Proust

Symptom no. 2:
That we are unable to write after reading a good book

This may seem a narrowly professional consideration, but it has wider relevance if one imagines that a good book might also stop us from thinking ourselves, because it would strike us as so perfect, as so inherently superior to anything our own minds could come up with. In short, a good book might silence us.

Reading Proust nearly silenced Virginia Woolf. She loved his novel, but loved it rather too much. There wasn't enough wrong with it—a crushing recognition when one considers Walter Benjamin's assessment of why people become writers: because they are unable to find a book already written that they are completely happy with. And the difficulty for Virginia was that, for a time at least, she thought she had found one.

Marcel and Virginia

A short story

Virginia Woolf first mentioned Proust in a letter she wrote to Roger Fry in the autumn of 1919. He was in France, she was in Richmond, where the weather was foggy and the garden in bad shape, and she casually asked him whether he might bring her back a copy of Swann's Way on his return.

It was 1922 before she next mentioned Proust. She had turned forty and, despite the entreaty to Fry, still hadn't read anything of Proust's work, though in a letter to E. M. Forster, she revealed that others in the vicinity "were being more diligent. "Everyone is reading Proust. I sit silent and hear their reports. It seems to be a tremendous experience," she explained, though appeared to be procrastinating out of a fear of being overwhelmed by something in the novel, an object she referred to more as if it were a swamp than hundreds of bits of paper stuck together -with thread and glue: "I'm shivering on the brink, and waiting to be submerged with a horrid sort of notion that I shall go down and down and down and perhaps never come up again."

She took the plunge nevertheless, and the problems started. As she told Roger Fry: "Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation that he procures—there's something sexual in it—that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can't write like that."

In what sounded like a celebration of In Search of Lost Time, but was in fact a far darker verdict on her future as a writer, she told Fry: "My great adventure is really Proust. Well—what remains to be written after that? . . . How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped—and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp."

In spite of the gasping, Woolf realized that Mrs. Dalloway still remained to be written, after which she allowed herself a brief burst of elation at the thought that she might have produced some-thing decent. "I wonder if this time I have achieved something?" she asked herself in her diary, but the pleasure was short-lived: "Well, nothing anyhow compared with Proust, in whom I am embedded now. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom. And he will I suppose both influence me and make me out of temper with every sentence of my own."

...

However, any bad mood she was in was liable to take a dramatic plunge for the worse after the briefest contact with the Frenchman. The diary entry continued: "Take up Proust after dinner and put him down. This is the worst time of all. It makes me suicidal. Nothing seems left to do. All seems insipid and worthless."

Nevertheless, she didn't yet commit suicide, though did take the wise step of ceasing to read Proust, and was therefore able to write a few more books whose sentences were neither insipid nor worthless. Then, in 1934, when she was working on The Years, there was a sign that she had at last freed herself from Proust's shadow. She told Ethel Smyth that she had picked up In Search of Lost Time again, "which is of course so magnificent that I can't write myself within its arc. For years I've put off finishing it; but now, thinking I may die one of these years, I've returned, and let my own scribble do what it likes. Lord what a hopeless bad book mine will be!"

The tone suggests that Woolf had at last made her peace with Proust. He could have his terrain, she had hers to scribble in. The path from depression and self-loathing to cheerful defiance suggested a gradual recognition that one person's achievements did not have to invalidate another's, that there would always be something left to do even if it momentarily appeared otherwise. Proust might have expressed many things well, but independent thought and the history of the novel had not come to a halt with him. His book did not have to be followed by silence; there was still space for the scribbling of others, for Mrs. Dalloway, The Common Reader, A Room of One's Own, and in particular, there was space for what these books symbolized in this context—perceptions of one's own.

How Proust Can Change Your Life Alain de Botton 1997 Pantheon

It was impossible for me to thank my father; what he called my sentimentality would have exasperated him. I stood there, not daring to move; he was still confronting us, an immense figure in his white nightshirt, crowned with the pink and violet scarf of Indian cashmere in which, since he had begun to suffer from neuralgia, he used to tie up his head, standing like Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli which M. Swann had given me, telling Sarah that she must tear herself away from Isaac. Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension. It is a long time, too, since my father has been able to tell Mamma to “Go with the child.” Never again will such hours be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father’s presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. Actually, their echo has never ceased: it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them afresh, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the streets that one would suppose them to have been stopped for ever, until they sound out again through the silent evening air.

Du côté de chez Swann by Marcel Proust 1913, translated as Swann's Way by C. K. Scott Moncrieff 1922.

If the weather was fair Marcel would take walks with his family Sunday after church.  From aunt Léonie's house in Combray they would take one of two directions, the shorter one they called "Swann's way" or the one following the river Vivonne, the Guermantes way.

Presently the course of the Vivonne became choked with water-plants.

At first they appeared singly, a lily, for instance, which the current, across whose path it had unfortunately grown, would never leave at rest for a moment, so that, like a ferry-boat mechanically propelled, it would drift over to one bank only to return to the other, eternally repeating its double journey.

Thrust towards the bank, its stalk would be straightened out, lengthened, strained almost to breaking-point until the current again caught it, its green moorings swung back over their anchorage and brought the unhappy plant to what might fitly be called its starting-point, since it was fated not to rest there a moment before moving off once again.

I would still find it there, on one walk after another, always in the same helpless state, suggesting certain victims of neurasthenia, among whom my grandfather would have included my aunt Léonie, who present without modification, year after year, the spectacle of their odd and unaccountable habits, which they always imagine themselves to be on the point of shaking off, but which they always retain to the end; caught in the treadmill of their own maladies and eccentricities, their futile endeavours to escape serve only to actuate its mechanism, to keep in motion the clockwork of their strange, ineluctable, fatal daily round.

Such as these was the water-lily, and also like one of those wretches whose peculiar torments, repeated indefinitely throughout eternity, aroused the curiosity of Dante, who would have inquired of them at greater length and in fuller detail from the victims themselves, had not Virgil, striding on ahead, obliged him to hasten after him at full speed, as I must hasten after my parents.

Du côté de chez Swann by Marcel Proust 1913, translated as Swann's Way by C. K. Scott Moncrieff 1922.

To understand Nabokov in his published lectures on Proust, delivered to students he taught at Cornell University from 1948 to 1958, I had to  better understand metaphor which provided a detour from my readings of The Search for Lost Time that took me through some of Shakespeare's figures of speech and 19th century studies of them.  I would venture that more has been written about Shakespeare than any other English author; but current thinking on metaphor, and even on Shakespeare, lacks, as judged by what Amazon.com offers in print.  Many important views of Elizabethan rhetoric are in books whose copyrights have long expired and now reside in the public domain.

History is forgotten as there is not much profit in it; you find yourself, before a monitor, in the archives of Project Gutenberg, which specializes in the past, spending nothing but time.

Note: If I can find Macbeth, read rather than dramatised, on Audible.com I will buy it, and Hamlet too.  Let me experience the emotion from Shakespeare's words first-hand and not have it performed or translated for me by actors of different understandings.

Oh, and by the way, I still have sheep; they finance my literary avocations for which I am grateful.

A pregnant servant maid is momentarily featured and compared to an allegorical figure in a Giotto picture, just as Mme. de Guermantes appeared in a church tapestry. It is noteworthy that throughout the whole work either the narrator or Swann often sees the physical appearance of this or that character in terms of paintings by famous old masters, many of them of the Florentine School. There is one main reason behind this method, and a secondary reason.

The main reason is of course that for Proust art was the essential reality of life. The other reason is of a more private kind: in describing young men he disguised his keen appreciation of male beauty under the masks of recognizable paintings; and in describing young females he disguised under the same masks of paintings his sexual indifference to women and his inability to describe their charm.

Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov 1980

From Proust Reader by Jim Everett, August 14, 2011

But perhaps to hear music this intensely requires an altered state of mind. Swann’s barren life had eroded his ability to feel deeply. The little phrase changed that and Proust created some of his most startling metaphors to describe Swann’s new musical faculty.

There was a deep repose, a mysterious refreshment for Swann–whose eyes, although delicate interpreters of painting, whose mind, although an acute observer of manners, must bear for ever the indelible imprint of the barrenness of his life–in feeling himself transformed into a creature estranged from humanity, blinded, deprived of his logical faculty, almost a fantastic unicorn, a chimeaera-like creature conscious of the world through his hearing alone. And since he sought in the little phrase for a meaning to which his intelligence could not descend, with what a strange frenzy of intoxication did he strip bare his innermost soul of the whole armour of reason and make it pass unattended through the dark filter of sound! (I, 336-337)

As though the musicians were not nearly so much playing the little phrase as performing the rites on which it insisted before it would consent to appear, and proceeding to utter the incantations necessary to procure, and to prolong for a few moments, the miracle of its apparition, Swann, who was no more able to see it than if it had belonged to a world of ultra-violet light, and who experienced something like the refreshing sense of a metamorphosis in the momentary blindness with which he was struck as he approached it, Swann felt its presence like that of a protective goddess, a confidante of his love, who, in order to be able to come to him through the crowd and to draw him aside to speak to him, had disguised herself in this sweeping cloak of sound. And as she passed, light, soothing, murmurous as the perfume of a flower, telling him what she had to say, every word of which he closely scanned, regretful to see them fly away so fast, he made involuntarily with his lips the motion of kissing, as it went by him, the harmonious, fleeting form. (I, 494)

Swann's Way Volume I; In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, translated by Moncrieff and Kilmartin, revised by Enright. The Modern Library Edition.

Botticelli "The Trials of Moses" Detail of Zepporah (1481-82) Sistine Chapel

As she (Odette) stood there beside him, brushing his cheek with the loosened tresses of her hair, bending one knee in what was almost a dancer’s pose, so that she could lean without tiring herself over the picture, at which she was gazing, with bended head, out of those great eyes, which seemed so weary and so sullen when there was nothing to animate her, Swann was struck by her resemblance to the figure of Zipporah, Jethro’s Daughter, which is to be seen in one of the Sixtine frescoes.

Du côté de chez Swann by Marcel Proust 1913 translated as Swann's Way by C. K. Scott Moncrieff 1922

Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov 1980, pps 212-215.

Style, I remind you, is the manner of an author, the particular manner that sets him apart from any other author. ...

The style of Proust contains three especially distinctive elements:

1. A wealth of metaphorical imagery, layer upon layer of comparisons. It is through this prism that we view the beauty of Proust's work. For Proust the term metaphor is often used in a loose sense, as a synonym for the hybrid form*, or for comparison in general, because for him the simile constantly grades into the metaphor, and vice versa, with the metaphorical moment predominating.

