Encounters and Destinies by Stefan Zweig

Author:Stefan Zweig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

MARCEL PROUST’S TRAGIC LIFE COURSE

(1925)

He is born in the dying days of the war on 10th July 1871, in Paris, son of a distinguished physician, from a wealthy, very wealthy bourgeois family. But neither the art of the father nor the immense fortune of the mother is able to rescue his childhood: at the age of nine, little Marcel loses his robust health for ever. Returning from a walk in the Bois de Boulogne, he is attacked by an asthmatic convulsion, and these terrible seizures crush his chest for the remainder of his life, right up to his final breath. Beyond his ninth year almost everything has been forbidden: travel, carefree games, acts of agility, high spirits, everything that is childhood. Thus he becomes an observer early on, sensitive, with heightened nerves, easily unsettled, a being with an acute irritability of the senses. He passionately loves the landscape, but rarely can he lay eyes on it, and never in spring: the fine dust of the pollen, the oppressiveness and gravidity of nature are too painful for his inflamed nerves. He loves flowers with a passion but he is not permitted to approach them. Even when a friend enters the room with a carnation in his buttonhole he is requested to remove it, and a visit to a salon where the table is adorned with bouquets forces him to retire to his bed for days on end. Sometimes he drives out in a closed car to see the cherished colours, the breathing calyxes from behind glass. And he takes books, books, books, to read about travel, of the landscapes he can never reach. Once he makes it to Venice, a handful of times the sea; but each of these trips costs him dearly in strength. So he finds himself virtually a prisoner in Paris.

His perception of all that is human becomes ever more delicate. The voice of a conversation, the clasp in a woman’s hair, the way one sits at a table and stands up, all the finest ornaments of the social milieu affix to his memory with incomparable exactitude. The meticulous detail captures his ever-wakeful eye between blinks, all the connections, twists and turns, snaking around and pauses in a conversation remain lodged in his ears with their vibrations undisturbed. Thus, in his novel he can later keep up Count Norpois’s conversation for one hundred and fifty pages and there is no pause for breath, no hesitation and no transition: his eye is alert and active on behalf of all the other exhausted organs.

Originally the parents decided that study and diplomacy would be the best course for him, but all intentions fail due to his ill health. But there is no immediate rush, his parents are well off, his mother adores him—so he squanders his years in society affairs and salons and until the age of thirty-five leads, in fact, the most absurd, foolish, futile, most aimless existence that has ever preceded a great artist, propelling himself as a snob

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