in an earlier post (see sept. 16) i had quoted a section from remembrance of things past that i thought was so wise and i wrote that although at 3,000 pages the book is daunting there are so many similarly wise things that you don't want your mind to drift for fear of missing one.
below are some more of these. proust continually inserts sentences like this that are so RIGHT. listed seriatum they may sound like those bits of philosophy you find in fortune cookies or on hallmark cards but there is a context for them, 3,000 pages of context. in context they mean more but even out of context they're great:
"but true beauty is so individual, so novel always, that one does not recognise it as beauty."
written in the early twentieth century, remembrance was highly influential on the ideas of artists who, like picasso for example, was making art that not everyone at the time recognized as beautiful.
"mme de guermantes, who often met the bulgarian at dinner at the prince de joinville's,...had said to him once, when he asked if she was not jealous [of her philandering, but rich, husband]:
'yes, your highness, of your bracelets." oooh, is that exquisite.
"...of all the flying seeds in the world, that to which are attached the most solid wings, enabling it to be disseminated at the greatest distance from its point of origin, is still a joke."
one of the lecturers on one of the teaching company's tapes said one time that of all human activity--war, love, hate, crime, etc.--the least seriously written about is humor.
"love?" [mme leroi] had once replied to a lady who had asked for her views on love, "i make it often but i never talk about it."
"god, whose will it is that there should be a few well-written books in the world, breathes with that purpose such disdain into the hearts of the mme lerois, for he knows that if these should invite the mme villeparisis to dinner, the latter would at once rise from their writing tables and order their carriages to be round at eight."
i have to give the quote above, which is hard to improve upon standing alone, a little more context because proust does improve it with context:
"...the salons of the mme de villeparisis of this world are alone destined to be handed down to posterity [by memoirs], because the mme lerois of this world cannot write, and, if they could, would not have the time. and if the literary dispositions of the mme de villeparisis are the cause of the disdain of the mme lerois, in its turn the disdain of the lerois does a singular service to the literary dispositions of the mme de villeparisis by affording those bluestocking ladies that leisure which the career of letters requires. god, whose will it is that there should be a few well-written books in the world, breathes with that purpose such disdain into the hearts of the mme lerois, for he knows that if these should invite the mme villeparisis to dinner, the latter would at once rise from their writing tables and order their carriages to be round at eight."
"we strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be."
"the only real social advantages are those that create life..."
"how many women's lives...have been divided thus into contrasting periods, the last being entirely devoted to the reconquest of what in the second has been so light-heartedly flung to the winds!"
remember how i wrote in my earlier post on remembrance that you sometimes have to read his sentences three times, once straight through, once taking out all the modifying clauses and parentheticals to get the most important meaning and then once again straight through? the above is one of those sentences. this is how it appears in all its spaghetti complexity:
"how many women's lives, lives of which little enough is known (for we all live in different worlds according to our age, and the discretion of their elders prevents the young from forming any clear idea of the past and taking in the whole spectrum), have been divided thus into contrasting periods, the last being entirely devoted to the reconquest of what in the second has been so light-heartedly flung to the winds!"
DO YOU SEE WHAT I MEAN? isn't that hilarious?
all of the above, by the way, are culled from only 56 pages of chapter one, the guermantes way, of the second volume of the work. as i said, sentences like that are sprinkled throughout the book so you don't want to take a lap when you're reading.
i hope you also get a sense for how amazing the translation here by moncrieff and kilmartin is. when you can render a literary masterpiece in one language into another with this level of subltety and nuance that itself is masterly.
-benjamin harris
below are some more of these. proust continually inserts sentences like this that are so RIGHT. listed seriatum they may sound like those bits of philosophy you find in fortune cookies or on hallmark cards but there is a context for them, 3,000 pages of context. in context they mean more but even out of context they're great:
"but true beauty is so individual, so novel always, that one does not recognise it as beauty."
written in the early twentieth century, remembrance was highly influential on the ideas of artists who, like picasso for example, was making art that not everyone at the time recognized as beautiful.
"mme de guermantes, who often met the bulgarian at dinner at the prince de joinville's,...had said to him once, when he asked if she was not jealous [of her philandering, but rich, husband]:
'yes, your highness, of your bracelets." oooh, is that exquisite.
"...of all the flying seeds in the world, that to which are attached the most solid wings, enabling it to be disseminated at the greatest distance from its point of origin, is still a joke."
one of the lecturers on one of the teaching company's tapes said one time that of all human activity--war, love, hate, crime, etc.--the least seriously written about is humor.
"love?" [mme leroi] had once replied to a lady who had asked for her views on love, "i make it often but i never talk about it."
"god, whose will it is that there should be a few well-written books in the world, breathes with that purpose such disdain into the hearts of the mme lerois, for he knows that if these should invite the mme villeparisis to dinner, the latter would at once rise from their writing tables and order their carriages to be round at eight."
i have to give the quote above, which is hard to improve upon standing alone, a little more context because proust does improve it with context:
"...the salons of the mme de villeparisis of this world are alone destined to be handed down to posterity [by memoirs], because the mme lerois of this world cannot write, and, if they could, would not have the time. and if the literary dispositions of the mme de villeparisis are the cause of the disdain of the mme lerois, in its turn the disdain of the lerois does a singular service to the literary dispositions of the mme de villeparisis by affording those bluestocking ladies that leisure which the career of letters requires. god, whose will it is that there should be a few well-written books in the world, breathes with that purpose such disdain into the hearts of the mme lerois, for he knows that if these should invite the mme villeparisis to dinner, the latter would at once rise from their writing tables and order their carriages to be round at eight."
"we strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be."
"the only real social advantages are those that create life..."
"how many women's lives...have been divided thus into contrasting periods, the last being entirely devoted to the reconquest of what in the second has been so light-heartedly flung to the winds!"
remember how i wrote in my earlier post on remembrance that you sometimes have to read his sentences three times, once straight through, once taking out all the modifying clauses and parentheticals to get the most important meaning and then once again straight through? the above is one of those sentences. this is how it appears in all its spaghetti complexity:
"how many women's lives, lives of which little enough is known (for we all live in different worlds according to our age, and the discretion of their elders prevents the young from forming any clear idea of the past and taking in the whole spectrum), have been divided thus into contrasting periods, the last being entirely devoted to the reconquest of what in the second has been so light-heartedly flung to the winds!"
DO YOU SEE WHAT I MEAN? isn't that hilarious?
all of the above, by the way, are culled from only 56 pages of chapter one, the guermantes way, of the second volume of the work. as i said, sentences like that are sprinkled throughout the book so you don't want to take a lap when you're reading.
i hope you also get a sense for how amazing the translation here by moncrieff and kilmartin is. when you can render a literary masterpiece in one language into another with this level of subltety and nuance that itself is masterly.
-benjamin harris
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