2. A tendency to fill in and stretch out a sentence to its utmost breadth and length, to cram the sentence with a miraculous number of clauses, parenthetic phrases, subordinate clauses, sub-subordinate clauses.

3. With older novelists there used to be a very definite distinction between the descriptive passage and the dialogue part: a passage of descriptive matter and then the conversation taking over, and so on. But Proust's conversations and his descriptions merge into one another, creating a new unity where flower and leaf and insect belong to one and the same blossoming tree. ...

My mother did not appear, but with no attempt to safeguard my self-respect (which depended upon her keeping up the fiction that she had asked me to let her know the result of my search for something or other) made Francoise tell me, in so many words 'There is no answer'—words I have so often, since then, heard the janitors of public dancing-halls and the flunkeys in gambling-clubs and the like, repeat to some poor girl, who replies in bewilderment: 'What! he's said nothing? It's not possible. You did give him my letter, didn't you? Very well, I shall wait a little longer.' And just as she invariably protests that she does not need the extra gas which the janitor offers to light for her, and sits on there ... so, having declined Francoise's offer to make me some tisane or to stay beside me, I let her go off again to the servants' hall, and lay down and shut my eyes, and tried not to hear the voices of my family who were drinking their after-dinner coffee in the garden.

This episode (from Swann's Way) is followed by a description of the moonlight and silence which perfectly illustrates Proust's working of metaphors within metaphors.

The boy opens his window and sits on the foot of his bed, hardly daring to move lest he be heard by those below. (1) "Things outside seemed also fixed in mute expectation." (2) They seemed not to wish "to disturb the moonlight." (3) Now what was the moonlight doing? The moonlight duplicated every object and seemed to push it back owing to the forward extension of a shadow. What kind of a shadow? A shadow that seemed "denser and more concrete than the object" itself. (4) By doing all this the moonlight "made the whole landscape at once leaner and larger like [additional simile] a map which is unfolded and spread out" flat. (5) There was some movement: "What had to move—the leafage of some chestnut-tree, for instance—moved. But its punctilious shiver [what kind of shiver?] complete, finished to the least shade, to the least delicate detail [this fastidious shiver] did not encroach upon the rest of the scene, did not grade into it, remaining clearly limited"—since it happened to be illumined by the moon and all the rest was in shadow. (6) The silence and the distant sounds. Distant sounds behaved in relation to the surface of silence in the same way as the patch of moonlit moving leafage in relation to the velvet of the shade. The most distant sound, coming from "gardens at the far end of the town, could be distinguished with such exact 'finish,' that the impression they gave of remoteness [an additional simile follows] seemed due only to their 'pianissimo' execution [again a simile follows] like those movements on muted strings" at the Conservatory. Now those muted strings are described: "although one does not lose one single note," they come from "outside, a long way from the concert hall so that [and now we are in that concert hall] all the old subscribers, and my grandmother's sisters too, when Swann gave them his seats, used to strain their ears as if [final simile] they had caught the distant approach of an army on the march, which had not yet rounded the corner" of the street.

*Nabokov illustrates a simple simile as "the mist was like a veil"; a simple metaphor as "there was a veil of mist"; and a hybrid simile as "the veil of the mist was like the sleep of silence," combining both simile and metaphor. HB

From Marcel Proust, Bloom's Major Novelists by Harold Bloom 2003.

§

Noiselessly I opened the window and sat down on the foot of my bed; hardly daring to move in case they should hear me from below. Things outside seemed also fixed in mute expectation, so as not to disturb the moonlight which, duplicating each of them and throwing it back by the extension, forwards, of a shadow denser and more concrete than its substance, had made the whole landscape seem at once thinner and longer, like a map which, after being folded up, is spread out upon the ground. What had to move — a leaf of the chestnut-tree, for instance — moved. But its minute shuddering, complete, finished to the least detail and with utmost delicacy of gesture, made no discord with the rest of the scene, and yet was not merged in it, remaining clearly outlined. Exposed upon this surface of silence, which absorbed nothing from them, the most distant sounds, those which must have come from gardens at the far end of the town, could be distinguished with such exact ‘finish’ that the impression they gave of coming from a distance seemed due only to their ‘pianissimo’ execution, like those movements on muted strings so well performed by the orchestra of the Conservatoire that, although one does not lose a single note, one thinks all the same that they are being played somewhere outside, a long way from the concert hall, so that all the old subscribers, and my grandmother’s sisters too, when Swann had given them his seats, used to strain their ears as if they had caught the distant approach of an army on the march, which had not yet rounded the corner of the Rue de Trévise.

Du côté de chez Swann by Marcel Proust 1913 translated as Swann's Way by C. K. Scott Moncrieff 1922.

These sentences are examples of why I enjoy reading Marcel Proust: Even though his descriptions of the French aristocracy before 1914—and its twilight in the Great War—interest me, I'm not so much enthralled by what he describes as I am by how he describes it.

If I had now begun to explore, with tremors of reverence and joy the faery domain which, against all probability, had opened to me its hitherto locked approaches, this was still only in my capacity as a friend of Gilberte.

The kingdom into which I was received was itself contained within another, more mysterious still, in which Swann and his wife led their supernatural existence and towards which they made their way, after taking my hand in theirs, when they crossed the hall at the same moment as myself but in the other direction.

But soon I was to penetrate also to the heart of the Sanctuary.

For instance, Gilberte might be out when I called, but M. or Mme. Swann was at home. They would ask who had rung, and on being told that it was myself would send out to ask me to come in for a moment and talk to them, desiring me to use in one way or another, and with this or that object in view, my influence over their daughter.

I reminded myself of that letter, so complete, so convincing, which I had written to Swann only the other day, and which he had not deigned even to acknowledge.

I marvelled at the impotence of the mind, the reason and the heart to effect the least conversion, to solve a single one of those difficulties which, in the sequel, life, without one’s so much as knowing what steps it has taken, so easily unravels.

My new position as the friend of Gilberte, endowed with an excellent influence over her, entitling me now to enjoy the same favours as if, having had as a companion at some school where they had always put me at the head of my class the son of a king, I had owed to that accident the right of informal entry into the palace and to audiences in the throne-room, Swann, with an infinite benevolence and as though he were not over-burdened with glorious occupations, would make me go into his library and there let me for an hour on end respond in stammered monosyllables, timid silences broken by brief and incoherent bursts of courage, to utterances of which my emotion prevented me from understanding a single word; would shew me works of art and books which he thought likely to interest me, things as to which I had no doubt, before seeing them, that they infinitely surpassed in beauty anything that the Louvre possessed or the National Library, but at which I found it impossible to look.

At such moments I should have been grateful to Swann’s butler, had he demanded from me my watch, my tie-pin, my boots, and made me sign a deed acknowledging him as my heir: in the admirable words of a popular expression of which, as of the most famous epics, we do not know who was the author, although, like those epics, and with all deference to Wolf* and his theory, it most certainly had an author, one of those inventive, modest souls such as we come across every year, who light upon such gems as ‘putting a name to a face,’ though their own names they never let us learn, I did not know what I was doing.

*Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824) a German philologist who held that the works attributed to Homer were written by a number of anonymous bards.

À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur by Marcel Proust 1918;  translated as Within a Budding Grove by C. K. Scott Moncrieff 1924.

July 10, 1871

But we are no more disturbed by the fact of our having become another person, after a lapse of years and in the natural order of events, than we are disturbed at any given moment by the fact of our being, one after another, the incompatible persons, crafty, sensitive, refined, coarse, disinterested, ambitious, which we are, in turn, every day of our life. And the reason why this does not disturb us is the same, namely that the self which has been eclipsed — momentarily in this latter case and when it is a question of character, permanently in the former case and when it is a matter of passions — is not present to deplore the other, the other which is for the moment, or for all time, our whole self; the coarse self laughs at his own coarseness, for he is a coarse person, and the forgetful man does not worry about his loss of memory, simply because he has forgotten.

I should have been incapable of resuscitating Albertine because I was incapable of resuscitating myself, of resuscitating the self of those days. Life, according to its habit which is, by incessant, infinitesimal labours, to change the face of the world, had not said to me on the morrow of Albertine’s death: “Become another person,” but, by changes too imperceptible for me to be conscious even that I was changing, had altered almost every element in me, with the result that my mind was already accustomed to its new master — my new self — when it became aware that it had changed; it was upon this new master that it depended.

Albertine Disparue Marcel Proust 1925; translated as The Sweet Cheat Gone by C. K. Scott Moncrieff 1930.

From an OP-ED memoir in the July 1, 2011 New York Times by A. E.  Hotchner entitled Hemingway, Hounded by the Feds.

In 1959 Ernest (Hemingway) had a contract with Life magazine to write about Spain’s reigning matadors, the brothers-in-law Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín. He cabled me, urging me to join him for the tour. It was a glorious summer, and we celebrated Ernest’s 60th birthday with a party that lasted two days.

But I remember it now as the last of the good times.

In May 1960, Ernest phoned me from Cuba. He was uncharacteristically perturbed that the unfinished Life article had reached 92,453 words. The contract was for 40,000; he was having nightmares.

A month later he called again. He had cut only 530 words, he was exhausted and would it be an imposition to ask me to come to Cuba to help him?

I did, and over the next nine days I submitted list upon list of suggested cuts. At first he rejected them: “What I’ve written is Proustian in its cumulative effect, and if we eliminate detail we destroy that effect.” But eventually he grudgingly consented to cutting 54,916 words. He was resigned, surrendering, and said he would leave it to Life to cut the rest.

A. E. Hotchner is the author of Papa Hemingway and Hemingway and His World.

Marcel Proust wrote in a hypotactic style; in the entry above by A. E. Hotchner we have the paratactic Ernest Hemingway defend the editing of his writing for hypotactic or Proustian reasons.  I would like to see what Hemingway cut out of the Life article.

For me the definitions* are of little use in remembering the difference  between the terms, not being a student of Greek and Latin, but recalling recent authors who are famous for using the different styles is more meaningful.

§

Perhaps the most consistent, philosophically reasoned paratactic style in our time has been written by Ernest Hemingway. Here is the famous tight-lipped syntactic reserve:

Now in the fall the trees were all bare and the roads were muddy. I rode to Gorizia from Udine on a camion. We passed other camions on the road and I looked at the country. The mulberry trees were bare and the fields were brown. There were wet dead leaves on the road from the rows of bare trees and men were working on the road, tamping stone in the ruts from piles of crushed stone along the side of the road between the trees. We saw the town with a mist over it that cut off the mountains. We crossed the river and I saw that it was running high. It had been raining in the moun­tains. We came into the town past the factories and then the houses and villas and I saw that many more houses had been hit. On a narrow street we passed a British Red Cross ambulance. The driver wore a cap and his face was thin and very tanned. I did not know him. I got down from the camion in the big square in front of the Town Mayor's house, the driver handed down my rucksack and I put it on and swung on the two musettes and walked to our villa. It did not feel like a homecoming.

A Farewell to Arms, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929.

Analysing Prose, Richard A. Lantham, 1983.

*Edward Morris wrote in 1901 that the term (parataxis) was introduced into linguistics by Friedrich Thiersch in his Greek Grammar (1831). The concept has expanded since then, and a number of definitions have emerged, often conflicting. From Wikipedia.

When driving this morning to the tannery in Quakertown to drop off sheepskins to be tanned and to pick up those that I'd left there 6 weeks ago, I heard the following passage from Proust's The Search for Lost Time read by John Rowe;  I liked it so much that I noted to find the passage on eBooks Adelaide when I got back home. I was sure I could find it easily by searching the web page for Titian, a name that Proust does not use often. 

What interests me is how Proust has his child-adult narrator play with the register of what he writes by going back and forth between the imagined wonders of Venice and the winter weather in Paris where he has his imaginings. Some critics label this as Proust's use of counterpoint in writing; no matter what you call it, it is mildy lyrical and rather pleasing.

When I repeated to myself, giving thus a special value to what I was going to see, that Venice was the “School of Giorgione, the home of Titian, the most complete museum of the domestic architecture of the Middle Ages,” I felt happy indeed. As I was even more when, on one of my walks, as I stepped out briskly on account of the weather, which, after several days of a precocious spring, had relapsed into winter (like the weather that we had invariably found awaiting us at Combray, in Holy Week), — seeing upon the boulevards that the chestnut-trees, though plunged in a glacial atmosphere that soaked through them like a stream of water, were none the less beginning, punctual guests, arrayed already for the party, and admitting no discouragement, to shape and chisel and curve in its frozen lumps the irrepressible verdure whose steady growth the abortive power of the cold might hinder but could not succeed in restraining — I reflected that already the Ponte Vecchio was heaped high with an abundance of hyacinths and anemones, and that the spring sunshine was already tinging the waves of the Grand Canal with so dusky an azure, with emeralds so splendid that when they washed and were broken against the foot of one of Titian’s paintings they could vie with it in the richness of their colouring.

Swann's Way Marcel Proust 1913, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff 1922.

One evening at 11:30 Paul Morand was wakened by the doorbell, which signaled the beginning of the most extraordinary night. Without bothering to put on a bathrobe over his pajamas, Morand, who was expecting no visitors, opened the door. He saw standing before him a "very pale" man, wearing a thick but worn fur coat and a scarf, despite the warm evening. Morand, although half-asleep, had a writer's eye and quickly took in the features of the strange personage in the doorway. (His) black hair was so thick that it pushed back the gray bowler, he carried a cane and wore slate-colored kid gloves, his teeth were large and perfect, with heavy lips set off by a mustache and large dark eyes whose gaze was both soft and magnetic. The nocturnal visitor announced in a "ceremonious" and "tremulous" voice: "I am Marcel Proust."

The astonished Morand invited him in. Proust, who asked permission to keep on his pelisse, began to speak in an insinuating but authoritative voice which Morand immediately recognized as the one he had found so spellbinding in Swann's Way. After telling Morand to get back into bed, Proust explained that he could go out only late at night and had taken the liberty of ringing the doorbell because Bardac had told him how much Morand liked Swann's Way. Morand later remembered that he "had even cried out, after having read Swann: 'It's so much better than Flaubert!' This cry of enthusiasm had reached Proust," who was now sitting down in front of the white marble chimney at the foot of Morand's bed. So began a long visit.

(Morand), who harbored ambitions to be a writer, found himself: with the man whose conversation was said to be the most brilliant in a city of legendary oral wits. The Proustian spoken sentence, as registered by Morand that evening, was

Morand remained dumbstruck in admiration. What he felt most strongly in the room that evening was the presence of genius.

Proust said that he had made an exception to come out and meet Morand that night, an exception he would pay for afterward. He then described the "art of living" with this famous traitor known as illness, how he changed—to the amazement of specialists—the prescribed doses of stimulants and depressants, how he consumed huge quantities of caffeine in pill form, or brewed, which he often laced with bromide, as a corrective to coffee's stimulating properties. Morand, aghast at what he heard, remarked that Proust was applying the accelerator and the brakes at the same time. Proust replied that he knew better than anyone what was good for him, adding, "We are never cured; at best we learn to live with our maladies."

From  Marcel Proust—A Life, William C. Carter 2000, p. 606

*Le Visiteur du Soir, Paul Morand 1949.

On (a) Saturday evening (in April of 1913) Marcel wrote Antoine Bibesco about the concert he had just attended at the Salle Villiers: "Great emotion this evening. More dead than alive I nonetheless went to a recital hall … to hear the Franck Sonata which I love so much." The piece was Cesar Franck's 1886 Sonata in A major for Piano and Violin, performed by the renowned Romanian violinist Georges Enesco and the French pianist Paul Goldschmidt. Proust had never heard Enesco, and he found his playing "wonderful; the mournful twitterings, the plaintive calls of his violin answered the piano as though from a tree, as though from some mysterious arbour. It made a very great impression." … Years later, when inscribing an original deluxe edition of Swann's Way to a young friend, Jacques de Lacretelle, Proust provided a fairly detailed account of the music that inspired (the fictional composer) Vinteuil's compositions. He mentioned, as one source of inspiration, Franck's sonata, as played by Enesco, where the "piano and the violin moan like two birds calling each other."

From  Marcel Proust—A Life, William C. Carter 2000.

Here in the translator's preface you see Proust going beyond Ruskin; I include it because it's a lovely piece of prose and also because it's from a marvelous and unique preface where the translator disputes the author he translates; the preface and notes to the translation are more about Proust than about Ruskin.

We feel quite truly that our wisdom begins where that of the author ends, and we would like to have him give us answers, when all he can do is give us desires. And these desires he can arouse in us only by making us contemplate the supreme beauty which the last effort of his art has permitted him to reach. But by a singular and, moreover, providential law of mental optics (a law which perhaps signifies that we can receive the truth from nobody, and that we must create it ourselves), that which is the end of their wisdom appears to us as but the beginning of ours, so that it is at the moment when they have told us all they could tell us that they create in us the feeling that they have told us nothing yet.

From On Reading, the translator's preface to John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies translated into French by Marcel Proust 1906; On Reading translated into English by Jean Autret and William Burford, 1971.

The real mystery of Proust (À la recherche du temps perdu is considered my many to be the greatest work of imaginative literature in the past 100 years) and his fiction is how did he, being unable to compose a novel until he'd reached the age of 35, come to write fiction at all in real life.  What provoked his genius?  Tadié suggests his reading of Ruskin was responsible instead of the fictional claim in the work where the narrator* specifies, in one case, the taste of a madelaine as the agent that brings forth involuntary memory enabling the him to write about his past.

Ruskin's book (Sesame and Lilies) is concerned with reading.  Proust seized on it (to translate) as an opportunity to recall his childhood reading during the holidays, improving on some of the passages from Jean Santeuil (his first 800 page attempt at a novel, abandoned and not published until 1952); the themes and the use of the first person provide a foretaste of Du cote de chez  Swann. If old books can conjure up the past, which can rise up into the present through the phenomenon of involuntary memory,  reading can lead us to the threshold of spiritual life (Ruskin), although it is not a substitute for it (Proust).

(In On Reading) he was making a clean break with the past, and with Ruskin, to whom he was bidding farewell; the choice had to be made between reading and writing, between other people’s books and his own work: 'We can only nurture the power of our sensitivity and our intelligence within ourselves, in the depths of our spiritual life,' from Contre Sainte Beuve.  Proust turned back into himself, into fictional creation. Escaping in  someone else's work had been both a failure and a success, because it had helped shape his mind, broadened his cultural knowledge [annotating Ruskin had required a considerable amount of research] and it had enriched his use of language. The pen that began Jean Santeuil was very different to that which framed the first lines of' On Reading:

'There are perhaps no other days of our childhood that we lived so fully as those which we believed we had left behind without experiencing them, those which we spent in the company of a favourite book.’

Both actively and reactively, Ruskin had thus given Proust the opportunity to clarify the aesthetic philosophy that he lacked, and to nurture the library of books which this least accumulative of men kept, not in his apartment, but in his mind…we pass from Ruskin as a reader to Proust as an adult reader, and thence to a small boy reading: that is to say, to a fictional character.

Fate would decree that just as Dante was abandoned by Virgil as they left Purgatory ['Thee o'er thyself I therefore crown and mitre'], Marcel should be deserted by Ruskin…at the very moment that he embarked upon the novel…

Marcel Proust, A Life Jean-Yves Tadié 1996, translated by Euan Cameron.

*In his letters and notes to himself about the novel, Proust usually spoke of the Narrator as "I," making no distinction between himself and his fictional persona. Proust's friends would recognize that voice as the writer's own. Whenever the Narrator speaks about art and literature, he is speaking for Proust. Still, Proust was engaged not in writing his autobiography but in creating a novel in which there are strong autobiographical elements. The symbiosis between Proust and his Narra­tor can be explained by the hybrid origin of the story. Having begun as an essay (Contre Sainte Beuve) in which the "I" was himself, as the text veered more and more toward fiction, the "I" telling the story became both its generator and its subject, like a Siamese twin, intimately linked to Proust's body and soul and yet other. This novel that passion­ately examines and contrasts the poetry and reality of proper names has none for the Narrator and his family. They are known only as "I," "Mama," and "Papa." The novel's creator was truly "another I," Proust at his best and most profound, reinventing himself for this novel that lacked obvious precursors.

From  Marcel Proust, A Life William C. Carter 2000.

Proust's rhetoric and syntax, components of his complex style of multiple perspectives, develop for the first time into what is often described as "Proustian" in the preface he wrote for his translation of Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies; he continues using these long and intricate sentence structures in his next critical  work, Contre Sainte Beuve, before he begins his masterwork À la recherche du temps perdu about 1908.

“There are  perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we let slip by without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book." Thus Proust began in the preface (On Reading) to his translation of Sesame and Lilies…

Anna de Noailles and other friends marveled at Proust's essay on reading (first published in the Renaissance Latine). She wrote immediately to express her admiration: "My dear friend, I only see people who are dazzled... touched... by the dear, divine pages you have written." She told him that people were quoting extensively from his article and that she (and critic) Andre Beaunier had passed his preface back and forth, describing to each other his sentences that were like "adorable threads of silk."

