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Marcel Proust
The novelist in 1900
Born	10 July 1871(1871-07-10) Auteuil, France
Died	18 November 1922 (aged 51) Paris, France
Occupation	Novelist, essayist, critic
Genres	modernism
Notable work(s)	In Search of Lost Time
Influences Pierre Loti, Saint-Simon, Brantôme, Balzac, Baudelaire, Anatole France, Henri Bergson, Dostoevsky, John Ruskin, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Stendhal, Shakespeare
Influenced John Banville, Samuel Beckett, Jean Cocteau, Graham Greene, Jack Kerouac, Naguib Mahfouz, Manuel Mujica Láinez, Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Nabokov, Orhan Pamuk, Truman Capote, John Updike,[1] Edmund White, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze.

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (French pronunciation: [maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past). It was published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927.

Biography

Proust was born in Auteuil (the southern sector of Paris's then-rustic 16th arrondissement) at the home of his great-uncle, two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian War. His birth took place during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood corresponds with the consolidation of the French Third Republic. Much of In Search of Lost Time concerns the vast changes, most particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle classes that occurred in France during the Third Republic and the fin de siècle.

Proust's father, Achille Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist and epidemiologist, responsible for studying and attempting to remedy the causes and movements of cholera through Europe and Asia; he was the author of many articles and books on medicine and hygiene. Proust's mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was the daughter of a rich and cultured Jewish family from Alsace ^[2]. She was literate and well-read; her letters demonstrate a well-developed sense of humour, and her command of English was sufficient for her to provide the necessary assistance to her son's later attempts to translate John Ruskin.^[3]

By the age of nine, Proust had his first serious asthma attack, and thereafter he was considered a sickly child. Proust spent long holidays in the village of Illiers. This village, combined with recollections of his great-uncle's house in Auteuil, became the model for the fictional town of Combray, where some of the most important scenes of In Search of Lost Time take place. (Illiers was renamed Illiers-Combray on the occasion of the Proust centenary celebrations.)

In 1882, at the age of eleven, Proust became a pupil at the Lycée Condorcet, but his education was disrupted because of his illness. Despite this he excelled in literature, receiving an award in his final year. It was through his classmates that he was able to gain access to some of the salons of the upper bourgeoisie, providing him with copious material for In Search of Lost Time ^[4].

Despite his poor health, Proust served a year (1889–90) as an enlisted man in the French army, stationed at Coligny Caserne in Orléans, an experience that provided a lengthy episode in The Guermantes' Way, part three of his novel. As a young man, Proust was a dilettante and a social climber whose aspirations as a writer were hampered by his lack of discipline. His reputation from this period, as a snob and an amateur, contributed to his later troubles with getting Swann's Way, the first part of his large-scale novel, published in 1913.

Proust had a close relationship with his mother. In order to appease his father, who insisted that he pursue a career, Proust obtained a volunteer position at the Bibliothèque Mazarine in the summer of 1896. After exerting considerable effort, he obtained a sick leave that extended for several years until he was considered to have resigned. He never worked at his job, and he did not move from his parents' apartment until after both were dead.^[3]

Grave of Marcel Proust at Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Proust, who was homosexual,^[5] was one of the first European novelists to treat homosexuality openly and at length.

His life and family circle changed considerably between 1900 and 1905. In February 1903, Proust's brother Robert married and left the family home. His father died in November of the same year ^[6]. Finally, and most crushingly, Proust's beloved mother died in September 1905. She left him a considerable inheritance. His health throughout this period continued to deteriorate.

Proust spent the last three years of his life mostly confined to his cork-lined bedroom, sleeping during the day and working at night to complete his novel. He died of pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess in 1922. He was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Early writing

Proust was involved in writing and publishing from an early age. In addition to the literary magazines with which he was associated, and in which he published, while at school, La Revue verte and La Revue lilas, from 1890–91 Proust published a regular society column in the journal Le Mensuel. ^[3] In 1892 he was involved in founding a literary review called Le Banquet (also the French title of Plato's Symposium), and throughout the next several years Proust published small pieces regularly in this journal and in the prestigious La Revue Blanche.

