#marcel proust novels

[novlr]

[soisaidfine]

Kleist wrote to his fiancée: "What is evil? The things of this world are intertwined and connected by a thousand threads; every action is the mother of millions of others, the worst generates the best."

Bruce Springsteen: "Adam raised a Cain" Ethel Cain: "We’re all daughters of Cain"

Stéphane Braunschweig: "In The Schroffenstein Family, there is this very important theme of the falsely accused—a Hitchcockian theme: how can one prove their innocence when everything seems to indicate their guilt? All the characters are innocent in action but as soon as they are told they could be guilty, as soon as suspicion falls on their innocence, they become terribly anxious. In Kafka's work, this issue leads to the question of responsibility. What makes one innocently guilty in Kafka's view is that one is—in the Judaic sense—responsible for the other: for Kafka, the other profoundly exists; even if living this reality is difficult, the other is there, as other. In Kleist's work, on the contrary, innocent guilt leads to a question of irresponsibility."

Anne-Françoise Benhamou: "This questioning of the notion of responsibility is at the heart of Kleist's famous 'Kantian crisis.' He wrote to his fiancée at the time:

"And what does it mean to do evil, judging by its effects? What is evil? Absolutely evil? The things of this world are intertwined and connected by a thousand threads; every action is the mother of millions of others, and often the worst generates the best. Who on this earth, tell me, has ever committed an act of pure evil—something that would be evil for all eternity?"

One almost thinks of Dostoevsky… And it’s also understandable why Nietzsche loved Kleist so much."

Stéphane Braunschweig: "It is a work constantly permeated by fantasy. And the fantasies present are very elementary; they are almost like childhood anxieties: the fantasy of destroying the other, of being destroyed by the other. Kleist constantly brings us back to archaic impulses. Whatever the complexity of the plot or situation, these primitive affects are always there; this is what is unsettling and makes us uncomfortable. And at the same time, what I love in his work is that this discomfort is accompanied by jubilation. Perhaps because at a certain point, it feels as if there is no censorship at all… as if we are, in a way, in a theater without a superego." - September 2002, Stéphane Braunschweig

"this relationship that almost always exists in human punishment, creating a situation in which there is almost never a fair sentence or a judicial error, but rather a sort of harmony between the judge's mistaken idea of an innocent act and the guilty facts they have overlooked." - Marcel Proust

[litandlifequotes]

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time.

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

[ofgreatart]

'the Dostoevsky woman (as distinctive as a Rembrandt woman) with her mysterious face, whose engaging beauty changes abruptly, as though her apparent good nature had been but make-believe, to a terrible insolence.' (Marcel Proust)

+ Terrence Malick, Olga Kurylenko: 'He wanted me to combine their influences—the romantic and innocent side, with the insolent and daring side.'

Nastasya Filippovna - Dostoevsky (The Idiot)

“I know that once when your sister Adelaida saw my portrait she said that such beauty could overthrow the world. But I have renounced the world. You think it strange that I should say so, for you saw me decked with lace and diamonds, in the company of drunkards and wastrels. Take no notice of that; I know that I have almost ceased to exist. God knows what it is dwelling within me now–it is not myself. I can see it every day in two dreadful eyes which are always looking at me, even when not present. These eyes are silent now, they say nothing; but I know their secret. His house is gloomy, and there is a secret in it. I am convinced that in some box he has a razor hidden, tied round with silk, just like the one that Moscow murderer had. This man also lived with his mother, and had a razor hidden away, tied round with white silk, and with this razor he intended to cut a throat.

All the while I was in their house I felt sure that somewhere beneath the floor there was hidden away some dreadful corpse, wrapped in oil-cloth, perhaps buried there by his father, who knows? Just as in the Moscow case. I could have shown you the very spot!

He is always silent, but I know well that he loves me so much that he must hate me. My wedding and yours are to be on the same day; so I have arranged with him. I have no secrets from him. I would kill him from very fright, but he will kill me first. He has just burst out laughing, and says that I am raving. He knows I am writing to you.”

Dostoevsky’s Nastasya Filippovna from “THE IDIOT” (Snegovski _)

“but when he was two rooms distant from the drawing-room, where they all were, he stopped as though recalling something; went to the window, nearer the light, and began to examine the portrait in his hand.

He longed to solve the mystery of something in the face of Nastasia Philipovna, something which had struck him as he looked at the portrait for the first time; the impression had not left him. It was partly the fact of her marvellous beauty that struck him, and partly something else. There was a suggestion of immense pride and disdain in the face almost of hatred, and at the same time something confiding and very full of simplicity. The contrast aroused a deep sympathy in his heart as he looked at the lovely face. The blinding loveliness of it was almost intolerable, this pale thin face with its flaming eyes; it was a strange beauty.

