To All Collectors

Even when one is no longer attached to things, it’s still something to have been attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didn’t grasp… Well, now that I’m a little too weary to live with other people, these old feelings, so personal and individual, that I had in the past, seem to me – it’s the mania of all collectors – very precious. I open my heart to myself like a sort of vitrine, and examine one by one all those love affairs of which the world can know nothing. And of this collection to which I’m now much more attached than to my others, I say to myself, rather as Mazarin said of his books, but in fact without the least distress, that it will be very tiresome to have to leave it all.
Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (Cities of the Plain) via The Hare with Amber Eyes

In The Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

In Search of Lost Time Volume II: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Marcel Proust

The epic read continues… Overall this second volume was more enjoyable than the first, although perhaps not as beautiful. The book has the tone of memory; the best way I can describe it is that the narrator has tinted everything to a certain hue. And I definitely get the impression I have met some characters that come to be very important in the future. I struggled with keeping the names of everyone straight but I think its understandable with Proust’s 10000+ creations!

MP

Still coming towards me, [the trees] might have been some mythological apparition, a coven of witches, a group of Norns propounding oracles. But I saw them as ghosts from my past, beloved companions from childhood, sometime friends reminding me of shared moments. Like risen shades, they seemed to be asking me to take them with me, to bring them back to the realm of the living.
Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

MP

I was saddened by the loss of my strip of pink sky, when I caught sight of it again, now reddening, in the window on the other side, from which it disappeared at another bend in the line. And I dodged from one window to the other, trying to reassemble the offset intermittent fragments of my lovely, changeable red morning, so as to see it for once as a single lasting picture.
Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

MP

The best way to gain time is to change place.
Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

MP

Because you are now in love with someone who will one day mean nothing to you, you refuse out of hand to meet someone who means nothing to you now, but whom you will one day come to love, someone whom whom you might have loved sooner if you had agreed to an earlier meeting, who might have curtailed your present sufferings (before replacing them, of course, with others).
Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

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What makes one so happy is the presence of something unstable in the heart, something one contrives constantly to keep in a state of stability, and which one is hardly even aware of as long as it remains like that.
Marcel Proust on love, In Search of Lost Time: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

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Perhaps there is only a single mind, in which everybody has a share, a mind to which all of us look, isolated though each of us is within a private body, just as at the theatre where, though every spectator sits in a separate place, there is only one stage.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

Swann’s Way

In Search of Lost Time Volume I: Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust

It was a long time coming, but I finally finished the first volume of Proust’s epic. One of the most beautiful writers of all time, once you get used to the pace. Proust’s narrative is incredibly easy going, ambling along – you’ll get all the information, but all in good time. I must admit it took me a little while to get into reading without want of ‘action’ but it was worth the effort. You’ll be turning page after page of atmosphere and memory to all of a sudden be struck by a sentence that is so true to the entirety of human nature, so concise, so evocative and so genuinely brilliant that its like being hit in the face.

This is a novel about love and childhood, time and memory, lost moments and recaptured lives. There is one particular image that will always stick with me when I think about this book: The moment in between sleeping and waking up when you create how you expect the room you are sleeping in to look before you open your eyes. I imagine this like all the pieces of furniture and ornaments whirling about the space and touching down in various scenarios as you think through all the rooms you could be asleep in. As you can see, the tiniest of details are given so much meaning. And the meaning is familiar.

My attitude to reading the rest of Proust is that I have a whole lifetime to do it. I think if you’ve read him, you’ll understand the feeling.

The reality that I had known no longer existed. … The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of an image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
In Search of Lost Time Volume I: Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust