on at the same time, without them becoming a single one.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 114.
‘When reality coincides at last with something we have longed for, fitting perfectly with our dreams, it can cover them up entirely and become indistinguishable from them, as two symmetrical figures placed against one another seem to become one; whereas, so as to give our joy its full intensity of meaning, we would actually prefer every detail of our desires, even at the instant of their fulfilment, to retain the prestige of still being immaterial, so as to be more certain that this really is what we desired. The mind is not even at liberty to remake its own earlier state, so as to compare it with the present one: the new acquaintance we have just made, the memory of those first unexpected moments, the words we have heard spoken, blocking the entrance to our consciousness, and commanding the exits from memory much more than those from imagination, act backwards against our past, which we can no longer see without their presence in it, rather than acting forwards on the still unoccupied shape of our future.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 113.
‘Listening for the first time to music that is even a little complicated, one can often hear nothing in it. And yet, later in life, when I had heard the whole piece two or three times, I found I was thoroughly familiar with it. So the expression 'hearing something for the first time' is not inaccurate. If one had distinguished nothing in it on the real first occasion, as one thought, then the second or the third would also be first times; and there would be no reason to understand it any better on the tenth occasion. What is missing the first time is probably not understanding, but memory. Our memory-span, relative to the complexity of the impressions which assail it as we listen, is infinitesimal ... Our memory is incapable of supplying us with an instantaneous recollection of this multiplicity of impressions. Even so, a recollection does gradually gather in the mind; and with pieces of music heard only two or three times, one is like the schoolboy who, though he has read over his lesson a few times before falling asleep, is convinced he still does not know it, but can then recite it word for word when he wakes up the following morning. Except that, in my case, I had heard nothing of the sonata until that moment; and whereas Swann and his wife could make out a distinct phrase, it was as ungraspable to my perception as someone's name that you try to remember, when the mind retrieves nothing but a vacuum, into which, without your assistance, an hour after you stop thinking about them, the complete set of syllables that you have been vainly groping about for suddenly leaps. Not only does one not immediately discern a work of rare quality; but even within such a work, as happened to me with the Vinteuil sonata, it is always the least precious parts that one notices first ...Therein lies the source of the melancholy that accompanies our discovery of such works, as of all things which can come to fruition only through time. By the time I had come to have access to the most secret parts of Vinteuil's sonata, everything in it which I had noticed and preferred at first was already beginning to be lost to me, carried away by habit out of the reach of my sensibility. Because it was only in successive stages that I could love what the sonata brought to me, I was never able to possess it in its entirety - it was an image of life. But the great works of art are also less of a disappointment than life, in that their best parts do not come first. In the Vinteuil sonata, the beauties one discovers soonest are also those which pall soonest, a double effect with a single cause: they are the parts which most resemble other works with which one is already familiar. But when those parts have receded, we can still be captivated by another phrase which, because its shape had been too novel to let our mind see anything there but confusion, had been made undetectable and kept intact; and the phrase we passed by every day unawares, the phrase which had withheld itself, which by the sheer power of its own beauty had become invisible and remained unknown to us, is the one which comes to us last of all. But it will also be the last one we leave. We shall love it longer than the others, because we took longer to love it.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), pp. 105-106.
‘What is this which gleams through me and smites my heart without wounding it? I am both a-shudder and a-glow; a-shudder insofar as I am unlike it, a-glow insofar as I am like it.’
quoted by David Bryant, The Guardian, 30 August 2003. Full text at Guardian website.
‘The wind industry is attracted by the enormous subsidy given to each unit of electricity generated. The Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Chemical Engineers, Platt's Power and Denmark's electricity supply company all agree that wind power can make a tiny contribution to the demand for energy ...’
Ann West, Vice-Chairman of Country Guardian, Guardian letters page, 27 August 2003.
‘The conceptual breakthrough that makes mobiles possible was the work of D. H. Ring ... at Bell Laboratories, New Jersey. There are only so many radio frequencies available; Ring's brilliant notion was to see that the same frequencies could be used over and over again if each covered only a small geographical area, or 'cell' - hence 'cellular phone'. This causes other problems, such as negotiating the handover of the phone from one cell to the next, but the principle is still the one on which mobile networks are based. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing is that Ring came up with the idea in 1947.’
Thomas Jones, London Review of Books, 10 July 2003. Full text at LRB website.
