Days of Reading by Marcel Proust

Author:Marcel Proust
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141963396
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

Scented with clover and artemisia

Gripping their quick, narrow streams

The country of the Aisne and of the Oise.

‘Look at the house in Zeeland, pink and shiny as a seashell. Look! Learn to see!’ At which moment he disappears. That is the value of reading, and also its inadequacy. To make it into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.

There are certain cases, however, certain as it were pathological cases of spiritual depression, when reading may become a sort of healing discipline and be entrusted, by way of repeated incitements, with reintroducing a lazy mind perpetually into the life of the spirit. Then books play a role for it analogous to that of psychotherapists for certain cases of neurasthenia.

We know that in certain affections of the nervous system, without any of the organs themselves being affected, the patient is mired in a sort of impossibility of willing, as if in a deep rut, from which he cannot escape unaided and where ultimately he would waste away, if a strong and helping hand were not held out to him. His brain, his legs, his lungs, his stomach are sound. He is not truly incapacitated from working, from walking, from exposing himself to the cold, from eating. But he is incapable of willing these various actions, which he would be perfectly capable of performing. And an organic degeneration, which would end by becoming the equivalent of the diseases he does not have, would be the irremediable consequence of this inertia of the will, if the impulsion he is unable to find in himself were not to come to him from outside, from a doctor who will will for him, until such time as his various organic wills have been re-educated. Now there exist certain minds that might be compared to patients such as these, who are prevented by a sort of laziness4 or frivolity from descending spontaneously into the deeper parts of the self where the true life of the spirit begins. It is not that once they have been shown the way there they are incapable of discovering and exploiting its true riches, but that, failing such intervention from without, they live on the surface in a perpetual forgetfulness of themselves, in a sort of passivity which makes them the plaything of every pleasure and reduces them to the stature of those roundabout who excite them, so that, like the man of gentle birth who, having shared the life of highway robbers ever since childhood, could not remember his name any more so long ago was it that he had ceased to bear it, they would end by abolishing in themselves all sense and recollection of their spiritual nobility, were an outside impulsion not to come to reintroduce them forcibly in a sense into the life of the mind, where they suddenly recover the power of thinking for themselves and of creating.

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