The prince gazed at it for a minute or two, then glanced around him, and hurriedly raised the portrait to his lips. When, a minute after, he reached the drawing-room door, his face was quite composed.

…

Mrs. Epanchin examined the portrait of Nastasia Philipovna for some little while, holding it critically at arm’s length.

“Yes, she is pretty,” she said at last, “even very pretty. I have seen her twice, but only at a distance. So you admire this kind of beauty, do you?” she asked the prince, suddenly.

“Yes, I do—this kind.”

“Do you mean especially this kind?”

“Yes, especially this kind.”

“Why?”

“There is much suffering in this face,” murmured the prince, more as though talking to himself than answering the question.

“I think you are wandering a little, prince,” Mrs. Epanchin decided, after a lengthened survey of his face; and she tossed the portrait on to the table, haughtily.

Alexandra took it, and Adelaida came up, and both the girls examined the photograph. Just then Aglaya entered the room.

“What a power!” cried Adelaida suddenly, as she earnestly examined the portrait over her sister’s shoulder.

“Whom? What power?” asked her mother, crossly.

“Such beauty is real power,” said Adelaida. “With such beauty as that one might overthrow the world.” She returned to her easel thoughtfully.

Aglaya merely glanced at the portrait—frowned, and put out her underlip; then went and sat down on the sofa with folded hands.”

“The prince declares, upon marrying Nastasya Filippovna, that it is better to resurrect a woman than to perform the actions of Alexander of Macedonia.”

“The prince. Essential social conviction: the economic doctrine of the uselessness of individual good actions is absurd. On the contrary, everything is based on individual action.”

Dostoevsky, The Idiot’s Notebooks

Photo via X/Twitter

“All we Karamazovs are such insects, and, angel as you are, that insect lives in you, too, and will stir up a tempest in your blood. Tempests, because sensual lust is a tempest—worse than a tempest! Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side. I am not a cultivated man, brother, but I’ve thought a lot about this. It’s terrible what mysteries there are! Too many riddles weigh men down on earth. We must solve them as we can, and try to keep a dry skin in the water. Beauty!

… Yes, man is broad, too broad, indeed. I’d have him narrower. The devil only knows what to make of it! What to the mind is shameful is beauty and nothing else to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man. But a man always talks of his own ache.”

The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky

Marcel Proust: “Well, then, this novel beauty remains identical in all Dostoevsky’s works, the Dostoevsky woman (as distinctive as a Rembrandt woman) with her mysterious face, whose engaging beauty changes abruptly, as though her apparent good nature had been but make-believe, to a terrible insolence (although at heart it seems that she is more good than bad), is she not always the same, whether it be Nastasia Philipovna writing love letters to Aglaé and telling her that she hates her, or in a visit which is wholly identical with this — as also with that in which Nastasia Philipovna insults Vania’s family — Grouchenka, as charming in Katherina Ivanovna’s house as the other had supposed her to be terrible, then suddenly revealing her malevolence by insulting Katherina Ivanovna (although Grouchenka is good at heart); Grouchenka, Nastasia, figures as original, as mysterious not merely as Carpaccio’s courtesans but as Rembrandt’s Bathsheba.”

“This radiant, dual face, with sudden bursts of pride that make the woman appear other than she is (‘You are not such,’ Muichkine says to Nastasia in the visit to Gania’s parents, and Alyosha could say it to Grushenka in the visit to Katherina Ivanovna).”

Photo: Olga Kurylenko: Marina, To the Wonder, Terrence Malick

“Terrence Malick recommended that Olga Kurylenko read The Idiot with a particular eye on two characters: the young and prideful Aglaya Yepanchin, and the fallen, tragic Nastassya Filippovna.”

Olga Kurylenko: “He wanted me to combine their influences — the romantic and innocent side, with the insolent and daring side. ‘For some reason, you only ever see that combination in Russian characters,’ he said to me.”

“Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot: Those books were, in a way, his script,” Olga Kurylenko says”. - BEHIND THE SCENES: https://www.vulture.com/2013/04/how-terrence-malick-wrote-filmed-edited-to-the-wonder.html

…

“In To the Wonder (Terrence Malick), Marina (Olga Kurylenko) has a predisposition to melancholy,” Kurylenko says. “She’s a very unstable woman. She’s suffering. So when she meets a man, she sees him as the ending of all her suffering. But it’s just an illusion.” To prepare, Terrence Malick directed the actress to the bricks of Russian literature – Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy), The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot (Dostoevsky). Olga Kurylenko: “I didn’t even need the script after that. Those were my script. I built the character as a combination of the different female characters in those books.” https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/olga-kurylenko-talks-russian-literature-and-terrence-malick-181787/

"Terrence Malick asked me to reread Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot. All the three of them are that thick!" Olga Kurylenko, 'To The Wonder’, Terrence Malick

“Because life is not a thin book. It is terribly long, and tangled, and dense. Tolstoy didn’t even want to stop War and Peace. Two epilogues, eight new chapters… it was like Time itself in motion. And Dostoevsky, writing these gigantic books precisely because he always wants to start reality anew.” George Steiner, translated from French

[the-ephemeral-ethereal]

'Life' contains situations more interesting, more novelistic than any novel.

from In Search of Lost Time, Book 1: Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

[britneyshakespeare]

inspired by a conversation w a friend. literary buffs: what's something based on your reading habits that people probably would assume you've read, but you just haven't? not counting things that are on your i'm-gonna-read-this-soon, oh-i-can't-wait-to-read-this list. just things that certainly exist in the world indifferent to your reading habits. i'll start. i've been a theater buff for as long as i've been a habitual reader and i've never read george bernard shaw.

[tim84]

17

Takes from the National Library of France -BNF- at the exhibition on Marcel Proust, famous writer from the early twentieth century, Paris !

I liked this show very much !

Très intéressant l’exposition sur Proust et sa Recherche du Temps Perdu !

Ce sont les derniers jours, courez-y ! Sinon vous pouvez aussi faire des chorégraphies pour Tik-Tok, sur le parvis de la bibliothèque, comme les petites jeunes… Faites ce que vous voulez, il y a le Batofar pas loin, il y a le MK2, le Burger King… Arrangez-vous !

Bisous 😘

TIM❤️THÉE

À Paris 13…

📸15 Janvier 2023

[vidavalor]

Remembrance of Things Past

Aziraphale's scent-oriented, mindful moments in Good Omens also might be something else as well-- an attempt to circumvent the potential taking of his memories by Heaven. He might be trying to create for the future what are known as madeleine memories or involuntary memories-- the sudden rush of a memory prompted by a certain taste or, especially, by a particular scent.

On Aziraphale trying to get around Heaven by setting up triggers for The Proust Effect under the cut.

I wrote a post awhile back about how I think one of the reasons why Aziraphale keeps a journal is as a way of having something that Crowley can show to him in the event that Heaven takes his memories. While reading something doesn't necessarily trigger a memory itself-- it can but it's not guaranteed-- I think there might be other things they are doing as well that they think might be effective in different ways when it comes to helping Aziraphale retain his memory. The biggest might be actively trying to create for the future what are known as madeleine memories or involuntary memories.

Understanding of involuntary memory? It comes from the extremely Aziraphale intersection of food, the French, literature and psychology...

For anyone who does not already know about involuntary memory:

In 1913, French writer Marcel Proust published the first volume in his 'In Search of Lost Time' series and it contained a passage about the power of memory so descriptive and that resonated with so many that it got scientists to actually study and prove the validity of the connection between scent and memory about which he wrote. Proust had his narrator in the novel describe how, after dipping a lime madeleine into a pot of tea, the scent and taste of eating the madeleine brought him instantly back to a specific time in his youth when his aunt would serve them to him while he was recovering from illness as a boy. He remembered details about her house and their time together, sounds and scenes that had dimmed or been forgotten entirely... all triggered by his mind upon smelling and tasting the specific combination of flavors of the tea-dipped lime madeleine.

Most of us have probably experienced something like this and scientists have since confirmed that it's a very real phenomenon, probably rooted in our need to be able to recognize danger by scent. They have also found that, in some cases and to a slightly lesser degree, hearing specific pieces of music can also bring about a similar sense of memory. Scent, though, remains the best possible trigger for memory.

I can't imagine that after seeing Crowley struggle with his own memory for so long and knowing that it could happen to him, too, that Aziraphale wouldn't be trying everything he could think of to be prepared for the possibility that it might.

In a story that has so much focus on memory-- and in a way that seems to potentially foreshadow that Aziraphale might (temporarily) lose his before the story is over-- there also are scenes that might suggest that Aziraphale's mindful moments might also be an attempt at trying to associate moments with scent in an effort to get around Heaven and retain as much of his memory as he can in the future.

