“Those charming associations that a young girl affords with a sea-shore, with the braided tresses of a statue in a church, with an old print, with everything that causes one to love in her, whenever she appears, a delightful picture, those associations are not very stable. When you come to live with a woman you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love her” (p.481)
This is something which saddens me deeply. generally proust´s ideas are food for thought but this particular one forces me to think of him as a cinic. on the other hand, (and perhaps this is why i find proust´s words sad, almost depressive) i must agree with him completely. yes, once you get to know people then the first impression fades away and what emerges is a new pattern which makes you decide whether you want to adapt your sensibility to the new circumstances or just run away.
i find proust´s words quite sad because he doesn`t give room to love. it seems that love is just a subjective construction and nothing else. once such construction vanishes into thin air then you realise that you have wasted your time, your energy and your money. you feel as if someone had laughed at you all those afternoons you spent thinking you were loved and respected. a very depressive feeling, indeed.
it is as if juliet were abandoning romeo
Filed under: amistad
antes de formar juicios sobre mi conducta sepan que cada historia tiene dos versiones, que aunque los chismes pueden ser jugosos en realidad es la forma más ociosa de pasar el tiempo. También recuerden que desde que hay dos versiones de una historia la verdad o la moral dejan de tener sentido o lo tienen según quien cuente la historia, y quien cuenta primero la historia es, generalmente, el que quiere dañar la reputación del otro.
Casi por último, aunque los chismes son jugosos y nos hacen sentir que pertenecemos a un grupo en donde las buenas costumbres están por encima de cualquier otra cosa ¡por favor! … no nos hagamos … los chismes brotan de viejas frustraciones, de insatisfacciones que (sin importar cuantos grados académicos se obtengan o cuántas conferencias se den o cuántos libros se publiquen con nuestro nombre) nunca se subsanarán porque nuestra alma ha sido maltrada desde el principio.
Y, ahora sí, por último: una vida entera que se dedica a contar chismes es una vida perdida.
Filed under: Proust
“We went into the sickroom. Bent in a semi-circle on the bed, a creature other than my grandmother, a sort of beast that had put on her hair and crouched among her bedclothes, lay panting, whimpering, making the blankets heave with its convulsions.” (p. 458)
“Life in withdrawing from her had taken with it the disillusionments of life. A smile seemed to be hovering on my grandmother´s lips. On that funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the Middle Ages, had laid her down in the form of a young girl.” (p. 471)
Filed under: Proust
to read a book for the second time has sense if we discover some hidden treasures which we didn´t notice during our first reading; and this is exactly what happened some weeks ago.
one day i read:
“Well, one of the reasons [...] why I should like to meet the said lady-you know who I mean, don´t you?” “Of course I do. All these digressions!”
and then, some days ago, i began to think on what i have read and, all of a sudden, i remembered this
“[...] you remember the lady i was speaking to you about just now.” “Yes.” “You´re quite sure you know who i mean?” “Why, what do you take me for, a village idiot?”
the first fragment takes place in page 164 while the other one in 131. it may be my imagination but since both fragments where written by proust i cannot help thinking that exists a subtle link between them. they share the same topic, of course (the desire of the narrator to meet some lady), but also the way in which the narrator says what he wants. Even when proust takes especial care to make the subject of his narrator´s request ambiguous, “you know who i mean”, one has a clear image of the importance of such desire.
the interesting thing (which is the real “subtle link”) is that one remembers both fragments as if the narrator where telling us his desire, as if we were the ones who can make this meeting possible. and most enigmatic of all: we experience time in a very peculiar way. if you read proust, time is as if we were not reading anything but living, actually living what we are reading. And our reading has to do with gossip, time passing, love, death, art and, also, the process of reading faces, the weather, love letters, books, paintings etc
this last characteristic is the most difficult to understand because it has to do with our experience of life and our experience of reading a book. sometimes happens that we are so much into our reading that we began to understand life through a book and we forget that a book is, first of all, an aesthetical event which only resembles life in a very rare way. such books are so complex because life and literature are strongly mingled; such books become a mirror but also a lense.
though it is hot and crowded, and people fight aggressively for a seat and do not make way when one needs to get down; though it is true all that, i need to say that in the metro (as we call our subway) i read Proust:
“It is in sickness that we are compelled to recognise that we do not live alone but are chained to a being from a different realm, from whom we are worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.” (p. 404)