In 1896 Les Plaisirs et les Jours, a compendium of many of these early pieces, was published. The book included a foreword by Anatole France, drawings by Mme. Lemaire, and was so sumptuously produced that it cost twice the normal price of a book its size.

That year Proust also began working on a novel, which was eventually published in 1954 and titled Jean Santeuil by his posthumous editors. Many of the themes later developed in In Search of Lost Time find their first articulation in this unfinished work, including the enigma of memory and the necessity of reflection; several sections of In Search of Lost Time can be read in first draft in Jean Santeuil. The portrait of the parents in Jean Santeuil is quite harsh, in marked contrast to the adoration with which the parents are painted in Proust's masterpiece. Following the poor reception of Les Plaisirs et les Jours, and internal troubles with resolving the plot, Proust gradually abandoned Jean Santeuil in 1897 and stopped work on it entirely by 1899.

Beginning in 1895 Proust spent several years reading Carlyle, Emerson, and John Ruskin. Through this reading Proust began to refine his own theories of art and the role of the artist in society. Also, in Time Regained Proust's universal protagonist recalls having translated Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies. The artist's responsibility is to confront the appearance of nature, deduce its essence and retell or explain that essence in the work of art. Ruskin's view of artistic production was central to this conception, and Ruskin's work was so important to Proust that he claimed to know "by heart" several of Ruskin's books, including The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Bible of Amiens, and Praeterita.^[7]

Proust set out to translate two of Ruskin's works into French, but was hampered by an imperfect command of English. In order to compensate for this he made his translations a group affair: sketched out by his mother, the drafts were first revised by Proust, then by Marie Nordlinger, the English cousin of his friend and sometime lover Reynaldo Hahn, then again finally polished by Proust. Confronted about his method by an editor, Proust responded, "I don't claim to know English; I claim to know Ruskin".^[8] The Bible of Amiens, with Proust's extended introduction, was published in French in 1904. Both the translation and the introduction were very well reviewed; Henri Bergson called Proust's introduction "an important contribution to the psychology of Ruskin" and had similar praise for the translation.^[3] At the time of this publication, Proust was already at work on translating Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, which he completed in June 1905, just prior to his mother's death, and published in 1906. Literary historians and critics have ascertained that, apart from Ruskin, Proust's chief literary influences included Saint-Simon, Montaigne, Stendhal, Flaubert, George Eliot, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy.

1908 was an important year for Proust's development as a writer. During the first part of the year he published in various journals pastiches of other writers. These exercises in imitation may have allowed Proust to solidify his own style. In addition, in the spring and summer of the year Proust began work on several different fragments of writing that would later coalesce under the working title of Contre Saint-Beuve. Proust described what he was working on in a letter to a friend: "I have in progress: a study on the nobility, a Parisian novel, an essay on Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert, an essay on women, an essay on pederasty (not easy to publish), a study on stained-glass windows, a study on tombstones, a study on the novel".^[3]

Robert de Montesquiou, the inspiration for Baron de Charlus in À la recherche du temps perdu

From these disparate fragments Proust began to shape a novel on which he worked continually during this period. The rough outline of the work centered on a first-person narrator, unable to sleep, who during the night remembers waiting as a child for his mother to come to him in the morning. The novel was to have ended with a critical examination of Sainte-Beuve and a refutation of his theory that biography was the most important tool for understanding an artist's work. Present in the unfinished manuscript notebooks are many elements that correspond to parts of the Recherche, in particular, to the "Combray" and "Swann in Love" sections of Volume 1, and to the final section of Volume 7. Trouble with finding a publisher, as well as a gradually changing conception of his novel, led Proust to shift work to a substantially different project that still contained many of the same themes and elements. By 1910 he was at work on À la recherche du temps perdu.

In Search of Lost Time

Begun in 1909, À la recherche du temps perdu consists of seven volumes totalling around 3,200 pages (about 4,300 in The Modern Library's translation) and featuring more than 2,000 characters. Graham Greene called Proust the "greatest novelist of the 20th century", and W. Somerset Maugham called the novel the "greatest fiction to date." Proust died before he was able to complete his revision of the drafts and proofs of the final volumes, the last three of which were published posthumously and edited by his brother, Robert.