But that's only one part of it... The other part is how he and Crowley are shown to consistently tie times in the present to times in their past.

There are many reasons for doing so and we looked at some of them in other metas but another one might be as a way of trying to connect memories together in a way that, should Aziraphale lose his memories in the future, if one could be triggered with a madeleine memory, then other memories connected to it might follow.

In the first episode, Aziraphale's mindful, sensual eating experience involves breathing in the scent of the sushi with his eyes closed, as if committing it to memory. The evening, as we looked at in the Fish meta, was supposed to be a dinner with Crowley tied to their time in ancient Rome. Breathing in brine and alcohol and salt like Aziraphale is here might also be a way of trying to literally tie these scents to his memories of the scents of oysters and wine in Rome so as to not forget either.

In the parallel to the sushi scene in 1.01, Aziraphale is shown in S2 to breathe in Goldstone's when he and Crowley go there in the present. It's part of the mindful experience for him in the moment but it could also serve as a way of trying to remember the events of both the present and 1941 in the future.

Crowley also breathes in Goldstone's in the present in S2. It's something they both do without even looking at one another in the scene and just kind of know the other is, indicating that this is just a thing they do. Both of them do it instinctively, like the rampant sensualists using elements of mindfulness to work through trauma that they are lol. Aziraphale's eyes are again closed and I would bet that he's as much willing himself to never fully forget his human magic love and 1941 in the future as he is reliving memories of the past.

This scene is a really interesting inclusion because while it's set in our present of S2, it's really about the past and the future. No one has any trouble believing that they're both thinking of 1941 here, even as they're here in the present, and both of them are utilizing techniques both related to the present (mindfulness) to connect with memories of the past (Proust Effect/involuntary memory.) What else might be true as well is that they don't just do this for the past and the present moments but for potential future ones as well.

Then there's this...

There are two scenes-- one in each season-- that focus on Crowley's unsurprisingly amazing scent. While memory wouldn't be the only reason why Crowley would smell great lol, both scenes suggest that Crowley's scent is unique and distinguishable. Sandalphon can smell it as being different from Aziraphale's cologne in S1 and Shax... a paralleling character to Aziraphale, played by the actress who played the character with whom Aziraphale shared a brain in S1... well, Shax is into it. Girl's in a dead faint to a point of straight up huffing him.

While there are others, one reason for this scene, though, could be that it parallels the fact that Aziraphale actually does this sometimes, if in a decidedly less ick way than Shax did lol. Part of why Crowley's been wearing the same, apparently quite appealing, scent for awhile now could be out of an effort to help Aziraphale's mind create enough associations between Crowley's scent and Aziraphale's memories that Crowley himself might be able to trigger some of Aziraphale's memories just by his presence alone.

It's also then interesting-- and potentially a little eerie-- that the only time Aziraphale eats or drinks anything in the present in S2 is when he drinks a few sips of a cup of tea to introduce Muriel to the drink and the custom. This is just after Muriel showed up at the door and failed to recognize Aziraphale, even though he recognized them, in one of several scenes that suggest that Muriel had their memories taken from them at some point. The two characters parallel one another pretty strongly. The difference could well wind up becoming that Aziraphale is able to retain more of his memories because he and Crowley have been working for years to find ways to get around Heaven... and they're using knowledge uncovered by humans to save what they can of Aziraphale's memories.

Or, as Nina would put it:

[cyancherub]

do you have any book recommendations for us :D

MAYBE SO.......!!!! u know i love talkin abt books!!!

well, ok since ive posted about most of the books ive been reading recently MAYBE i can also post about some that i ordered and am waiting to arrive??? because all of these sounded very interesting to me!!!

SO books i have coming in the mail:

surrealist novels:

the woman in the dunes by kobo abe

the hearing trumpet by leonora carrington

the melancholy of resistance by laszlo krasznahorkai:

the third policeman by flann o'brien

nadja by andre breton

(been really into surrealism lately if it isn't apparent. most excited for melancholy of resistance i think)

horror, gothic, etc:

bruges-la-morte by georges rodenbach

the damned (la-bas) by joris-karl huysmans

floating dragon by peter straub

classics, short stories, etc:

french decadent tales (oxford world's classics) by stephen romer

in watermelon sugar by richard brautigan

swann's way (in search of lost time, #1) by marcel proust

selected short stories by balzac

icefields by thomas wharton

some ive picked up recently & stoked to read:

ada, or ardor by nabokov (my most beloved author of all time)

