07.07.09

Within a Budding Grove

Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 1:58 am by Miracle ♪♫

First, the highlighted passages:

• “In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can rest assured. So it is with Time in one’s life.”

• “What brings men together is not a community of views but a consanguinity of minds.”

• “All that I grasped was that to repeat what everybody else was thinking was, in politics, the mark not of an inferior but of a superior mind.”

• “Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.”

• “…in the state of mind in which we “observe” we are a long way below the level to which we rise when we create.”

• “But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth’s surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves…”

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After abundant intermissions and distracting emotional caprices, I finally finished the second volume of À la recherche du temps perdu.

Within a Budding Grove or In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower earned Marcel Proust the Prix Goncourt in 1919 and though it is a tome that can prevail without having to lean on the other volumes, it makes a staggering sequel to Swann’s Way.

Truth be told, I was slightly disoriented as our narrator meticulously described coming of age in a society I could hardly relate with. Yet there was the timeless keynote of growing up, and that, I could identify with. Within a Budding Grove chronicles the narrator’s recollections as an adolescent in the seaside resort of Balbec where he meets titillating characters who open his eyes to the adult realm of politics, art, philosophy, and love. I could have blamed my lack of focus or its seven hundred and forty ornate pages for the perplexity I felt at times while reading, until I comprehended that my sentiments only reflected what this book is mainly about – that perplexing stage in our lives called adolescence, retold in a most masterful manner.

“…we were still at an age when enthusiasm cannot keep silence, and had been transported into a life where anonymity is suffocating…”

“My intelligence might have told me the opposite. But the characteristic feature of the ridiculous age I was going through – awkward indeed but by no means infertile – is that we do not consult our intelligence… In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we know little peace of mind. There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer posses the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything. “

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I would compare reading Swann’s Way to witnessing pastel-coloured fireworks while in Monet’s garden, and cross one of those bridges to Withing a Budding Grove, then come to an atmosphere brushed by Renoir, and on to a place with Manet-like shades… where the strokes remain beautiful, and where the pastel-coloured explosions and imaginations of childhood fade away and are gradually replaced by deeper colours. Swann’s Way enlivens the senses, Withing a Budding Grove arouses the mind.

I have left the budding grove at last, but I take it with me.

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