The book was translated into English by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, appearing as Remembrance of Things Past between 1922 and 1931. Scott Moncrieff translated volumes one through six of the seven volumes, dying before completing the last. This last volume was rendered by other translators at different times. When Scott Moncrieff's translation was later revised (first by Kilmartin, then by Enright) the title of the novel was changed, to the more literal In Search of Lost Time.

In 1995, Penguin undertook a fresh translation of the book by editor Christopher Prendergast and seven translators in three countries, based on the latest, most complete and authoritative French text. Its six volumes (comprising Proust's seven) were published in Britain under the Allen Lane imprint in 2002. The first four (those which under American copyright law are in the public domain) have since been published in the U.S. under the Viking imprint and in paperback under the Penguin Classics imprint.

Bibliography

• 1896 Les plaisirs et les jours ("Pleasures and Days")
• 1904 La Bible D'Amiens; a translation of John Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens
• 1906 Sésame et les lys; a translation of Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies
• 1913–27 À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, also Remembrance of Things Past)

Vol.	French titles	Published	English titles
1	Du côté de chez Swann	1913	Swann's Way The Way by Swann's
2	À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs	1919	Within a Budding Grove In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
3	Le Côté de Guermantes (published in two volumes)	1920/21	The Guermantes Way
4	Sodome et Gomorrhe (published in two volumes)	1921/22	Cities of the Plain Sodom and Gomorrah
5	La Prisonnière	1923	The Captive The Prisoner
6	La Fugitive Albertine disparue	1925	The Fugitive The Sweet Cheat Gone Albertine Gone
7	Le Temps retrouvé	1927	The Past Recaptured Time Regained Finding Time Again Remembrance of Things Past

• 1919 Pastiches et mélanges ("Pastiches and mixtures"); English trans. of Pastiches portion: "The Lemoine Affair," trans. Charlotte Mandell
• 1954 Contre Sainte-Beuve ("Against Sainte-Beuve")
• 1954 Jean Santeuil (unfinished)

See also

• Involuntary memory
• "Proust", an essay by Samuel Beckett
• Proust Questionnaire

References

• Adorno, Theodor (1967) "Prisms." The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.
• Aciman, André (2004) The Proust Project. New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Albaret, Céleste (Barbara Bray, trans.) (2003) Monsieur Proust. The New York Review of Books
• Alexander, Patrick (2009) 'Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time.' Vintage Books, New York, ISBN 978-0-307-47232-8
• Bernard, Anne-Marie (2002) The World of Proust, as seen by Paul Nadar. Cambridge: MIT Press
• Carter, William C. (2000) Marcel Proust: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press
• Davenport-Hines, Richard (2006) A Night at the Majestic. Faber and Faber ISBN 9780571220090
• De Botton, Alain (1998) How Proust Can Change Your Life. New York: Vintage Books
• Deleuze, Gilles (2004) Proust and Signs: The Complete Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
• Painter, George D (1959) Marcel Proust A Biography Vols. 1 & 2. London: Chatto & Windus
• Shattuck, Roger (1963) Proust's Binoculars: A Study of Memory, Time, and Recognition in À la recherche du temps perdu. New York: Random House
• Shattuck, Roger (2000) Proust's Way: A Field Guide To In Search of Lost Time, W. W. Norton
• Tadié, Jean-Yves: Marcel Proust: A Life. Viking, New York, 2000
• White, Edmund (1998) Marcel Proust. New York: Viking Books

External links

• Proust's In Search of Lost Time
• The Kolb-Proust Archive for Research
• Marcel Proust, a personal site in Italian
• Essay by Stephan Reimertz on Proust in Germany (in French)
• Works by Marcel Proust in English, at Project Gutenberg Australia
• Proust and Deleuze (Madrid)
• An ongoing project since November 16, 2009 to re-write all seven volumes in a series of daily tweets
• Why Proust? And Why Now? — an essay on the lasting relevance of Proust and his work
• Reading Proust — A reader enjoys new translations of In Search of Lost Time.
• TempsPerdu.com — links including to online texts of Lost Time in French and English
• Marcel Proust's Album Proust receives a tribute in this album of "recomposed photographs"
• Proust lu sur Internet : Le Baiser de la Matrice Web-film of the reading of "In Search of Lost Time" online, in French, by 4000 websurfers