carmilla by le fanu

nightmare alley by william lindsay gresham

a king alone by jean giono

twilight of the idols by nietzsche

transparent things by nabokov

dark water by koji suzuki

selected poems by jorge luis borges (also beloved)

trolled my goodreads for more recs

books ive read & enjoyed so far this year:

the iliac crest by cristina rivera garza

the tenant by roland topor (FAV!!! huge fav)

crimson labyrinth by yusuke kishi

pedro paramo by juan rulfo

carolina ghost woods by judy jordan

death in her hands by ottessa moshfegh

the unbearable lightness of being by milan kundera

in the lake of the woods by tim o'brien

disgrace by j m coetzee

goth by otsuichi

books i enjoyed from last year:

the lottery & other stories by shirley jackson

the vegetarian by han kang

rosemary's baby by ira levin

piercing by ryu murakami (an all time fav)

the bloody chamber by angela carter (fav)

starve acre by andrew michael hurley (also a fav)

the glassy, burning floor of hell by brian evenson

the devil's larder by jim crace

monstrilio by gerardo samano cordova

and as a bonus, literally anything by nabokov. i have a big book of his short fiction that ive been reading slowly for a long while. despair by him is my fav book of all time, hands down. he is a master of absurdism (and a master of every language he writes in).

ALSO!!!! if youre into poetry, anything and every single thing by: t.s. eliot, baudelaire, rimbaud, borges. i also love neruda's poetry but i have heard he was an awful man so keep that in mind

[maybeitsalive]

Philip Marlowe, BI: Novels quotes (part 1)

Look, someone had to do it…

When I say Philip Marlowe is bi, I know I’m preaching to the choir, but maybe you need to make someone else realize this very important truth. For your convenience, here’s some quotes from the novels, so you can prove that you’re not ins- okay, you’re on Tumblr so you’re probably insane, but now you’re insane with proof at the tip of your fingers.

This is not an exhaustive list, the quotes are all Marlowe-centred (otherwise I’d quote half the books) and your mileage may vary.

The Big Sleep

Chap 11

“I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust.” “Who’s he?” I put a cigarette in my mouth and stared at her. She looked a little pale and strained, but she looked like a girl who could function under a strain. “A French writer, a connoisseur in degenerates. You wouldn’t know him.”

(Reminder that Proust was gay as hell.)

Chap 13

“The pug sidled over flatfooted and felt my pockets with care. I turned around for him like a bored beauty modeling an evening gown.”

Chap 24

“She called me a filthy name. I didn’t mind that. I didn’t mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much; a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were they had all my memories. I couldn’t stand her in that room any longer. What she called me only reminded me of that.”

(it’s probably a queer slur. Even the radio drama included it.)

Chap 28

“Just a plain pine box,” I said. “Don’t bother with bronze or silver handles. And don’t scatter my ashes over the blue Pacific. I like the worms better. Did you know that worms are of both sexes and that any worm can love any other worm?”

Farewell my lovely

Oh boy. I had to skip a lot.

Chap 3

“He just picked me up. I’m kind of cute sometimes.”

Chap 22

“I think I went to sleep, just like that, with a bloody face on the table, and a thin beautiful devil with my gun in his hand watching me and smiling.”

Chap 35

Everything about Red, but there you go:

“He smiled a slow tired smile. His voice was soft, dreamy, so delicate for a big man that it was startling. It made me think of another soft-voiced big man I had strangely liked.” (ie Malloy)

Chap 36

“I looked at him again. He had the eyes you never see, that you only read about. Violet eyes. Almost purple. Eyes like a girl, a lovely girl. His skin was as soft as silk. Lightly reddened, but it would never tan. It was too delicate. He was bigger than Hemingway and younger, by many years. He was not as big as Moose Malloy, but he looked very fast on his feet. His hair was that shade of red that glints with gold. But except for the eyes he had a plain farmer face, with no stagy kind of handsomeness.”

“I told him about it. I told him a great deal more than I intended to. It must have been his eyes.”

Chap 37

(Still about Red:)

“Put your dough away,” Red said. “You paid me for the trip back. I think you’re scared.” He took hold of my hand. His was strong, hard, warm and slightly sticky. “I know you’re scared,” he whispered. “I’ll get over it,” I said. “One way or another.” He turned away from me with a curious look I couldn’t read in that light.”

(About Brunette:)

“He had a cat smile, but I like cats. He was neither young nor old, neither fat nor thin. Spending a lot of time on or near the ocean had given him a good healthy complexion. His hair was nut-brown and waved naturally and waved still more at sea. His forehead was narrow and brainy and his eyes held a delicate menace. They were yellowish in color. He had nice hands, not babied to the point of insipidity, but well-kept. His dinner clothes were midnight blue, I judged, because they looked so black. I thought his pearl was a little too large, but that might have been jealousy.”

