In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Author — Marcel ProustFinished — 2025-03-30
Started — 2025-01-27
I’ll forever treasure the ritual of gasping at a passage (usually encountered at the Katsushika Central Public Library while waiting for my kids to finish some activity in the neighborhood) pulling out my phone, capturing it with Apple’s OCR, then pasting it into Ulysses and into my iMessage thread with Sben, to kick off a little discussion about it.
This is also the first volume I intentionally read in multiple translations at once, depending on the situation: the Penguin Grieve when I had the library book handy, and the Yale Carter on the Kobo otherwise.
The dogs bark, the caravan moves on Arab proverb
Marcel is invited to tea by Gilberte It’s curious and foreign to me that Marcel never seems to doubt whether he’s worthy of the affections he craves He just craves ’em I would have been miserably stewing
Reading Proust in the ball pit
something that would last forever, like oil lamps and horse trolleys. But after the manner of kaleidoscopes, which are turned from time to time, society composes new designs by jumbling the order of elements that once seemed immutable.
I think I can see Grieve’s personality and style in this volume Especially his opinionatedness and, yes, his grievance Even against Proust’s own flaws In contrast I also sense a transparency, a nativeness? In Davis, retroactively Grieve makes me think about the work of writing and of translation, for better or for worse I can also sense the ghost of Moncrieff, even having not read him, as the personality who fully put his own artistry on the page, a bolder, unreverential stroke
In wit or delicacy of mind, these young Bergottes, the future writer and his brothers and sisters, were no doubt not the equals of other young people, who thought them very rowdy, and actually rather vulgar, with their irritating jokes, which were typical of the household’s partly pretentious, partly puerile style. But genius, or even great talent, lies less in elements of mind and social refinement superior to those of others than in the ability to transform and transpose them. To heat a liquid with a flashlight, what is required is not the strongest possible torch, but one in which the current can be diverted from the production of light and adapted to the production of heat. To fly through the air, it is not necessary to have the most powerful motorcar, but a motor which, by turning its earthbound horizontal line into a vertical, can convert its speed along the ground into ascent. Likewise, 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. It was when the young Bergotte became capable of showing to the world of his readers the tasteless drawing room where he had spent his childhood, and the rather unamusing exchanges it had witnessed between himself and his brothers, that he rose above his wittier and more distinguished family friends. They could be driven home in their fine Rolls-Royces, sneering a little at the Bergottes and their vulgarities. But he, with his much less impressive flying machine, had at last taken off and soared over their heads.
When Bergotte’s view on something differed in this way from my own, it never reduced me to silence, or deprived me of a possible rejoinder, as M. de Norpois’s opinion would have done. Not that Bergotte’s opinions were any less valid than the former ambassador’s. 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 judgment on a matter is in some measure the work of the two people who were in disagreement. But the ideas that leave no possibility of a rejoinder are those that are not properly speaking ideas, those that, by being supported by nothing, find nothing to attach to in the other’s mind: on the one side, no brotherly branch is held out, and on the other, there is nothing but a vacuum. The arguments advanced by M. de Norpois (on questions of art) were indisputable because they were devoid of reality.
In those days, in that part of Paris, which was seen as rather remote (indeed, the whole city was darker then than nowadays, none of the streets, even in the center of town, being lit by electricity, and very few of the houses), lamps glowing inside a drawing room on a ground floor or a mezzanine, which was where Mme Swann’s receiving rooms were, could light up the street and draw the glance of passersby, who saw in these illuminations a manifest but veiled relation to the handsome horses and carriages waiting outside the front doors. The passerby, seeing one of these carriages move off, might think, not without a certain thrill, that there had been a change in this mysterious relation; but it would only be because a coachman, fearing his horses might catch a chill, was taking them for a turn around the block, their hooves striking sharp and clear against the background of silence laid down by the rubber-rimmed wheels.
“Now the memories of love present no exception to the general laws of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general laws of Habit. And as Habit weakens everything, what best reminds us of a person is precisely what we had forgotten (because it was of no importance, and we had therefore left it in full possession of its strength). That is why the better part of our memory exists outside ourselves, in a damp breeze, in the odor of an unaired room or in the odor of the first crackling fire in a cold grate: wherever we find again of ourselves what our intellect, having no use for it, had disdained, the last reserve that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again. Outside ourselves? Rather within ourselves, but hidden from our own eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the person that we were, place ourselves face to face with past events as that person had to face them, suffer again because we are no longer ourselves but he, and because he loved what now leaves us indifferent. In the broad daylight of our habitual memory the images of the past gradually pale and fade out of sight, nothing remains of them, we will never recapture the past again. Or rather we would never recapture it again had not a few words (such as “secretary to the Ministry of Posts”) been carefully locked away in oblivion, just as is deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale a copy of a book that might otherwise become unobtainable.
the tyranny of the Particular as a counterpart to the Eternal in a scene describing the disillusionment of breaking open an eternal-seeming place-name to find the actual particular place
First mention of class conflict of any kind?