Online texts

• [1] Christopher Hitchens on Proust translations
• Alarecherchedutempsperdu.com: french and english text
• Works by Marcel Proust (public domain in Canada)
• Works by Marcel Proust at Project Gutenberg French text of volumes 1-4 and Swann's Way in English translation
• University of Adelaide Library French text of volumes 1-4 and the complete novel in English translation

From Wikiquote

Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

Valentin-Louis-Georges-Eugène-Marcel Proust (1871-07-10 – 1922-11-18) was a French novelist, essayist and critic.

Sourced

• A sort of egotistical self-evaluation is unavoidable in those joys in which erudition and art mingle and in which aesthetic pleasure may become more acute, but not remain as pure.
  • Preface (1910) to The Bible of Amiens by John Ruskin, translated by Proust (1904); from Marcel Proust: On Reading Ruskin, trans. Jean Autret and Philip J. Wolfe (Yale University Press, 1987, ISBN 0-300-04503-4), p. 53

• I shall not find a painting more beautiful because the artist has painted a hawthorn in the foreground, though I know of nothing more beautiful than the hawthorn, for I wish to remain sincere and because I know that the beauty of a painting does not depend on the things represented in it. I shall not collect images of hawthorn. I do not venerate hawthorn, I go to see and smell it.
  • Preface (1910) to The Bible of Amiens by John Ruskin, translated by Proust (1904); from Marcel Proust: On Reading Ruskin, trans. Jean Autret and Philip J. Wolfe (Yale University Press, 1987, ISBN 0-300-04503-4), p. 57

• A man is not more entitled to be "received in good society," or at least to wish to be, because he is more intelligent and cultivated. This is one of those sophisms that the vanity of intelligent people picks up in the arsenal of their intelligence to justify their basest inclinations. In other words, having become more intelligent creates some rights to be less. Very simply, diverse personalities are to be found in the breast of each of us, and often the life of more than one superior man is nothing but the coexistence of a philosopher and a snob. Actually, there are very few philosophers and artists who are absolutely detached from ambition and respect for power, from "people of position." And among those who are more delicate or more sated, snobism replaces ambition and respect for power in the same way superstition arises on the ruins of religious beliefs. Morality gains nothing there. Between a worldly philosopher and a philosopher intimidated by a minister of state, the second is still the more innocent.
  • Notes to Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin, translated by Proust (1906); from Marcel Proust: On Reading Ruskin, trans. Jean Autret and William Burford (Yale University Press, 1987, ISBN 0-300-04503-4), p. 152

• A homosexual is not someone who likes other homosexuals, but someone who on seeing a soldier immediately wants him for a friend

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2006/05/06/metrodaddys-inside-story-on-the-us-armys-gay-porn-scandal/

In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927)

À la recherche du temps perdu. Alternative translation of title: Remembrance of Things Past. The first six volumes were translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff from 1922 to 1930, with a revised translation by Terence Kilmartin in 1981 and a further revision by D.J Enright in 1992. The seventh and final volume was translated by Frederick Blossom and published in 1932.

Vol I: Swann's Way (1913)

Du côté de chez Swann

• Même au point de vue des plus insignifiantes choses de la vie, nous ne sommes pas un tout matériellement constitué, identique pour tout le monde et dont chacun n'a qu'à aller prendre connaissance comme d'un cahier des charges ou d'un testament; notre personnalité sociale est une création de la pensée des autres.
  • Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.
  • "Overture"

• Mais, quand d’un passé ancien rien ne subsiste, après la mort des êtres, après la destruction des choses, seules, plus frêles mais plus vivaces, plus immatérielles, plus persistantes, plus fidèles, l’odeur et la saveur restent encore longtemps, comme des âmes, à se rappeler, à attendre, à espérer, sur la ruine de tout le reste, à porter sans fléchir, sur leur gouttelette presque impalpable, l’édifice immense du souvenir.