The High Window

Nothing too obvious.

The Lady in the Lake

Chap 3

“He had everything in the way of good looks the snapshot had indicated. He had a terrific torso and magnificent thighs. His eyes were chestnut brown and the whites of them slightly gray-white. His hair was rather long and curled a little over his temples. His brown skin showed no signs of dissipation. He was a nice piece of beef, but to me that was all he was. I could understand that women would think he was something to yell for.” (…) “At the moment I’m not doing anything,” he said coldly. “I expect a commission in the navy almost any day.” “You ought to do well at that,” I said. (...) “So long, beautiful hunk,” I said, and left him standing there.”

(He said the last one to be a jerk but he said it.)

Chap 13

(All of it is a scene between a half-naked Marlowe and the three guys he's bribing with booze and money. Personally I think it’s just a mix between it’s too hot + zero-fuck-given attitude, but I can’t not mention it.)

Unsurprisingly this got long, so part 2 is coming.

[litandlifequotes]

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

[ofgreatart]

the masterpiece of the House of Murder in Dostoevsky, that sombre house, so long, and so high, and so huge, of Rogojin in which he kills Nastasia Philipovna. That novel and terrible beauty of a house. (Marcel Proust)

“As, in Vermeer, there is the creation of a certain soul, of a certain colour of fabrics and places, so there is in Dostoevsky creation not only of people but of their homes, and the house of the Murder in Crime and Punishment with its dvornik, is it not almost as marvellous as the masterpiece of the House of Murder in Dostoevsky, that sombre house, so long, and so high, and so huge, of Rogojin in which he kills Nastasia Philipovna (The Idiot). That novel and terrible beauty of a house, that novel beauty blended with a woman’s face, that is the unique thing which Dostoevsky has given to the world.”

Marcel Proust

'His house impressed me much; it is like a burial-ground, he seems to like it, which is, however, quite natural. Such a full life as he leads is so overflowing with absorbing interests that he has little need of assistance from his surroundings.' Hippolyte: Rogojin Dostoevsky: The Idiot, PART III, Chapter VII

Photo: At Rogozhin’s house - from “The Idiot” by Dostoevsky. Fritz Eichenberg

[waystarresourceco]

Alan Ruck on what Connor does with his time (and bonus historic penis story).

“If you judge Connor by a business world metric of any kind, he’s a moron. He’s got no game and no interest, but he reads all the time. I think he reads history and I think he reads novels that are 100 years old. I don’t think he reads anything new that he might have to form an opinion about – 'well I didn’t think it was so great' or 'I thought it was really interesting' – he wants something like Marcel Proust Remembrance of Things Past, one of the great works of all time, because people have already made that decision. They’ve already given it that value. So actually, Connor reads a lot it’s just, he just doesn’t know anything of current events.”

“I did a little historic penis research. There’s this thing in a jar that actually looks like it once belonged to a donkey. But it’s claimed to be Rasputin’s penis, and apparently Napoleon’s penis was never very impressive to begin with, but some dentist owns it in new jersey and apparently it’s like a schmeckle, it’s just like a little button of a thing. . . . I did throw that ad-lib into that episode. I was talking about how small Napoleon’s penis was but then I said, ‘but Rasputin’s penis was amazing’. I made Matthew MacFadyen giggle to the point of bending over which is kind of my mission in life.”

Excerpt from the official HBO Succession Podcast: Interview with Alan Ruck - Episode 7

Scene referenced is below the cut.

The Saga of Connor and Napoleon's Dick:

And the thrilling conclusion:

Part 1 of the script excerpt from "The Summer Palace" and conclusion from "Vaulter."

[ceekbee]

Here are some fascinating facts about books that will leave you amazed:

1. Roosevelt read an average of one book per day.

2. Harvard University Library has four books bound in human skin.

3. Iceland tops the world in per capita book reading.

4. People who read books are less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease.

5. In Brazilian prisons, reading a book can reduce a prisoner's sentence by four days.

6. The most stolen book is the Bible.

7. Victor Hugo’s *Les Misérables* contains a sentence with 823 words.

8. Virginia Woolf wrote all her books while standing.

9. Leo Tolstoy's wife hand-copied the manuscript of *War and Peace* seven times.

10. There are over 20,000 books written about chess.

11. Noah Webster took 36 years to write his first dictionary.

12. The Mahabharata is the only book or epic in the world with over 1,200 characters.

13. Words like “hurry” and “addiction” were invented by Shakespeare.

14. If all the books in the New York Public Library were lined up, they would stretch 8 miles.

15. The longest novel ever written is *In Search of Lost Time* by Marcel Proust, with over 1.2 million words.

16. The first book ever printed was the Gutenberg Bible in 1455.

17. J.K. Rowling is the first billionaire author, thanks to the success of the Harry Potter series.

18. Charles Dickens was paid by the word, which is why many of his books are so lengthy.

[tseneipgam]