‘Like most Swedish creators, from Strindberg to Abba, [Henning Mankell] does much of his work on one of the myriad small islands in the Baltic archipelago east of Stockholm.’
James Meed, The Guardian G2, 12 Sept 2003. Full text at the Guardian website.
‘ "God is love? Actually, that is not the gospel," he said, clenching his fists in front of him. "God is God, and is holy. How can Holy God be close to sinful man? How can He have anything to do with the likes of me? I am not picking on anyone. I would start with me." ’
Graham Bowley, Financial Times, 13 September 2003. Full text at FT website.
‘ I have come to understand the weakness of the domestic tradition that was once our glory, and to a certain extent - in some homes - still is.
The weakness is a lack of professionalism, the lack in each of us, of a solid grounding in skill and knowledge about food, where it comes from, how it should be prepared. Somehow we do not manage in shops and restaurants to keep high standards that constantly remind the cook at home of what food can be. You have only to spend a day visiting Fauchon or Le Nôtre in Paris, or some of the supermarkets of German and Italian towns, and then spend the next visiting the groceries of Piccadilly to see what I mean ...
The thing is that if you have a solid basis of skill, and can constantly refer to the highest standards, you have a better chance of adapting to the changes of life than if you merely look in magazines and books for new 'recipes' ... I am lucky in working mainly for a paper that allows me enough space to hint at the fact that words such as apple, cheese, bread are meaningless: that for good food one needs to understand that a Cox's Orange Pippin in a pie will give you a quite different result from a Bramley; that for a good cheese sauce Parmesan must be used because English hard cheeses will put too much fat into the sauce before they can achieve the same intensity of flavour; that sliced bread and frozen poultry are not worth buying - ever.’
Jane Grigson, ‘English Food’, Preface to Second Edition (1979).
‘Projection is a kind of applied authorship, in which the lover writes not only the self, but the other. Such love makes us casualties of our own construction.’
Sarah Churchwell, Times Literary Supplement, Sept 12 2003.
‘some recent Catholic theology has set about reconceiving natural law. One prevailing trend has been to incorporate acknowledgement of the historicity of moral norms. So, for example, Bruno Schüller, SJ, an eminent continental moralist, has argued that as human nature develops in some respects, so too much specifications of the natural law. Another important revision of the traditional understanding of natural law has been to exchange 'physicalist' terms for 'personalist' ones (Bernard Häring). In general the argument here has been that human nature should not be understood in terms of what human and nonhuman animals share in common - that is, the biological - but rather in terms of what is distinctively human - that is, the personal....
Some moral theologians (such as Franz Böckle in Fundamentalmoral, 1977), affirming what they believe to be the deep theological roots of Kantian 'autonomy', identify the Christian ethic with that at which 'theonomous' reason arrives, and so reject the project of trying to build a distinctively Christian 'ethic of faith' (of the kind advocated by Bernhard Stoeckle in Grenzen der autonomen Moral, 1974, trans. 'The Limits of Autonomous Morality').’
Nigel Biggar, 'Ethics' in Alister McGrath (ed.), 'The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought', p. 167.
‘Intricate ivory carvings said to be the oldest known examples of figurative art have been uncovered in a cave in southwestern Germany. Researchers say that the finding could change our understanding of early man's imaginative endeavours.
The artefacts - including a figurine depicting a Lowenmensch ('lion man') - have been carbon-dated to around 30,000 years ago, when some of the earliest known relatives of modern humans populated Europe.
Discovered last year by a team led by US archaeologist Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen in Germany, at the Hohle Fels cave near Ulm, the objects include figures depicting a horse and a bird ...
Conard reported the discovery on 30 July at the Sixteenth Congress of the International Quaternary Association in Reno, Nevada, during a lecture on the human colonization of Europe.’
Rex Dalton, 'Nature' Magazine, 4 September 2003. Full text at Nature online.
‘Swann may well have known that magnanimity is often nothing more than the outward appearance of a selfish impulse, which we have not yet seen as such or named. In my protestations of good will towards him, perhaps he recognized a mere effect, as well as a resounding confirmation, of my love for his daughter, and he may have foreseen that my subsequent acts would be inevitably governed by this love, and not by my secondary veneration for himself.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 66.