In the evenings, they never dined in the hotel, where the electric fountains gushed their light into the spacious dining room, turning it into an immense and wonderful aquarium, while, invisible in the outer shadows beyond the glass wall, the working classes of Balbec, the fishermen, and even middle-class families pressed against the windows, in an attempt to see the luxurious life of these denizens, glowing amid the golden sway of the eddies, all of it as weird and fascinating for the poor as the existence of strange fish and mollusks (but whether the glass barrier will go on protecting forever the feeding of the marvelous creatures, or whether the obscure onlookers gloating toward them from the outer dark will break into their aquarium and hook them for the pot, therein lies a great social question).
It was just three trees that I had noticed, set back a little from the steeply cambered road we were on, looking as though they stood at the entrance to a covered drive, and making a pattern that I knew I had seen somewhere before. I could not manage to recognize the place they had, as it were, been separated from; but I sensed that it must have been somewhere familiar to me, long ago; and as my mind stumbled about between a former year and the present moment, the countryside around Balbec shifted and faltered, and I had to ask myself whether this whole outing was not just some figment, Balbec merely a place where I might once have been in my imagination, Mme de Villeparisis someone out of a novel, and the three old trees nothing but the solid reality that meets the eye of a reader who glances up from a book, his mind still held by the spell of a fictional setting.
I sat there for a moment thinking of nothing; then, with the fresher impetus of pent-up consciousness, I managed to leap farther in the direction of the trees, or, rather, toward 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 carrage rolled on, 1 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 around 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 storybook 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 that 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 them-selves, like certain trees or clumps of grass glimpsed along the Guer-mantes way, a meaning that 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 could not tell. Still coming toward me, they might have been some mythological apparition, a coven of witches, a group of Norns propounding oracles. But I saw them as ghosts from my past, beloved companions from child-hood, 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 naive and passionate ges-ticulations, 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 that we brought for you will return forever to nothing.” And it is true that, though the same mode of pleasure and disquiet that I had just experienced once more was to come back to me in later years, though I did attend to it at last one evening—too late, but forever—I never did find out what it was these particular trees had attempted to convey to me, or where it was that I had once seen them. When the carriage went around 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.
Synopsis says: “Three trees near Hudimesnil: an unsolved mystery of memory.”
This book speaks to my soul like nothing else has
“Anyway—doesn’t matter.” One may hear this statement, which is analogous to a reflex, spoken by all who have a touch of self-esteem, in circumstances which can vary from the trivial to the tragic, and which reveals, as it did on the present occasion, how much the thing that is said not to matter does matter to the speaker; and in the tragic vein, the first thing to come to the lips of any man who takes a certain pride in himself, if his last hope has just been dashed by someone’s refusal to help him out, may well be the brave, forlorn words, “Oh well, it doesn’t matter, not to worry-I’ll think of something else,” the something else that is the alternative to what “doesn’t matter” being sometimes the last resort of suicide.
In later life, whenever I read historical texts that contained this name, a fine medallion of the Renaissance—some said a genuine antique—a name borne by some podestà or prince of the Church, which had always remained in the family, being handed on from descendant to descendant, from the chancellery of the Vatican right down to my friend’s uncle, I would experience the special pleasure savored by those who, in their inability to afford a collection of medals or to constitute a private gallery of art-works, cultivate instead a passion for old names (place-names, as documentary and picturesque as an out-of-date map or isometric projection, a tradesman’s sign, or a customary; and baptismal names, with their fine French final syllables, in which one still hears the ring of the longstanding mutilations that our ancestors, by speech defects, the intonation of some ethnic vulgarity, or mispronunciation, inflicted on Latin and Saxon words, in a way that later elevated them into the grammarians' noble statutes), repertoires of antique sonorities that enable them to enjoy private concerts, like those people who acquire a viola da gamba or viola d’amore so as to play ancient music on period instruments.
In a recluse, the most irrevocable, lifelong rejection of the world often has as its basis an uncontrolled passion for the crowd, of such force that, finding when he does go out that he cannot win the admiration of a concierge, passersby, or even the coachman halted at the comer, he prefers to spend his life out of their sight, and gives up all activities that would make it necessary for him to leave the house.
