Finding Time Again: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 7 by Marcel Proust

Author:Marcel Proust [Proust, Marcel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

At that moment the butler came to tell me that, the first piece having ended, I could leave the library and enter the drawing-rooms. This made me recollect where I was. But I was not at all disturbed in the train of thought which I had just begun by the fact that a fashionable party, my return to society, had provided me with my point of departure for a new life which I had not been able to find in solitude. There was nothing extraordinary about this fact, an impression capable of resuscitating the eternal man in me not necessarily being linked to solitude any more than to society (as I had once thought it was, as had perhaps once been the case for me, as ought still perhaps to be the case if I had developed harmoniously, instead of experiencing this long intermission, which seemed only now to be ending). For experiencing this impression of beauty only when, in the grip of some immediate sensation, however insignificant, a similar sensation, spontaneously re-arising within me, had just extended the first over several periods of time at once, and filled my soul, where individual sensations usually left so much emptiness, with a general essence, there was no reason why I should not receive sensations of this kind in society as much as in the natural world, since they are produced by chance, helped doubtless by the particular excitement which, on the days when one finds oneself outside the regular tenor of life, makes even the simplest things start to give us sensations which habit usually makes us spare our nervous system. I was going to try to find the objective reason why it should be precisely and uniquely this kind of sensation which led to the work of art, by continuing the thoughts which had come to me in such rapid sequence in the library; for I felt that the impetus given to my intellectual life was now strong enough for me to be able to continue as successfully in the drawing-room, among all the guests, as alone in the library; it seemed that, from this point of view, even in the midst of this large gathering I should be able to retain my solitude. Because for the same reason that great events do not impinge from outside on our mental powers, and that a third-rate writer living in an epic epoch will remain just as poor a writer, what was really dangerous in society was the socialite attitude one brings to it. By itself it was no more capable of rendering you third-rate than a heroic war was capable of making a third-rate poet sublime.

In any case, whether it was theoretically useful or not that the work of art was constituted in this fashion, and while I was waiting until I had examined this point as fully as I was intending to, I could not deny that so far as I was concerned, whenever truly aesthetic impressions had come to me, it had always been after sensations of this kind.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.