"There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness. Had we been placed on earth by a malign creator for the exclusive purpose of suffering, we would have good reason to congratulate ourselves on our enthusi- astic response to the task. Reasons to be inconsolable abound: the frailty of our bodies, the fickleness of love, the insincerities of social life, the compromises of friendship, the deadening effects of habit. In the face of such persistent ills, we might naturally expect that no event would be awaited with greater anticipation than the moment of our own extinction."

"he had never esteemed himself highly ['If only I could value myself more! Alas! It is impossible] and had once referred to himself as a flea and to his writing as a piece of indigestible nougat"

"With a father so masterful at aerobic instruction, at advice on corsets and sewing positions, it seems as if Marcel may have been hasty or simply overambitious in equating his life's work with that of the author of Elements of Hygiene. Rather than blame him for the problem, one might ask whether any novel could genuinely be expected to contain therapeutic qualities, whether the genre could in itself offer any more relief than could be gained from an aspirin, a country walk or a dry martini.

Charitably, one could suggest escapism. Marooned in familiar circumstances, there may be pleasure in buying a paperback at the station news-stand ['I was attracted by the idea of reaching a wider audience, the sort of people who buy a badly printed volume before catching a train, specified Proust]. Once we've board a carriage, we can

abstract ourselves from current surroundings and enter a more agreeable, or at least agreeably different world, breaking off occasionally to take in the passing scenery, while holding open our badly printed volume at the point where an ill-tempered monocle-wearing baron prepares to enter his drawing room - until our destination is heard on the tannoy, the brakes let out their reluctant squeals and we emerge once more into reality, symbolized by the station and its group of loitering slate-grey pigeons pecking shiftily at abandoned confectionery [in her memoirs, Proust's maid Céleste helpfully informs those alarmed not to have made much ground in Proust's novel that it is not designed to be read from one station to the next]. Whatever the pleasures of using a novel as an object with which to levitate into another world, it is not the only way of handling the genre. It certainly wasn't Proust's way, and would arguably not have been a very effective method of fulfilling the exalted therapeutic ambitions expressed to Céleste. Perhaps the best indication of Proust's views on how we should read lies in his approach to looking at paintings. After his death, his friend Lucien Daudet wrote an account of his time with him, which included a description of a visit they had once made together to the Louvre. Whenever he looked at paintings, Proust had a habit of trying to match the figures depicted on canvases with people he knew from his own life.

The possibility of making such visual connections between people circulating in apparently wholly different worlds explains Proust's assertion that 'aesthetically, the number of human types is so restricted that we must constantly, wher. ever we may be, have the pleasure of seeing people we know Any such pleasure is not simply visual: the restricted number of human types also means that we are repeatedly able to read about people we know in places we might never have expected to do so. Such intimate communion between our own life and the novels we read may be why Proust argued that: "In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity." But why would readers seek to be the readers of their own selves? "

"As Proust saw the problem: "People of bygone ages seem infinitely remote from us We do not feel justified in ascribing to them any underlying intentions beyond those they formally express; we are amazed when we come across an emotion more or less like what we feel today in a Homeric hero … it is as though we imagined the epic poet . .. to be as remote from ourselves as an animal seen in a zoo." It is perhaps only normal if our initial impulse on being introduced to the characters of The Odyssey is to stare at them as though they are a family of duck-billed platypuses circling their enclosure in the municipal zoo."

"

But an advantage of more prolonged encounters with Proust or Homer is that worlds that had seemed threaten- ingly alien reveal themselves to be essentially much like our own, expanding the range of places in which we feel at home. It means we can open the zoo gates and release a set of trapped creatures from the Trojan War or the Faubourg Saint-Germain, who we had previously considered with unwarranted provincial suspicion, because they had names like Eurycleia and Telemachus or had never sent a fax. (in) A cure for loneliness We might also let ourselves out from the zoo. What is considered normal for a person to feel in any place at any point is liable to be an abbreviated version of what is in fact normal, so that the experiences of fictional characters afford us a hugely expanded picture of human behaviour, and thereby a confirmation of the essential normality of thoughts or feelings unmentioned in our immediate environment. After childishly picking a fight with a lover who had looked distracted throughout dinner, there is relief in hearing Proust's narrator admit to us that 'As soon as I found Albertine not being nice to me, instead of tell- ing her I was sad, I became nasty', and revealing that 'I never expressed a desire to break up with her except when I was unable to do without her', after which our own romantic antics might seem less like those of a perverse platypus."