“First appearance of the little gang of girls” is vivid stuff, summoning the aesthetics of early manga encounters for me: Fujishima, Katsura, et al. Even GTO
If we believed that the eyes of such a girl were nothing but shiny little disks of mica, we would not be eager to enter her life and link it to our own. But we are well aware that whatever it is that shines in those reflective discs is not reducible to their material composition; that flitting about behind them are the black incognizable shadows of the ideas she forms about the people and places she knows—the paddocks at race-courses, the sandy paths along which she might have pedaled, drawing me after her, over hill and meadow, like a little Peri more seductive than the sprite from the Persian paradise—the dimness of the house into which she will disappear, her own impenetrable projects, and the designs of others upon her; and what we are most aware of is that she herself lies behind them, with her desires, her likes and dislikes, the power of her inscrutable and inexhaustible will. I knew I could never possess the young cyclist, unless I could also possess what lay behind her eyes. My desire for her was desire for her whole life: a desire that was full of pain, because I sensed it was unattainable, but also full of heady excitement, because what had been my life up to that moment had suddenly ceased to be all of life, had turned into a small corner of a great space opening up for me, which I longed to explore, and which was composed of the lives led by these young girls, because what was laid out now before my eyes was that extension and potential multiplication of self that we know as happiness. The fact that they and I shared nothing, no habit, no idea, was surely bound to make it more difficult for me to make their acquaintance and meet with their approval. But perhaps it was my very awareness of these differences between us, my knowledge that, in the nature of the girls as in their every action, there was not one iota of an element that was known to me or that I could have access to, which had replaced my satiety of life by a thirst, akin to that of a drought-stricken land, for a life which my soul, having gone forever without a single drop of it, would now absorb in great greedy drafts, letting it soak me to the roots.
Then the days grew shorter; and when I went to my room, the violet sky, which seemed to have been branded by the rigid, geometrical, fleeting, flashing iron of the sun (as though in representation of some miraculous sign or mystical apparition), hung down over the sea at the juncture of the horizon like a religious canvas above a high altar, while the different parts of the sunset, exhibited in the glass doors of the low mahogany bookcases running around the walls, and which I mentally compared to the marvelous painting from which they had been de-tached, were like the different scenes with which an old master once decorated a shrine for a religious house, now divided into separate panels, for display in a museum, where only the imagination of a visitor to the exhibition can reassemble them on the predellas of the altarpiece. Some weeks later, when I went up, the sun would have already set. Lying above the sea, there would be a band of red, as dense and fine-edged as a slab of aspic, similar to the red that striped the sky at Combray, above the wayside cross, on evenings when I was nearing home after a walk and intended to go down to the kitchen betore dinner; and before long, right on top of the water, which had the coldness and the color of the fish known as gray mullet, there would be another sky, of the same pink as one of the salmon we would soon order at Rivebelle; and these shades whetted my expectation of the pleasure of changing into evening clothes to go out to dine. Very close to the shore, trying to rise over the sea, in tiers that spread ever wider, its layers superimposed upon one an-other, there was a haze as black as soot, but also with the smooth sheen and consistency of agate, its highest parts, visibly top-heavy, beginning to tilt above their deformed support, leaning away from the center of gravity of those that had hitherto underpinned them, and seeming about to crumble and collapse into the sea, dragging down with them from halfway up the sky the whole precarious edifice. The sight of a ship leaving, like a night traveler, gave me the impression I had once had in the train, of being freed of the restrictions of sleeping and staying closed up in a room. Not that I felt hemmed in by this room, since within the hour I was going to walk out of it and go off in a carriage. I lay down on the bed; and, as though I were on a bunk aboard one of the boats I could see not far away, which after nightfall people might be surprised to see moving slowly through the darkness, like dim, silent swans that never sleep, I was surrounded on all sides by images of the sea.
Marcel looking around Balbec for the girls is like Sakura Taisen’s after-hours sections
The blinds being down on most sides, the studio was rather cool; and, except for one part where daylight’s fleeting decoration dazzled the wall, it was dim; the only window open was a small rectangle framed in honeysuckle, looking out on a strip of garden, then a road; so most of the studio was in half-darkness, transparent and compact in its mass, but moist and glistening at the angles where the light edged it, like a block of rock crystal with one of its sides already cut and polished in patches, so that it shines like a mirror and gives off an iridescent glow. While Elstir, at my request, went on with his painting, I wandered through this chiaroscuro, stopping here and there in front of a picture.
Almost all of the works I could see around me in the studio were, of course, seascapes done recently here in Balbec. But I could see that their charm lay in a kind of metamorphosis of the things depicted, analogous to the poetical device known as metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, Elstir re-created them by removing their names, or by giving them other names. The names of things always express a view of the mind, which is foreign to our genuine impressions of them, and which forces us to eliminate from them whatever does not correspond to that view.