(Marcel) refused to believe it. Accustomed as he was to showering the most lavish compliments on his friends' mediocre writings, he could not believe that their words were sincere. He answered by "beseeching" Anna to "stop being so nice . . . for I cannot bear it any longer; the burden of happiness, gratitude, emotion, stupefaction is too overwhelming and I might die of it. There is also the fear that the whole thing may be a joke, for nothing can penetrate the armour of my sadness, (his asthma had been getting worse) my conviction that all those pages are execrable, a sort of indigestible nougat which sticks between one's teeth."

Beaunier had  taken particular delight in the style: "These long sentences, encumbered with all the details and circumstances, have a strange and delicious charm," which came, Beaunier said, from their "meticulous truth."

Writing to Mme Straus, Proust worried that his ... essay might be dangerous for his languid friend to read and urged her to avoid it: "Don't read it, it's a failed effort and horribly wearying to read, with sentences that take up an entire page" of the kind “that Dr. Widmer would particularly forbid you to read."

From  Marcel Proust, A Life William C. Carter 2000.

Examples of lyric In Search of Lost Time:

Although it was simply a Sunday in autumn, I had been born again, life lay intact before me, for that morning, after a succession of mild days, there had been a cold fog which had not cleared until nearly midday: and a change in the weather is sufficient to create the world and ourselves anew. Formerly, when the wind howled in my chimney, I would listen to the blows which it struck on the iron trap with as keen an emotion as if, like the famous chords with which the Fifth Symphony opens, they had been the irresistible calls of a mysterious destiny. Every change in the aspect of nature offers us a similar transformation by adapting our desires so as to harmonise with the new form of things. The mist, from the moment of my awakening, had made of me, instead of the centrifugal being which one is on fine days, a man turned in on himself, longing for the chimney corner and the shared bed, a shivering Adam in quest of a sedentary Eve, in this different world.

Between the soft grey tint of a morning landscape and the taste of a cup of chocolate I incorporated all the originality of the physical, intellectual and moral life which I had taken with me to Doncieres about a year earlier and which, blazoned with the oblong form of a bare hillside—always present even when it was invisible—formed in me a series of pleasures entirely distinct from all others, incommunicable to my friends in the sense that the impressions, richly interwoven with one another, which orchestrated them were a great deal more characteristic of them to my unconscious mind than any facts that I might have related.

Le côte de Guermantes, Marcel Proust 1920; translated as The Guermantes Way by C. K. Scott Moncrief and Terrance Kilmartin, P. 358 of the Vintage Edition.

Prince Von speaks of the German Emperor William II over dinner at the Duc de Guermantes.

“The Emperor is a man of astounding intelligence,” resumed the Prince, “he is passionately fond of the arts, he has for works of art a taste that is practically infallible, if a thing is good he spots it at once and takes a dislike to it. If he detests anything there can be no more doubt about it, the thing is excellent.“  Everyone smiled.

Le côte de Guermantes, Marcel Proust 1920; translated by C. K. Scott Moncrief 1925.

Hence,

      if I had been tempted to scoff at her (Françoise, the old servant) when,

             in her misery at having to leave a house in which one was "so well respected by all and sundry,"

      she had packed her trunks weeping,

            in accordance with the rites of Combray,

      and declaring superior to all possible houses that which had been ours, 

on the other hand,

      finding it as hard to assimilate the new as I found it easy to abandon the old,

I felt myself drawn towards our old servant

      when I saw that moving into a building

           where she had not received from the hall-porter,

              who did not yet know us,

                 (what) the marks of respect necessary to her spiritual wellbeing,

                      had brought her positively to the verge of prostration.

The Guermantes Way Volume II, p. 3; In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, translated by Moncrief and Kilmartin, Vintage Edition.

Sonate pour violon et piano 3rd movement (fragmento)

Reading Carter's biography of Proust, I came upon this  mention  of  Saint-Saëns's Opus 75 and accessed it on iTunes as both the narrator and Swann go on expansively about "the little phrase" which finds it source here.

Despite "passionate" admiration for Saint-Saëns's work, Proust thought less highly of the composer's accomplishments than did his former pupil (the composer) Reynaldo (Hahn).  But the haunting melody of one section of the first movement of Saint-Saëns's Sonata I for Piano and Violin, Opus 75, captivated him. Marcel never tired of hearing it and asked Reynaldo (his lover) to play it for him again and again, referring to it as “the little phrase."  In the Search… Swann asks Odette (his lover) to play it  for him again and again, "the little phrase," now attributed to Proust's fictional composer Vinteuil.

Marcel Proust, A Life William C. Carter 2000

The Saint-Saëns sonata, is it in a minor key—it feels like it—I'm not sure, but after listening to it, Swann in love I'm not, and of that I'm sure. I did download piano music by Reynaldo Hahn, not being familiar with his work, to give it a listen.

But before we go, here is an excerpt of Proust speaking of the language of music  as Swann listens to the Vinteuil sonata containing the little phrase performed at the home of the Marquise de Saint-Euverte's.

At first the piano complained alone, like a bird deserted by its mate; the violin heard and answered it, as from a neighboring tree. It was as at the beginning of the world, as if there were as yet only the two of them on the earth, or rather in this world closed to all the rest, so fashioned by the logic of its creator that in it there should never be any but themselves: the world of this sonata. Was it a bird, was it the soul, as yet not fully formed, of the little phrase, was it a fairy—that being invisibly lamenting, whose plaint the piano heard and tenderly repeated? Its cries were so sudden that the violinist must snatch up his bow and race to catch them as they came. Marvelous bird! The violinist seemed to wish to charm, to tame, to capture it. Already it had passed into his soul, already the little phrase which it evoked shook like a medium's the body of the violinist, "possessed" indeed. Swann knew that the phrase was going to speak to him once again. And his personality was now so divided that the strain of waiting for the imminent moment when he would find himself face to face with it again shook him with one of those sobs which a beautiful line of poetry or a sad piece of news will wring from us, not when we are alone, but when we impart them to friends in whom we see ourselves reflected like a third person whose probable emotion affects them too. It reappeared, but this time to remain poised in the air, and to sport there for a moment only, as though immobile, and shortly to expire. And so Swann lost nothing of the precious time for which it lingered. It was still there, like an iridescent bubble that floats for a while unbroken. As a rainbow whose brightness is fading seems to subside, then soars again and, before it is extinguished, shines forth with greater splendor than it has ever shown; so to the two colours which the little phrase had hitherto allowed to appear it added others now, chords shot with every hue in the prism, and made them sing.

Swann's Way Volume I, 495ff; In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, translated by Moncrief and Kilmartin, revised by Enright. The Modern Library Edition.

If one had to read but a sampling of À la Recherche du temps perdu it would be Noms De Pays: Le Nom, the last section of volume I, Du côté de chez Swann.  The tone is lovely; the account is self contained and it has a wistful yet mature view of time past and has no need of the madelaine gimmickry that Proust uses to conjure 'involuntary memory'.

Robert de Montesquiou, the aesthete who was the model for Proust's Baron de Charlus (perhaps the most intriguing and certainly the most  amusing character of the 2000 personages, real or fictional, in À la recherche du temps perdu), had his first love affair

"with a female ventriloquist who, while Montesquiou was straining to achieve his climax, would imitate the drunken voice of a pimp, threatening the aristocratic client."

Pages from the Goncourt Journals, (1851-1896) the Goncourt Brothers, Edmund & Jules, translator Robert Baldick, 2006.

Colette has given us a portrait of Marcel that is all but forgotten, yet which is shocking in its disdain:

“At ‘mother Barmann's’ [that is to say Mme Arman] I was hounded, politely, by a pretty, young literary-minded boy. The young fellow had fine eyes, with a hint of blepharism...He compared me—my short hair again!—to Myrtocleia, to a young Hermes, to a love of Prud'hon's...My little flatterer, thrilled by his own evocations, never left me...He contemplated me with his caressing eyes, with their long eyelashes...”

Colette did not much care for

“his over-weaning politeness, the excessive attention he paid to those he was talking to,”

she once again described

"the large, brownish, melancholy eyes, a skin that was sometimes pink and sometimes pale, an anxious look in the eyes, a mouth which, when it shut, was pursed tightly as if for a kiss...”

Marcel Proust, A Life by Jean-Yves Tadié, 1996 p. 211.

On the way to a recital at the house of the Duc de Guermantes, travelling along the Champs Elysées, Marcel's carriage reaches the Rue Royale.

I was not traversing the same streets as those who were passing by, I was gliding through a sweet and melancholy past composed of so many different pasts that it was difficult for me to identify the cause of my melancholy. Was it due to those pacings to and fro awaiting Gilberte and fearing she would not come? Was it that I was close to a house where I had been told that Albertine had gone with Andrée or was it the philosophic significance a street seems to assume when one has used it a thousand times while one was obsessed with a passion which has come to an end and borne no fruit like when after luncheon I made fevered expeditions to gaze at the play-bills of Phèdre and of The Black Domino while they were still moist with the bill-sticker’s paste?

Le temps retrouvé 1927,  Volume VII of À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust. Translated by Stephen Hudson.

On second thought, it's not to restart reading À la recherche du temps perdu, but to continue what I enjoy: looking at Proust's syntax, diagramming the more curious structures,  questioning the translations, reading the original in French when I do question them, and so on.

My bedtime reading is Jean Yves Tadié's biography, Marcel Proust, A Life which is lighter for the late hours of the day; on clear mornings, before following Proust into his daunting music, where I often feel clumsy like I'm learning the tango, "Show me that step again, s'il vous plaît," I read a section or two of Virginia Tufte's helpful Artful Sentences, Syntax as Style to better understand the grammar (noun phrases, verb phrases, etc.) that Proust uses in À la recherche du temps perdu, pedant, or verbal danceophile, that I sometimes can be.

Since my name was on their visiting-lists, my long absence from Paris had not prevented old friends from sending me invitations and when, on getting home, I found together with an invitation for the following day to a supper given by La Berma in honour of her daughter and her son-in-law, another for an afternoon reception at the Prince de Guermantes’, my sad reflections in the train were not the least of the motives which counselled me to go there.

I told myself it really was not worth while to deprive myself of society since I was either not equipped for or not up to the precious “work” to which I had for so long been hoping to devote myself “to-morrow” and which, may be, corresponded to no reality.

In truth, this reasoning was negative and merely eliminated the value of those which might have kept me away from this society function.

But what made me go was that name of Guermantes which had so far gone out of my head that, when I saw it on the invitation card, it awakened a beam of attention and laid hold of a fraction of the past buried in the depths of my memory, a past associated with visions of the forest domain, its rich luxuriance once again assuming the charm and significance of the old Combray days when, before going home, I passed into the Rue de l’Oiseau and saw from outside, like dark lacquer, the painted window of Gilbert le Mauvais, Sire of Guermantes.