  Et dès que j’eus reconnu le goût du morceau de madeleine trempé dans le tilleul que me donnait ma tante (quoique je ne susse pas encore et dusse remettre à bien plus tard de découvrir pourquoi ce souvenir me rendait si heureux), aussitôt la vieille maison grise sur la rue, où était sa chambre, vint comme un décor de théâtre.

  • When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

    And once again I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy), immediately the old gray house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater.

  • "Overture"

• À partir de cet instant, je n’avais plus un seul pas à faire, le sol marchait pour moi dans ce jardin où depuis si longtemps mes actes avaient cessé d’être accompagnés d’attention volontaire: l’Habitude venait de me prendre dans ses bras et me portait jusqu’à mon lit comme un petit enfant.
  • From that instant I had not to take another step; the ground moved forward under my feet in that garden where, for so long, my actions had ceased to require any control, or even attention, from my will. Custom came to take me in her arms, carried me all the way up to my bed, and laid me down there like a little child.
  • "Combray"

• Autrefois on rêvait de posséder le cœur de la femme dont on était amoureux; plus tard sentir qu’on possède le cœur d’une femme peut suffire à vous en rendre amoureux.
  • In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.
  • "Swann in Love"

Vol III: Within a Budding Grove (1919)

À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs

• Et non seulement on ne retient pas tout de suite les œuvres vraiment rares, mais même au sein de chacune de ces œuvres-là, et cela m'arriva pour la Sonate de Vinteuil, ce sont les parties les moins précieuses qu'on perçoit d'abord... Moins décevants que la vie, ces grands chefs-d'œuvre ne commencent pas par nous donner ce qu'ils ont de meilleur.
  • And not only does one not seize at once and retain an impression of works that are really great, but even in the content of any such work (as befell me in the case of Vinteuil’s sonata) it is the least valuable parts that one at first perceives... Less disappointing than life is, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.
  • Ch. I: "Madame Swann at Home"

• Ce qu'on appelle la postérité, c'est la postérité de l'œuvre.
  • What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.
  • Ch. I: "Madame Swann at Home"

• Le temps dont nous disposons chaque jour est élastique; les passions que nous ressentons le dilatent, celles que nous inspirons le rétrécissent et l'habitude le remplit.
  • The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.
  • Ch. I: "Madame Swann at Home"

• On ne reçoit pas la sagesse, il faut la découvrir soi-même après un trajet que personne ne peut faire pour nous, ne peut nous épargner.
  • We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us.
  • Ch. IV: "Seascape, with a Frieze of Girls"

Vol. IV: Cities of the Plain (1921-1922)

Sodome et Gomorrhe

• Comme tous les gens qui ne sont pas amoureux, il s'imaginait qu'on choisit la personne qu'on aime après mille délibérations et d'après des qualités et convenances diverses.
  • Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless deliberations and on the strength of various qualities and advantages.
  • Pt. II, Ch. 1

• Nous désirons passionnément qu'il y ait une autre vie où nous serions pareils à ce que nous sommes ici-bas. Mais nous ne réfléchissons pas que, même sans attendre cette autre vie, dans celle-ci, au bout de quelques années, nous sommes infidèles à ce que nous avons été, à ce que nous voulions rester immortellement.
  • We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally.
  • Pt. II, Ch. 2

Vol. V: The Captive (1923)

La Prisonnière

• Le seul véritable voyage, le seul bain de Jouvence, ce ne serait pas d'aller vers de nouveaux paysages, mais d'avoir d'autres yeux, de voir l'univers avec les yeux d'un autre, de cent autres, de voir les cent univers que chacun d'eux voit, que chacun d'eux est.
  • The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.
  • Ch. II: "The Verdurins Quarrel with M. de Charlus"

Vol. VI: The Sweet Cheat Gone (1925)

Albertine disparue. Also known as La fugitive

• Les liens entre un être et nous n'existent que dans notre pensée. La mémoire en s'affaiblissant les relâche, et, malgré l'illusion dont nous voudrions être dupes et dont, par amour, par amitié, par politesse, par respect humain, par devoir, nous dupons les autres, nous existons seuls. L'homme est l'être qui ne peut sortir de soi, qui ne connaît les autres qu'en soi, et, en disant le contraire, ment.
  • The bonds that unite another person to ourself exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.
  • Ch. I: "Grief and Oblivion"

• Nous n'arrivons pas à changer les choses selon notre désir, mais peu à peu notre désir change. La situation que nous espérions changer parce qu'elle nous était insupportable, nous devient indifférente. Nous n'avons pas pu surmonter l'obstacle, comme nous le voulions absolument, mais la vie nous l'a fait tourner, dépasser, et c'est à peine alors si en nous retournant vers le lointain du passé nous pouvons l'apercevoir, tant il est devenu imperceptible.
  • We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.
  • Ch. I: "Grief and Oblivion"

• Une femme est d'une plus grande utilité pour notre vie si elle y est, au lieu d'un élément de bonheur, un instrument de chagrin, et il n'y en a pas une seule dont la possession soit aussi précieuse que celle des vérités qu'elle nous découvre en nous faisant souffrir.
  • A woman is of greater service to our life if she is in it, instead of being an element of happiness, an instrument of sorrow, and there is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.
  • Ch. I: "Grief and Oblivion"

• On ne guérit d'une souffrance qu'à condition de l'éprouver pleinement.
  • We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
  • Ch. I: "Grief and Oblivion"

• Aussi, les demeures disposées des deux côtés du chenal faisaient penser à des sites de la nature, mais d'une nature qui aurait créé ses œvres avec une imagination humaine.
  • In this way, the mansions arranged along either bank of the canal made one think of objects of nature, but of a nature which seemed to have created its works with a human imagination.
  • Ch. III: Venise

Vol. VII: The Past Recaptured (1927)

Le temps retrouvé

• Par l’art seulement, nous pouvons sortir de nous, savoir ce que voit un autre de cet univers qui n’est pas le même que le nôtre et dont les paysages nous seraient restés aussi inconnus que ceux qu’il peut y avoir dans la lune. Grâce à l’art, au lieu de voir un seul monde, le nôtre, nous le voyons se multiplier, et autant qu’il y a d’artistes originaux, autant nous avons de mondes à notre disposition, plus différents les uns des autres que ceux qui roulent dans l’infini et qui, bien des siècles après qu’est éteint le foyer dont il émanait, qu’il s’appelât Rembrandt ou Vermeer, nous envoient encore leur rayon spécial.

  Ce travail de l’artiste, de chercher à apercevoir sous la matière, sous de l’expérience, sous des mots, quelque chose de différent, c’est exactement le travail inverse de celui que, à chaque minute, quand nous vivons détourné de nous-même, l’amour-propre, la passion, l’intelligence, et l’habitude aussi accomplissent en nous, quand elles amassent au-dessus de nos impressions vraies, pour nous les cacher entièrement, les nomenclatures, les buts pratiques que nous appelons faussement la vie.

  • By art alone we are able to get outside ourselves, to know what another sees of this universe which for him is not ours, the landscapes of which would remain as unknown to us as those of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our disposal, differing more widely from each other than those which roll round the infinite and which, whether their name be Rembrandt or Ver Meer, send us their unique rays many centuries after the hearth from which they emanate is extinguished.

    This labour of the artist to discover a means of apprehending beneath matter and experience, beneath words, something different from their appearance, is of an exactly contrary nature to the operation in which pride, passion, intelligence and habit are constantly engaged within us when we spend our lives without self-communion, accumulating as though to hide our true impressions, the terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life.

  • Ch. III: "An Afternoon Party at the House of the Princesse de Guermantes"

• Le bonheur est salutaire pour le corps, mais c'est le chagrin qui développe les forces de l'esprit.
  • Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
  • Ch. III: "An Afternoon Party at the House of the Princesse de Guermantes"

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

Marcel Proust

• Wikisource in French: Volumes I-V and VII of In Search of Lost Time
• Vol. VI of In Search of Lost Time (French)
• Works by Marcel Proust at Project Gutenberg
• University of Adelaide Library: Volumes I-IV of In Search of Lost Time in French and Volumes I-VII in English