‘I had just experienced the New Year's Day of older men, who differ on that day from the young, not because nobody brings them presents, but because they no longer believe in the New Year.’
Marcel Proust, ‘In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower’, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), pp. 62-63.
‘what a contradiction it is to search in reality for memory's pictures, which would never have the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from not being perceived by the senses ... The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions that formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is only regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.’
Marcel Proust, The Way By Swann's, trans. James Grieve (Penguin, 2002), p. 430.
‘We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.’
Marcel Proust, The Way By Swann's', trans. Lydia David, (Penguin, 2002), p. 383
‘he would have liked to observe as though it were a landscape about to disappear that love which he had just left behind; but it is so difficult to duplicate oneself and give oneself a truthful display of a feeling one no longer has that soon, darkness gathering in his brain, he could no longer see anything, gave up looking ...
when Swann happened upon proof close at hand that Forcheville had been Odette's lover, he noticed that he felt no pain, that his love was far away by now, and he was sorry not to have been warned of the moment when he was about to leave it behind for ever. And just as before kissing Odette for the first time he had tried to imprint on his memory the face which had been familiar to him for so long and which was about to be transformed by the memory of that kiss, so he would have wanted, in his thoughts at least, to have been able to make his farewells, while she still existed, to the Odette who had inspired him with love, jealousy, to the Odette who had made his suffer and whom he would now never see again.’
Marcel Proust, The Way By Swann's', trans. Lydia David, (Penguin, 2002), pp. 379-380
‘on the days when she happened to be kind and affectionate with him again, if she showed him some thoughtful attention, he would note these ostensible and deceptive signs of a slight renewal of feeling, with the loving, sceptical solicitude, the despairing joy of those who, caring for a friend in the last days of an incurable illness, report certain precious facts such as: 'Yesterday, he did his accounts himself, and he was the one who spotted a mistake in addition that we had made; he ate an egg and enjoyed it - if he digests it without any trouble we'll try a cutlet tomorrow', although they know these facts are meaningless on the eve of an unavoidable death.’
Marcel Proust, The Way By Swann's', trans. Lydia Davis, (Penguin, 2002), p. 355
‘the wisdom of people not in love who believe a man of sense should be unhappy only over a person who is worth it; which is rather like being surprised that anyone should condescend to suffer from cholera because of so small a creature as the comma bacillus.’
Marcel Proust, The Way By Swann's', trans. Lydia Davis, (Penguin, 2002), p. 345
‘Knowing a thing does not always mean preventing a thing, but at least the things we know, we hold, if not in our hands, at least in our minds where we can arrange them as we like, which gives us the illusion of a sort of power over them.’
Marcel Proust, The Way By Swann's', trans. Lydia Davis, (Penguin, 2002), p. 318
‘He had the sudden suspicion that this hour spent at Odette's house, in the lamplight, was perhaps not an artificial hour, invented for his own use (intended to mask that dismaying and delightful thing which he thought about endlessly without being able really to picture it, an hour in Odette's real life, in Odette's life when he himself was not there), with stage-set accessories and cardboard fruit, but was perhaps a real hour in Odette's life, that if he had not been there, she would have set out the same armchair for Forcheville and poured him not some unfamiliar drink, but that very same orangeade, that the world inhabited by Odette was not that other frightful and supernatural world where he spent his time locating her and which perhaps only existed in his imagination, but rather the real world, radiating no special sadness, comprising that table where he was going to be able to write and that drink which he would be permitted to taste, all those objects which he contemplated with as much curiosity and admiration as gratitude, for if by absorbing his dreams they had delivered him from them, they in return had been enriched by them, they showed him the palpable realization of his dreams, and they interested his mind, they assumed substance and shape before his eyes at the same time that they soothed his heart.’
Marcel Proust, The Way By Swann's', trans. Lydia Davis, (Penguin, 2002), p. 302
‘It is 150 years since the discipline of pre-history was born. The very first use of the newly invented term "prehistoric" is disputed, but one of the earliest examples came in 1851 with the publication of Daniel Wilson's book, The Archaeology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland . Certainly by 1865, and the publication of John Lubbock's Prehistoric Times, the term and the concept had become well established, and that book went into several editions over the next four decades.’
Colin Renfrew, review of Steven Mithen, 'After the Ice: A global human history, 20,000 - 5,000BC' in the Times Literary Supplement, August 29 2003.