For a moment the Guermantes seemed once more utterly different from society people, incomparable with them or with any living beings, even with a king, beings issuing from gestation in the austere and virtuous atmosphere of that sombre town of Combray where my childhood was spent, and from the whole past represented by the little street whence I gazed up at the painted window.

I longed to go to the Guermantes’ as though it would bring me back my childhood from the deeps of memory where I glimpsed it.

And I continued to re-read the invitation until the letters which composed the name, familiar and mysterious as that of Combray itself, rebelliously recaptured their independence and spelled to my tired eyes a name I did not know.

Le temps retrouvé 1927,  Volume VII of À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust. Translated by Stephen Hudson.

§

My long absence from Paris had not prevented old friends from continuing, as my name remained on their lists, faithfully to send me invitations, and when on my return I found—together with one to a tea-party given by Berma for her daughter and her son-in-law another to an afternoon party with music which was to take place the following day at the house of the Prince de Guermantes, the gloomy reflexions which had passed through my mind in the train were not the least of the motives which urged me to accept.

Really, I said to myself, what point is there in forgoing the pleasures of social life if, as seems to be the case, the famous "work" which for so long I have been hoping every day to start the next day, is something I am not, or am no longer, made for and perhaps does not even correspond to any reality.  

This reasoning was, it is true, completely negative and merely deprived of their force those other reasons which might have dissuaded me from going to this fashionable concert.

The positive rea­son that made me decide to go was the name of Guer­mantes, absent long enough from my mind to be able, when I read it upon the invitation card, to re-awaken a ray of my attention, to draw up from the depths of my memory a sort of section of the past of the Guermantes, attended by all the images of seigniorial forest and t flowers which at that earlier time of my life had accompa­nied it, and to reassume for me the charm and the significance which I had found in it at Combray when, passing along the Rue de l'Oiseau on my way home, I used to from outside, like some dark lacquer, the window Gilbert the Bad, Lord of Guermantes.

For a moment the Guermantes had once more seemed to me to be totally different from people in society, comparable neither with them nor with any living being, even a reigning prince, creatures begotten of the union of the sharp and windy air of the dark town of Combray in which my childhood had been spent with the past which could be sensed there, in the little street, at the height of the stained-glass window.

I had had a longing to go to the Guermantes party as if in going there I must have been brought nearer to my child­hood and to the depths of my memory where my child­hood dwelt.

And I had continued to read and re-read the invitation until in the end, rising in revolt, the letters which composed this name at once so familiar and so mysterious, like that of Combray itself, resumed their in­dependence and outlined before my tired eyes a name that I seemed never to have seen before.

Le temps retrouvé 1927, Volume VII of À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.  Translated by Andreas Mayor, Terence Kilmartin and revised by D. J. Enright.

Oh the loss! Perhaps I should restart À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust now that I have finished it; over several months, I slowly read scenes that interested me—I even diagramed some of his sentences to better experience them—these were scenes and passages that I noted while listening to the work being read to me (in truth, the last 5 volumes were abridged in the audio format) as I drove upstate and down. The 4300 pages in 7 volumes of The Modern Library Edition contain over 2000 characters—who could know that many people—nevertheless I feel like a companion, one I got to know well, has left me. 

The basic story (really an excuse for the author's pleasure of writing) is of minimal interest—how Marcel begins to write—but Proust's labyrinthine sentences that describe the narrator's feelings about the people he encounters are a treasure, never lost in Time like Marcel's past, always present and available to a reader in the volumes of  À la recherche du temps perdu.

Does not the sign of unreality in others consist in their inability to satisfy us, as, for instance, in the case of social pleasures which, at best, cause that discomfort which is provoked by unwholesome food, when friendship is almost a pretence, since, for whatever moral reasons he may seek it, the artist who gives up an hour of work to converse for that time with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality to an illusion (friends being friends only in the sense of a sweet madness which overcomes us in life and to which we yield, though at the back of our minds we know it to be the error of a lunatic who imagines the furniture to be alive and talks to it) owing to the sadness which follows its satisfaction—like that I felt the day I was first introduced to Albertine when I gave myself the trouble, after all not great, to obtain something—to make the acquaintance of the girl—which only seemed to me unimportant because I had obtained it.

Le temps retrouvé 1927,  Volume VII of À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust. Translated by Stephen Hudson.

Proust, when he's writing a scene, moving his people in and out of the action, as he does here in Mme de Villeparisis's drawing room, writes as clearly as E. B. White; but  when he describes the reflections of his narrator in the same scene he writes as only he can: in a fashion that is qualifying, parenthetical and nuanced as his syntax travels backwards and forwards—even sideways—through temporal realms. This is writing that I'm drawn to.  He writes necessarily; these long and complex sentences can not be shortened or simplified without changing the characters or their concerns.

Mme de Guermantes had sat down.

Her name, accompanied as it was by her title, added to her physical person the duchy which cast its aura round about her and brought the shadowy, sun-splashed coolness of the woods of Guermantes into this drawing-room, to surround the pouf on which she was sitting.

I was surprised only that the likeness of those woods was not more discernible on the face of the Duchess, about which there was nothing suggestive of vegetation, and on which the ruddiness of her cheeks—which ought, one felt, to have been emblazoned with the name Guermantes—was at most the effect, and not the reflexion, of long gallops in the open air.

Later on, when I had become indifferent to her, I came to know many of the Duchess's distinctive features, notably (to stick for the moment only to those of which I already at this time felt the charm though without yet being able to identify it) her eyes, which captured as in a picture the blue sky of a French country afternoon, broadly expansive, bathed in light even when no sun shone; and a voice which one would have thought, from its first hoarse sounds, to be almost plebeian, in which there lingered, as over the steps of the church at Combray or the pastrycook's in the square, the rich and lazy gold of a country sun.

But on this first day I discerned nothing, my ardent attention volatilised at once the little that I might otherwise have been able to take in and from which I might have been able to grasp something of the name Guermantes.

In any case, I told myself that it was indeed she who was designated for all the world by the title Duchesse de Guermantes: the inconceivable life which that name signified was indeed contained in this body; it had just introduced that life into the midst of a group of disparate people, in this room which enclosed it on every side and on which it produced so vivid a reaction that I felt I could see, where the extent of that mysterious life ceased, a fringe of effervescence outline its frontiers—in the circumference of the circle traced on the carpet by the balloon of her blue pekin skirt, and in the bright eyes of the Duchess at the point of intersection of the preoccupations, the memories, the incomprehensible, scornful, amused and curious thoughts which filled them from within and the outside images that were reflected on their surface.

Perhaps I should have been not quite so deeply stirred had I met her at Mme de Villeparisis's at an evening party, instead of seeing her thus at one of the Marquise's "at homes," at one of those tea-parties which are for women no more than a brief halt in the course of their afternoon's outing, when, keeping on the hats in which they have been doing their shopping, they waft into a succession of salons the quality of the fresh air outside, and offer a better view of Paris in the late afternoon than do the tall open windows through which one can hear the rumble of victorias: Mme de Guermantes wore a straw hat trimmed with cornflowers, and what they recalled to me was not the sunlight of bygone years among the tilled fields round Combray where I had so often gathered them on the slope adjoining the Tansonville hedge, but the smell and the dust of twilight as they had been an hour ago when Mme de Guermantes had walked through them in the Rue de la Paix.

With a smiling, disdainful, absent-minded air, and a pout on her pursed lips, she was tracing circles on the carpet with the point of her sunshade, as with the extreme tip of an antenna of her mysterious life; then, with that indifferent attention which begins by eliminating every point of contact between oneself and what one is considering, her gaze fastened upon each of us in turn, then inspected the settees and chairs, but softened now by that human sympathy which is aroused by the presence, however insignificant, of a thing one knows, a thing that is almost a person: these pieces of furniture she would have felt had she noticed on the chairs, instead of our presence, that of a spot of grease or a layer of dust.

Le Côté de Guermantes Volume III of À la recherche du temps perdu Marcel Proust, 1921. Translated by Moncrief, Kilmartin and Enright in the Modern Library Edition, the paragraph beginning on page 273.

Marvelous sentence. The transcendence from Marcel at l'Opéra to his remembrance of summer afternoons as a boy walking along what was called Le Côté de Guermantes (the Guermantes way), so named because the Guermantes family had a summer house on the river Vivonne near where Marcel's family, who vacationed in Combray, often took their  Sunday walks, epitomises his desire  to recall the past as portrayed throughout the novel and made manifest here as Proust's sentence closes. 

…I would rather have had their opinion of Phèdre than that of the greatest critic in the world.  For in his I should have found merely intelligence, an intelligence superior to my own but similar in kind.

But what the Duchesse and Princesse de Guermantes might think, an opinion which would have furnished me with an invaluable clue to the nature of these two poetic creatures, I imagined with the aid of their names, I endowed with an irrational charm, and, with the thirst and the longing of a fever-stricken patient, what I demanded that their opinion of Phèdre should yield to me was the charm of the summer afternoons that I had spent wandering along the Guermantes way.

Le Côté de Guermantes Volume III of À la recherche du temps perdu Marcel Proust, 1921. Translated by Moncrief, Kilmartin and Enright.

Marcel goes to l'Opéra where he divides his attention between watching the actress Berma (a character based on Sarah Bernhardt) perform in Racine's Phèdre and paying earnest attention to the Duchesse de Guermantes and the audience in the boxes surrounding her.

…while an effort as painstaking as it must have been costly to imitate the clothes and style of the Duchesse de Guermantes only made Mme de Cambremerer look like some provincial schoolgirl, mounted on wires, rigid, erect, desiccated, angular, with a plume of raven's feathers stuck vertically in her hair.

Perhaps she was out of place in a theatre in which it was only with the brightest stars of the season that the boxes (even those in the highest tier, which from below seemed like great hampers studded with human flowers and attached to the ceiling of the auditorium by the red cords of their plush-covered partitions) composed an ephemeral panorama which deaths, scandals, illnesses, quarrels would soon alter, but which this evening was held motionless by attentiveness, heat, dizziness, dust, elegance and boredom, in the sort of eternal tragic instant of unconscious expectancy and calm torpor which, in retrospect, seems always to have preceded the explosion of a bomb or the first flicker of a fire.

Le Côté de Guermantes Volume III of À la recherche du temps perdu Marcel Proust, 1921. Translated by Moncrief, Kilmartin, Enright and me.

Reading Proust, I listen to the Moncrief translation on an iPhone when I'm driving; on a Kindle app, I  read The Moncrief, Kilmartin, Enright revised translation, but very slowly, identifying the basic parts of speech and how they function.  I want to hear and understand what Proust is doing at the sentence level. 

Here is a passage from Volume III of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu,  Le Côte de Guermantes:

Moncrief, Kilmartin, Enright revised translation (1925, 1981, 1994):

I had been able to distinguish the intentions underlying the voices and the mime of Aricie, Is­mene and Hippolyte, but Phèdre had interiorised hers, and my mind had not succeeded in wresting from her diction and attitudes, in apprehending in the miserly sim­plicity of their unbroken surfaces, those inventions, those effects of which no sign emerged, so completely had they been absorbed into it.

The last word, what does the "it" refer to in the sentence above?  It makes no sense; the singular referent the "it" refers to is not there.  The pronoun in the French construction is the 3rd person plural ils not the 3rd person singular il (as translated); and in my view, the translator should have used them instead of it to refer to "her diction and attitudes."

Note: Upon rereading the original passage, I found that it and the newsletter version were in error about pronoun reference.  It stands corrected.

Proust (1920):

Les intentions entourant comme une bordure majestueuse ou délicate la voix et la mimique d’Aricie, d’Ismène, d’Hippolyte, j’avais pu les distinguer; mais Phèdre se les était intériorisées, et mon esprit n’avait pas réussi à arracher à la diction et aux attitudes, à appréhender dans l’avare simplicité de leurs surfaces unies, ces trouvailles, ces effets qui n’en dépassaient pas, tant ils s’y étaient profondément résorbés.

The Moncrief translation, before Kilmartin and Enright revised it, is better in this instance.

Moncrief translation (1925):

The intentions which surrounded, like a majestic or delicate border, the voice and mimicry of Aricie, Ismène or Hippolyte I had been able to distinguish, but Phèdre had taken hers into herself, and my mind had not succeeded in wresting from her diction and attitudes, in apprehending in the miserly simplicity of their unbroken surfaces those treasures, those effects of which no sign emerged, so completely had they been absorbed.

...in the new house.  Which, it is high time now that the reader should be told—and told also that we had moved into it because my grandmother, not having been at all well (though we took care to keep this reason from her), was in need of better air—was a flat forming part of the Hôtel de Guermantes.

Le côte de Guermantes Vol. 3 of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Marcel Proust 1920; translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff 1925.

Marcel and his new friend, the handsome aristocrat Robert Saint-Loup, have dinner at the Rivebelle restaurant. Young women are seated near their table. Marcel is ever the voyeur. The year is 1890; it is Summer on the coast of Normandy.

...you could hear them whispering: “That’s young Saint-Loup. It seems he’s still quite gone on that girl of his. Got it bad, he has. What a dear boy! I think he’s just wonderful; and what style! Some girls do have all the luck, don’t they? And he’s so nice in every way. I saw a lot of him when I was with d’Orléans. They were quite inseparable, those two. He was going the pace, that time. But he’s given it all up now, she can’t complain. She’s had a good run of luck, that she can say. And I ask you, what in the world can he see in her? He must be a bit of a chump, when all’s said and done. She’s got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy. I can tell you, a little shop girl would be ashamed to be seen in her knickers. Do just look at his eyes a moment; you would jump into the fire for a man like that. Hush, don’t say a word; he’s seen me; look, he’s smiling. Oh, he remembers me all right. Just you mention my name to him, and see what he says!”

À l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs Vol. 2 of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Marcel Proust 1919; translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff 1922.

Baron de Charlus:

His voice rose. "It reminds me of a room in the Château of Blois where the caretaker who was showing me over said: ‘This is where Mary Stuart used to say her prayers; I use it to keep my brooms in.’ Naturally I wish to know nothing more of this house that has let itself be dishonoured, any more than of my cousin Clara de Chimay after she left her husband. But I keep a photograph of the house, when it was still unspoiled, just as I keep one of the Princess before her large eyes had learned to gaze on anyone but my cousin. A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist."

À l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs Vol. 2 of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Marcel Proust 1919; translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff 1922.

Sarah Bernhardt (October 22, 1844 – March 26, 1923) was a French stage and early film actress, and has been referred to as "the most famous actress the world has ever known".  Photograph by Nadar.

In À la Recherche du Temps Perdu she is mentioned by her real name and as the fictional Berma, an actress that Marcel is finally taken to see in a matinee by his grandmother.

As you perhaps know I am enamoured by the Proustian sentence;  marvelous explanations of it are to be found in this article that explicates by contrast the work of four English translators of Du Côté de Chez Swann: Moncrief, Kilmartin, Enright and Davis by André Aciman in a review entitled Proust's Way in the New York Review of Books, December 1, 2005. 

It will cost you $89.00 for a subscription that permits you  to plumb the NYRB archives 5 years and older.  Being a fan of Proust's writing you will be doubly rewarded by this article if you are also a fan of chastising wit. 

First we have Proust translated by Moncrief, then Aciman's commentary on it.

(H)e recited it with a separate stress upon each word, leaning forward, bowing his head, with at once the vehemence which a man gives, so as to be believed, to a highly improbable statement (as though the fact that he did not know the Guermantes could be due only to some strange accident of fortune) and with the emphasis of a man who, finding himself unable to keep silence about what is to him a painful situation, chooses to proclaim it aloud...

“With at once” (Proust’s à la fois) is, as I mentioned earlier, a typical move by which Proust opens up at least two prongs of interpretation. This allows his sentence to warn the reader that it is just about to bifurcate along parallel, complementary tracks. The trick of course—and Proust had mastered this better than any other writer—is to open up with an “at once” that introduces the first term of two (or more) parallel terms while managing to keep the reading voice suspended long enough so that when the second term appears, it is by no means unexpected but, in fact, welcomed, since room had already been made for it beforehand. This is what gives the Proustian sentence its stunning ability to deploy syntactic ambiguities and to resolve them along the way. This also allows Proust to open a rather long parenthetical statement that is not allowed to disturb the sentence too much, since, by the time the second term of the parallel construction is introduced, the reader will pick up the parallelism exactly where he had left it. “With at once (a) the vehemence” (quoted earlier) is finally resolved by “and (b) with the emphasis of a man who…” Enright, following in the steps of Kilmartin, keeps the parallel construction...

Lydia Davis takes an entirely different tack. She is reluctant to preface the parallel with the “at once x…and also y” formula. Such a construction would represent a stylistic maneuver that many contemporary writers might hesitate to adopt since it asks their readers to bate their breath and keep reading all the while anticipating an eventual second term. This move forces the reader to read contrapuntally, which means reading x in the present with an eye on a forthcoming y, which clearly interferes with the linear reading one expects from, say, newspapers, magazines, Harlequin romances, and living novelists I would prefer not to name.

Proust’s sentences imitate the passage of time syntactically. One reads in the present but is constantly invited to anticipate developments in the immediate future. Actually, one does not anticipate anything; one is only given the impression of having anticipated things. This impression is brought about at the end of every sentence by Proust, when we are sent back to a time when we guessed—or should have guessed—that something was being announced without being revealed yet. This ability to write things in three tenses is what confers the power of many sentences by Proust. Events are never linear in Proust.

As the first volume, Swann's Way, of Proust's In Search of Lost Time has concluded on Twitter @proustr, the administrator has assured me that the second volume, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower will begin tweeting as early as this weekend.  With 500 plus pages  in the second volume at ~140 characters an hour it should take a year or more to finish the book.

In the second volume dealing with Marcel and his adolescent love for first Gilberte then for Albertine, Proust uses a more comprehensible sentence structure. I was unsure, even after reading  Swann's Way if I could finish another volume but 60 pages into  the next one I knew I would finish the seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time so familiar I was with the characters and with Proust and his rendering of their thought processes in his sometimes difficult syntax, but most importantly with his new found irony, that which seemed to be sparing in Swann's Way, as I found myself delightfully amused reading of a swooning teenager in fin-de-siècle Paris and at the same time,  knowing I was reading Proust for enjoyment rather than because, he being an acknowledged  master of Modernism, I felt that I should if I were to consider myself—or be considered by others—a well read person. 

And as you can see I like long and complicated, but grammatically correct sentences, that hopefully have their necessity.

Here is a shorter passage from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower that I came across this morning when reading the more recent translation by James Grieve:

And since I loved her, I could only ever see her through the confused desire for more of her, which when you are with the person you love deprives you of the feeling of loving.

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

When his love for her had ended, the desire to show her that his love for her had ended had also disappeared. 

Marcel Proust 1919; translated by James Grieve 2002.

Contrary to the ending of Un Amour de Swann where Swann has fallen out of love with Odette, Proust has them married in the next section, Noms de Pays: Le Nom, of Du Côté de Chez Swann. 

In this passage he views Odette from the eyes of Marcel (who can  sometimes be Proust, sometimes not, sometimes a child and sometimes an adult viewing his childhood).  Among other things, what strikes me is  Proust's sliding narration with its angles of view: Marcel, Odette, former lovers of Odette and Marcel again all walking in the Bois de Boulonge.

I assigned the first place, in the order of aesthetic merit and of social grandeur, to simplicity, when I saw Mme. Swann on foot, in a ‘polonaise’ of plain cloth, a little toque on her head trimmed with a pheasant’s wing, a bunch of violets in her bosom, hastening along the Allée des Acacias as if it had been merely the shortest way back to her own house, and acknowledging with a rapid glance the courtesy of the gentlemen in carriages, who, recognising her figure at a distance, were raising their hats to her and saying to one another that there was never anyone so well turned out as she.

