06.17.09

Marcel Proust: Swann’s Way

Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 6:06 am by Miracle ♪♫

“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past…”
from Sonnet XXX, by William Shakespeare

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“…and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.” Thus ended Swann’s Way. If a whispered and awe-inspired “wow” would suffice, that is all this entry would ever contain, but one must say more – and yet remain deficient in claiming how resplendent Marcel Proust’s words are.

Time, memory, and music, this triumvirate, course through Swann’s Way fluidly as if all three were one entity, and that is what draws me most into this first volume of Remembrance of Things Past / In Search of Lost Time / À la recherche du temps perdu, the pièce de résistance of Proust’s life. In harmony with Thomas Mann, he has astonishingly fused together with philosophy two loves of mine; music and literature. (However, Proust’s airy and ethereal touch even when dealing with dark, melancholy, or disappointing motifs is a stark contrast to Mann’s abysmal approach which can perhaps be compared to 20th century French and German classical music in general.) While I adore them equally and cannot favour one above the other, I have to suffer saying that if reading pleasure is concerned, Proust prevails.

I could not, it is true, lay down the novel of his which I was reading… Then I observed the rare, almost archaic expressions he liked to employ at certain moments, in which a hidden stream of harmony, an inner prelude, would heighten his style; and it was at such points as these, too, that he would begin to speak of the “vain dream of life,” of the “inexhaustible torrent of fair forms,” of the “sterile and exquisite torment of understanding and loving…” that he would express a whole system of philosophy, new to me, by the use of marvellous images that one felt must be the inspiration for the harp-song which then arose and to which they provided a sublime accompaniment. One of these passages… filled me with a joy… a joy that I felt I was experiencing in a deeper, vaster, more integral part of myself, from which all obstacles and partitions seemed to have been swept away. For what happened was that, while I recognized in this passage the same taste for uncommon phrases, the same musical outpouring, the same idealist philosophy which had been present in the earlier passages without my having recognised them as being the source of my pleasure…

And so I would read, or rather sing his sentences in my mind, with rather more dolce, rather more lento than he himself had perhaps intended, and his simplest phrase would strike my ears with something peculiarly gentle and loving in its intonation. These are Proust’s own words, the narrator’s sentiments towards Bergotte, his favourite author… and yet, it is precisely the same feelings that arise in me when reading Proust.  Had my senses remained muddled, I would have easily mistook his words for music.
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Related Entries:
Losing Time in Proust
Raveling Proust

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