“I was once told,” I said, recalling the conversation with Legrandin at Combray, and thinking it would be interesting to know Elstir’s view, “to stay away from Brittany. It was supposed to be bad for someone inclined to wistfulness.” “Not at all,” he replied. “When the soul of a man inclines to the wistful, he mustn’t be kept away from it, he mustn’t have it rationed. If you keep your mind off it, your mind will never know what’s in it. And you’ll be the plaything of all sorts of appearances, because you’ll never have managed to understand the nature of them. If a little wistfulness is a dangerous thing, what cures a man of it is not less of it, it’s more of it, it’s all of it! Whatever dreams one may have, it is important to have a thorough acquaintance with them, so as to have done with suffering from them. A certain divorce between dreaming and daily life is so often useful to us that I wonder whether one should not take the precaution of practicing it preventively, so to speak, in the way some surgeons recommend appendectomy for all children, so as to avoid the possibility of future appendicitis.”
Every day since I had first seen Albertine, I had entertained thousands of thoughts about her, I had carried on, with what I called “her,” an extended interior conversation, in which I had questions put to her and had her answer them, think, and act; and in the endless series of imagined Albertines who occupied my head one after another, for hours on end, the real Albertine, the one glimpsed down at the esplanade, was merely the forerunner, like an actress, the star who, having created a part, hands it over after the very first performances to others.
At the end of lunch, I was inclined now to stay on as the tables were being cleared; and if it was a moment at which the little gang of girls could not be expected to pass, my eyes looked on things other than the sea. Since seeing such things in the watercolors of Elstir, I enjoyed noticing them in reality, glimpses of poetry as they seemed: knives lying askew in halted gestures; the tent of a used napkin, within which the sun has secreted its yellow velvet; the half-emptied glass showing better the noble widening of its lines, the undrunk wine darkening it, but glinting with lights, inside the translucent glaze seemingly made from condensed daylight; volumes displaced, and liquids transmuted, by angles of illumination; the deterioration of the plums, green to blue, blue to gold, in the fruit dish already half plundered; the wandering of the old-fashioned chairs, which twice a day take their places again around the cloth draping the table as though it is an altar for the celebration of the sanctity of appetite, with a few drops of lustral water left in oyster shells like little stone fonts; I tried to find beauty where I had never thought it might be found, in the most ordinary things, in the profound life of “still life.” Kudos to the translator: Grieve. I’m excited to check this passage in the Carter too.
At the moment when Elstir suggested I go with him and be introduced to Albertine, who was sitting a little way away, I finished a coffee éclair and inquired with interest of an old gentleman, whom I had just met, and to whom I saw fit to offer the rose he had admired in my buttonhole, about certain agricultural shows in Normandy. This is not to say that the introduction that followed gave me no pleasure, or that it did not have a character of some gravity in my eyes. The pleasure, of course, I did not experience till a little later, back at the hotel, when, having been alone for a while, I was myself again. Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner darkroom, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.
for, at those moments in my life when I was not in love but wished I was, the ideal of physical beauty I carried about with me—which, as has been seen, I could recognize in a distant glimpse of any passing stranger who was far enough away for the imprecision of her features not to impede that recognition—was partnered by the emotional shadow, ever ready to be brought to real life, of the woman who was going to fall in love with me and step straight into the part already written for her in the comedy of fondness and passion that had been awaiting her since my childhood, and for which every young girl I met, as long as she had a pleasant disposition and some of the physical characteristics required by the role, appeared eager to be auditioned. In this play, whoever it was I cast as the new star or her understudy for this part of leading lady, the outline of the plot, the main scenes, and even the words to be spoken had long since taken the form of a definitive edition.
Elstir spoke even more lyrically about yachting events than about horseracing, which made me realize that for a modern artist regattas and gatherings of sportsmen, where women are suffused by the glaucous glow of a seaside racecourse, could be a study fully as captivating as the ceremonial celebrations that Veronese and Carpaccio so liked to depict. “Your comparison is especially apt,” Elstir said, “given that, in the city where they painted, those celebrations were partly nautical. Except that the beauty of the vessels of that period lay often in their cumbersomeness and intricacy. As is also done here at Balbec, they held jousting on the water, usually in honor of a visiting embassy, like the one Carpaccio shows in The Legend of Saint Ursula. The ships were massive, built like cathedrals, and they looked almost amphibious, like smaller Venices within the real one, when they were moored to landing stages, draped with crimson satins, and carpeted by Persian rugs, and carrying women in cherry-colored brocades or green damask, close to balconies inlaid with multicolored marble, where other women would lean out to get a good view, in gowns with black sleeves with white slashes in them thick with pearls or adorned with point lace. It was unclear where the land finished and the water began, what was still palace or possibly ship, a caravel, a galleass, the bucentaur.”