But instead of simplicity it was to ostentation that I must assign the first place if, after I had compelled Françoise, who could hold out no longer, and complained that her legs were ‘giving’ beneath her, to stroll up and down with me for another hour, I saw at length, emerging from the Porte Dauphine, figuring for me a royal dignity, the passage of a sovereign, an impression such as no real Queen has ever since been able to give me, because my notion of their power has been less vague, and more founded upon experience — borne along by the flight of a pair of fiery horses, slender and shapely as one sees them in the drawings of Constantin Guys, carrying on its box an enormous coachman, furred like a cossack, and by his side a diminutive groom, like Toby, “the late Beaudenord’s tiger,” I saw — or rather I felt its outlines engraved upon my heart by a clean and killing stab — a matchless victoria, built rather high, and hinting, through the extreme modernity of its appointments, at the forms of an earlier day, deep down in which lay negligently back Mme. Swann, her hair, now quite pale with one grey lock, girt with a narrow band of flowers, usually violets, from which floated down long veils, a lilac parasol in her hand, on her lips an ambiguous smile in which I read only the benign condescension of Majesty, though it was pre-eminently the enticing smile of the courtesan, which she graciously bestowed upon the men who bowed to her. That smile was, in reality, saying to one: “Oh yes, I do remember, quite well; it was wonderful!” to another: “How I should have loved to! We were unfortunate!”, to a third: “Yes, if you like! I must just keep in the line for a minute, then as soon as I can I will break away.” When strangers passed she still allowed to linger about her lips a lazy smile, as though she expected or remembered some friend, which made them say: “What a lovely woman!”. And for certain men only she had a sour, strained, shy, cold smile which meant: “Yes, you old goat, I know that you’ve got a tongue like a viper, that you can’t keep quiet for a moment. But do you suppose that I care what you say?” Coquelin passed, talking, in a group of listening friends, and with a sweeping wave of his hand bade a theatrical good day to the people in the carriages. But I thought only of Mme. Swann, and pretended to have not yet seen her, for I knew that, when she reached the pigeon-shooting ground, she would tell her coachman to ‘break away’ and to stop the carriage, so that she might come back on foot. And on days when I felt that I had the courage to pass close by her I would drag Françoise off in that direction; until the moment came when I saw Mme. Swann, letting trail behind her the long train of her lilac skirt, dressed, as the populace imagine queens to be dressed, in rich attire such as no other woman might wear, lowering her eyes now and then to study the handle of her parasol, paying scant attention to the passers-by, as though the important thing for her, her one object in being there, was to take exercise, without thinking that she was seen, and that every head was turned towards her. Sometimes, however, when she had looked back to call her dog to her, she would cast, almost imperceptibly, a sweeping glance round about.

Those even who did not know her were warned by something exceptional, something beyond the normal in her — or perhaps by a telepathic suggestion such as would move an ignorant audience to a frenzy of applause when Berma (Sarah Bernhardt) was ‘sublime’— that she must be some one well-known. They would ask one another, “Who is she?”, or sometimes would interrogate a passing stranger, or would make a mental note of how she was dressed so as to fix her identity, later, in the mind of a friend better informed than themselves, who would at once enlighten them. Another pair, half-stopping in their walk, would exchange:

“You know who that is? Mme. Swann! That conveys nothing to you? Odette de Crécy, then?”

“Odette de Crécy! Why, I thought as much. Those great, sad eyes... But I say, you know, she can’t be as young as she was once, eh? I remember, I had her on the day that MacMahon went.”

“I shouldn’t remind her of it, if I were you. She is now Mme. Swann, the wife of a gentleman in the Jockey Club, a friend of the Prince of Wales. Apart from that, though, she is wonderful still.”

“Oh, but you ought to have known her then; Gad, she was lovely! She lived in a very odd little house with a lot of Chinese stuff. I remember, we were bothered all the time by the newsboys, shouting outside; in the end she made me get up and go.”

Without listening to these memories, I could feel all about her the indistinct murmur of fame. My heart leaped with impatience when I thought that a few seconds must still elapse before all these people, among whom I was dismayed not to find a certain mulatto banker who (or so I felt) had a contempt for me, were to see the unknown youth, to whom they had not, so far, been paying the slightest attention, salute (without knowing her, it was true, but I thought that I had sufficient authority since my parents knew her husband and I was her daughter’s playmate) this woman whose reputation for beauty, for misconduct, and for elegance was universal. But I was now close to Mme. Swann; I pulled off my hat with so lavish, so prolonged a gesture that she could not repress a smile. People laughed. As for her, she had never seen me with Gilberte, she did not know my name, but I was for her — like one of the keepers in the Bois, like the boatman, or the ducks on the lake, to which she threw scraps of bread — one of the minor personages, familiar, nameless, as devoid of individual character as a stage-hand in a theatre, of her daily walks abroad.

Du Côté de Chez Swann, Noms de Pays: Le Nom  Marcel Proust  1922;  translated by C. K. Scott Moncrief 1930.

The phrasing in the last paragraph is extraordinary.  Reading about the act of a child in servitude to his imagination and to "this woman whose reputation for beauty, for misconduct, and for elegance was universal," we also can't repress a smile.

The life of Swann’s love, the fidelity of his jealousy, were formed out of death, of infidelity, of innumerable desires, innumerable doubts, all of which had Odette for their object. If he had remained for any length of time without seeing her, those that died would not have been replaced by others. But the presence of Odette continued to sow in Swann’s heart alternate seeds of love and suspicion. 

Du Côté de Chez Swann, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu Tome I  Marcel Proust 1913;  Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff 1922.

Seeking solace for his faltering relationship with Odette—a demimondaine with whom he has fallen in love—who now sees other men, Swann returns to high society in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. At a ball he sees his friend, the Princess des Laumes.

    "...We are indulging in the most refined form of humour, my dear Charles—but how tiresome it is that I never see you now,” she went on in a coaxing tone, “I do so love talking to you...  Do agree that life is a dreadful business. It’s only when I see you that I stop feeling bored.”

    Which was probably not true. But Swann and the Princess had the same way of looking at the little things of life... Since Swann had become so melancholy, and was always in that trembling condition which precedes a flood of tears, he had the same need to speak about his grief that a murderer has to tell some one about his crime. And when he heard the Princess say that life was a dreadful business, he felt as much comforted as if she had spoken to him of Odette.

    “Yes, life is a dreadful business! We must meet more often, my dear friend. What is so nice about you is that you are not cheerful. We could spend a most pleasant evening together.”

Du Côté de Chez Swann Marcel Proust 1913; translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff 1922

“I swear to you,” Swann told Odette, shortly before she was to leave for the theatre, “that, in asking you not to go, I should hope, were I a selfish man, for nothing so much as that you should refuse, for I have a thousand other things to do this evening, and I shall feel that I have been tricked and trapped myself, and shall be thoroughly annoyed, if, after all, you tell me that you are not going.

But my occupations, my pleasures are not everything; I must think of you also.

A day may come when, seeing me irrevocably sundered from you, you will be entitled to reproach me for not having warned you at the decisive hour in which I passed judgment on you, one of those stern judgments which love cannot overcome..."

—Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, 1913.  My translation, my emphasis.

Swann catches Odette ineptly lying to him about someone else she's seeing.  So in love with her he is; "Poor darling," he pitys her rather than himself.

He had an idea that it was not merely the truth about what had occurred that afternoon that she was endeavouring to hide from him, but something more immediate, something, possibly, which had not yet happened, but might happen now at any time, and, when it did, would throw a light upon that earlier event.

At that moment, he heard the front-door bell ring.  Odette never stopped speaking, but her words dwindled into an inarticulate moan.

—Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, 1913.  Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, 1922.

Again,

But then, at once, his jealousy, as it had been the shadow of his love, presented him with the complement, /with the converse of that new smile with which she had greeted him that very evening,—with which, now, perversely, /she was mocking Swann while she tendered her love to another—of that lowering of her head, but lowered now to fall on other lips, /and (but bestowed upon a stranger) of all the marks of affection that she had shewn to him. /And all these voluptuous memories which he bore away from her house were, as one might say, but so many sketches, rough plans, /like the schemes of decoration which a designer submits to one in outline, enabling Swann to form an idea of the various attitudes, /aflame or faint with passion, which she was capable of adopting for others. /With the result that he came to regret every pleasure that he tasted in her company, /every new caress that he invented (and had been so imprudent as to point out to her how delightful it was), /every fresh charm that he found in her, for he knew that, a moment later, /they would go to enrich the collection of instruments in his secret torture-chamber.

Swann's Way  Marcel Proust 1913; as delivered to my iPhone by Twitter;  translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff 1922.

"One day, when reflections of this order had brought him once again to the memory of the time when some one had spoken to him of Odette as of a ‘kept’ woman, and when, once again, he had amused himself with contrasting that strange personification, the ‘kept’ woman—an iridescent mixture of unknown and demoniacal qualities, embroidered, as in some fantasy of Gustave Moreau, with poison-dripping flowers, interwoven with precious jewels—with that Odette upon whose face he had watched the passage of the same expressions of pity for a sufferer, resentment of an act of injustice, gratitude for an act of kindness, which he had seen, in earlier days, on his own mother’s face, and on the faces of friends; that Odette, whose conversation had so frequently turned on the things that he himself knew better than anyone, his collections, his room, his old servant, his banker, who kept all his title-deeds and bonds;—the thought of the banker reminded him that he must call on him shortly, to draw some money.

And indeed, if, during the current month, he were to come less liberally to the aid of Odette in her financial difficulties than in the month before, when he had given her five thousand francs, if he refrained from offering her a diamond necklace for which she longed, he would be allowing her admiration for his generosity to decline, that gratitude which had made him so happy, and would even be running the risk of her imagining that his love for her (as she saw its visible manifestations grow fewer) had itself diminished.

And then, suddenly, he asked himself whether that was not precisely what was implied by ‘keeping’ a woman (as if, in fact, that idea of ‘keeping’ could be derived from elements not at all mysterious nor perverse, but belonging to the intimate routine of his daily life, such as that thousand-franc note, a familiar and domestic object, torn in places and mended with gummed paper, which his valet, after paying the household accounts and the rent, had locked up in a drawer of the old writing-desk whence he had extracted it to send it, with four others, to Odette) and whether it was not possible to apply to Odette, since he had known her (for he never imagined for a moment that she could ever have taken a penny from anyone else, before), that title, which he had believed so wholly inapplicable to her, of ‘kept’ woman."

On Twitter (proustr) I follow Swann in Love  1913, Marcel Proust, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.  The first of these three sentences, delivered once an hour in approximate 140 character segments, began on May 16th at 0:38; the final sentence concluded on May 16th at 23:38, exactly 24 hours later.

At this pace, I can re-read & think through those woven Proustian sentences (or question the translation)  anywhere I am being they're on my constant companion, my iPhone.  I don't have to find the book and make the time or find a place on the N train uptown  to read. 

"...he says something, not because it is true but because he enjoys saying it, and listens to his own voice uttering the words as though they came from some one else..."

Marcel Proust, 1913

This time on Twitter @proustr,  Swann's Way*, once every hour, 140 characters at a time or "Actually...phrase(s) at a time, where a phrase is a...way to break up a sentence at a logical point."

From chapter three, Swann in Love, the following sentence was delivered in 5 installments; it began with a tweet at 7:38 AM and concluded with a tweet at 11:38 AM.

But, now that he was in love with Odette, all this was changed; to share her sympathies,

to strive to be one with her in spirit was a task so attractive that he tried to find satisfaction in the things that she liked,

and did find a pleasure, not only in copying her habits but in adopting her opinions, which was all the deeper because,

as those habits and opinions sprang from no roots in her intelligence, they suggested to him nothing except that love,

for the sake of which(,) he had preferred them to his own.

Let Swann's pedantry for beauty, that he subordinates to his love of Odette, be mine for the intriguing Proustian syntax that I savour in this periodic, phrase-by-phrase reading of the novel. 

Does anyone beside me think that the translation needs the parenthetical comma I added?  Here is the sentence as Proust wrote it.

Mais, au contraire, depuis qu’il aimait Odette, sympathiser avec elle, tâcher de n’avoir qu’une âme à eux deux lui était si doux, qu’il cherchait à se plaire aux choses qu’elle aimait, et il trouvait un plaisir d’autant plus profond non seulement à imiter ses habitudes, mais à adopter ses opinions, que, comme elles n’avaient aucune racine dans sa propre intelligence, elles lui rappelaient seulement son amour, à cause duquel il les avait préférées.

You decide; as Shakespeare wrote, but not about your French, "...but that was in another country and besides the wench is dead."

*Du côté de chez Swann translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.

Love's pendulum:

When he came away from Odette, he was happy, he felt calm, he recalled the smile with which, in gentle mockery, she had spoken to him of this man or of that, a smile which was all tenderness for himself; he recalled the gravity of her head which she seemed to have lifted from its axis to let it droop and fall, as though against her will, upon his lips, as she had done on that first evening in the carriage; her languishing gaze at him while she lay nestling in his arms, her bended head seeming to recede between her shoulders, as though shrinking from the cold.

But then, at once, his jealousy, as it had been the shadow of his love, presented him with the complement, with the converse of that new smile with which she had greeted him that very evening—with which, now, perversely, she was mocking Swann while she tendered her love to another—of that lowering of her head, but lowered now to fall on other lips, and (but bestowed upon a stranger) of all the marks of affection that she had shewn to him. And all these voluptuous memories which he bore away from her house were, as one might say, but so many sketches, rough plans, like the schemes of decoration which a designer submits to one in outline, enabling Swann to form an idea of the various attitudes, aflame or faint with passion, which she was capable of adopting for others. With the result that he came to regret every pleasure that he tasted in her company, every new caress that he invented (and had been so imprudent as to point out to her how delightful it was), every fresh charm that he found in her, for he knew that, a moment later, they would go to enrich the collection of instruments in his secret torture-chamber.

—Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, 1913.  Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.

A forbidden visit:

Even before he saw Odette, even if he did not succeed in seeing her there, what a joy it would be to set foot on that soil where, not knowing the exact spot in which, at any moment, she was to be found, he would feel all around him the thrilling possibility of her suddenly appearing: in the courtyard of the Château, now beautiful in his eyes since it was on her account that he had gone to visit it; in all the streets of the town, which struck him as romantic; down every ride of the forest, roseate with the deep and tender glow of sunset—innumerable and alternative hiding-places, to which would fly simultaneously for refuge, in the uncertain ubiquity of his hopes, his happy, vagabond and divided heart.

—Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, 1913.  Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.

A good cup of tea:

He would escort her to her gate, but no farther. Twice only had he gone inside to take part in the ceremony—of such vital importance in her life—of ‘afternoon tea.’ The loneliness and emptiness of those short streets (consisting, almost entirely, of low-roofed houses, self-contained but not detached, their monotony interrupted here and there by the dark intrusion of some sinister little shop, at once an historical document and a sordid survival from the days when the district was still one of ill repute), the snow which had lain on the garden-beds or clung to the branches of the trees, the careless disarray of the season, the assertion, in this man-made city, of a state of nature, had all combined to add an element of mystery to the warmth, the flowers, the luxury which he had found inside...

Odette had received him in a tea-gown of pink silk, which left her neck and arms bare. She had made him sit down beside her in one of the many mysterious little retreats which had been contrived in the various recesses of the room, sheltered by enormous palmtrees growing out of pots of Chinese porcelain, or by screens upon which were fastened photographs and fans and bows of ribbon. She had said at once, “You’re not comfortable there; wait a minute, I’ll arrange things for you,” and with a titter of laughter, the complacency of which implied that some little invention of her own was being brought into play, she had installed behind his head and beneath his feet great cushions of Japanese silk, which she pummelled and buffeted as though determined to lavish on him all her riches, and regardless of their value...

She poured out Swann’s tea, inquired “Lemon or cream?” and, on his answering “Cream, please,” went on, smiling, “A cloud!” And as he pronounced it excellent, “You see, I know just how you like it.”

This tea had indeed seemed to Swann, just as it seemed to her, something precious, and love is so far obliged to find some justification for itself, some guarantee of its duration in pleasures which, on the contrary, would have no existence apart from love and must cease with its passing,* that when he left her, at seven o’clock, to go and dress for the evening, all the way home, sitting bolt upright in his brougham, unable to repress the happiness with which the afternoon’s adventure had filled him, he kept on repeating to himself: “What fun it would be to have a little woman like that in a place where one could always be certain of finding, what one never can be certain of finding, a really good cup of tea.”

—Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, 1913.  Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.

*À la recherche d'amor perdu, my emphasis.

On a phrase from an imaginary sonata:

With a slow and rhythmical movement it led him (Swann) here, there, everywhere, towards a state of happiness, noble, unintelligible, yet clearly indicated. And then, suddenly having reached a certain point from which he was prepared to follow it, after pausing for a moment, abruptly it changed its direction, and in a fresh movement, more rapid, multiform, melancholy, incessant, sweet, it bore him off with it towards a vista of joys unknown. Then it vanished. He hoped, with a passionate longing, that he might find it again, a third time. And reappear it did, though without speaking to him more clearly, bringing him, indeed, a pleasure less profound. But when he was once more at home he needed it, he was like a man into whose life a woman, whom he has seen for a moment passing by, has brought a new form of beauty, which strengthens and enlarges his own power of perception, without his knowing even whether he is ever to see her again whom he loves already, although he knows nothing of her, not even her name. 

—Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, 1913.  Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.

The NYS Sheep & Wool Festival occurs in Rhinebeck at the Dutchess Co. Fairgrounds every year on the third weekend in October.  It is the largest event of its kind in the Northeast; Sunday was a cool and gray day outside under the leaves changing from greens to ochres then oranges.

Many thousands of people come to look at the sheep and  buy from the wool vendors in their stands.   There were no Merino sheep this year; Dominique and I looked at  Romneys, Rambouillets, Oxfords, Leicesters, Cotswalds and  Suffolks—sheep smell like home—and we looked at the yarn displays for ideas on how to better display the yarn at market. 

Peggy Hart, a weaver in her stand at Rhinebeck

Several years ago, Peggy wove blankets for me with yarn spun from my merino wool; New Yorkers loved them.  She and I talked about weaving more throws; I photographed her latest work for reference when we discuss designs—all hers are unique—Peggy likes the challenge of weaving ideas and patterns that are new.  See her work at Bedfellows Blankets where you'll see two examples of  the merino blankets she wove along with a picture of several of my ewes.

Also I wanted to meet Clara Parkes, who was there signing copies of her new book, The Knitters Book of Wool in which, among other things, she reestablishes the link between wool and sheep, pasture and farms.  Here are excerpts about the book from her newsletter The Knitters Review to which you can subscribe:

I'm drawn to yarns that have more of a story, whether it's the fibers, the mill, or the dyer. And the yarns I really love tend to come straight from the farm. Call me romantic, but when the hands that nurtured an animal hand you a skein of its yarn, you get a more meaningful, enduring product.

and

Because really, nothing beats wool. It's an extraordinary material—annually renewable and recyclable—with infinite potential. It can be wispy and sensual when it wants to be, it can be gruff and powerful, it can put out fires and keep families warm at night, it can be stepped on, sat under, rained on, and wrapped up in again and again.

Among other very useful items in her newsletter, she knits up and reviews a new yarn  almost every week.  I've learned much from Clara on yarn  She signed my copy of her book and we talked; I told her I would send her some of my yarn.

Winding through the crowds seeing more people I knew, "Hi" to Madeline Nichols of Ewe & Me Merinos who bought my 11th born sheep, a ram named "Elf," back in the 80's.  Her stand gets fuller and better every year she does Rhinebeck and  "Hi" to Deirdre of Greener Shades, an ecologically correct dye supplier who spins in Connecticut.

We were hungry. From a stand that might have been called Shakespeare's Spuds, Dominique and I bought for $7.00 an overflowing, supersize order of french fries which we salted well—one, two, three shakes and four—and splashed them with malt vinegar too.  We found a dry place to eat under a large tree. So hungry,  we didn't care if the potatoes came from a field down the road or from the mountains of Peru, O the hot oil deliciously dripped off them: trans-fat, sans-fat; who gives a fat when you're hungry—these were fries from God—we began to devour them with such gusto that several well-dressed, matronly passers-by stopped and spoke about the fries, "Greasy, they look greasy, are they greasy?" "But they do look good." To every one and to no one in particular with my mouth full I said, "Yes, these are greasy-good fries." Where did you get them," we were asked by a chorus whose caloric guilt had been overcome at the sight of  us delightfully going down and I couldn't help but think of kids looking in the smeared front window of a McDonalds in East Harlem—now you know—I wiped salty, glistening fingers on my Levis and pointed to the stand, "There, Let the sky rain potatoes."  We continued along toward the exit.

At the gate, and into my box truck, we loaded 10 round bale feeders (40  steel panels) from Sydell, a manufacturer of sheep handling equipment in South Dakota, who trucks your order to Rhinebeck waiving the shipping charge if you pick it up there.  The feeder design is excellent; it collapses (slides together) to always contact  the round bale permitting the sheep eat it away.  It's safe and they don't waste the hay.

Crossing the Hudson at Kingston—the feeders clanging on the bumps—heading south on the Thruway in the Sunday city-bound traffic—hoping that Dominique wouldn't mind—I played a download from Audible.com of Proust's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and read well by John Rowe. 

Listening to Proust in the hesitating traffic—speeding up to slow down again—this serpentine somewhat periodic sentence had me waiting for its conclusion, even though I was lost in its middle;  this is where the narrator pays a surprise visit to his uncle in Paris and finds him with the "lady in pink."  

And yet, when I thought of what her life must be like, its immorality disturbed me more, perhaps, than if it had stood before me in some concrete and recognizable form, by its secrecy and invisibility, like the plot of a novel, the hidden truth of a scandal which had driven out of the home of her middle-class parents and dedicated to the service of all mankind which had brought to the flowering-point of her beauty, had raised to fame or notoriety, the play of whose features, the intonations of whose voice, like so many others I already knew, made me regard her, in spite of myself, as a young lady of good family, her who was no longer of a family at all.

The French is difficult. I looked at the original before I changed  Moncrieff's translation above.  I am still lost in the middle, but now as M. Proust would have me lost, or so I hope.