"

An effect of reading a book which has devoted attention to noticing such faint yet vital tremors is that, once we've put the volume down and resumed our own life, we may attend to precisely the things which the author would have responded to had he or she been in our company. Our mind will be like a radar newly attuned to pick up certain objects floating through consciousness, the effect will be like bringing a radio into a room that we had thought silent, and realizing that the silence only existed at a particular frequency and that all along we in fact shared the room with waves of sound coming in from a Ukrainian station or the night-time chatter of a minicab firm. Our attention will be drawn to the shades of the sky, to the changeability of a face, to the hypocrisy of a friend or to a submerged sadness about a situation which we had previously not even known we could feel sad about. The book will have sensitized us, stimulated our dormant antennae by evidence of its own developed sensitivity."

"

Unfortunately, the very artistry of Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Flaubert has the tendency to suggest that it would have been apparent even from a news-in-brief that there was something significant about Romeo, Anna and Emma, something which would have led any right-thinking person to see that these were characters fit for great literature or a show at the Globe, whereas of course there would have been nothing to distinguish them from the somersaulting horse in Villeurbanne or the electrocuted Marcel Peigny in Aube. Hence Proust's assertion that the greatness of works of art has nothing to do with the apparent quality of their subject matter, and everything to do with the subsequent treatment of that matter. And hence his associated claims that everything is potentially a fertile subject for art and that we can make discoveries as valuable in an advertisement for soap as in Pascal's Pensées."

"A good way of evaluating the wisdom of someone's ideas might be to undertake a careful examination of the state of their own mind and health. After all, if their pronounce- ments were truly worthy of our attention, we should expect that the first person to reap their benefits would be their creator. Might this justify an interest not simply in a writer's work, but also in their life?...It now seems as if the magnitude of Proust's misfortunes should not be allowed to cast doubt on the validity of his ideas, indeed, it is the very extent of his suffering that we should take to be evidence of the perfect precondition for insights. It is when we hear that Proust's lover died in a plane crash off the coast of Antibes, that Stendhal endured a series of agonizing unrequited passions and that Nietzsche was a social outcast taunted by schoolboys, that we can be reassured of having discovered valuable intellectual

authorities. It is not the contented or the glowing who have left many of the profound testimonies of what it means to be alive. It seems that such knowledge has usually been the privileged preserve of, and the only blessing granted to, the violently miserable. Nevertheless, before subscribing uncritically to a Romantic cult of suffering, it should be added that suffering has, on its own, never been quite enough. It is unfortunately easier to lose a lover than complete In Search of Lost Time, to experience unrequited desire than write De L'Amour, to be socially unpopular than the author of The Birth of Tragedy. Many unhappy syphilitics omit to write their Fleurs du Mal and shoot themselves instead. Perhaps the greatest claim one can therefore make for suffering is that it opens up possibilities for intelligent, imaginative enquiry"

"It's quite true that the sky is on fire at sunset, but it's been said too often, and the moon that shines discreetly is a trifle dull. We may ask why Proust objected to phrases that had been used too often. After all, doesn't the moon shine discreetly? Don't sunsets look as if they were on fire? Aren't clichés just good ideas that have proved rightly popular? The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject. Clichés are detrimental in so far as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface. And if this matters, it is because the way we speak is ultimately linked to the way we feel, because how we describe the world must at some level reflect how we first experience it."

"We know there is a demarcation between the sea and the sky, but it can on occasion be hard to tell whether an azure-coloured band is in fact part of the sea or the sky, the confusion lasting only until our reason re-establishes a distinction between the two elements which had been missing from our first glance. Elstir's achievement is to hang on to the original muddle, and to set down in paint a visual impression before it has been overruled by what he knows.

Proust was not implying that painting had reached its apotheosis in Impressionism, and that the movement had triumphantly captured reality' in a way that previous schools of art had not. His appreciation of painting ranged further than this, but the works of Elstir illustrated with particular clarity what is arguably present in every success- ful work of art: an ability to restore to our sight a distorted or neglected aspect of reality. As Proust expressed it: Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us."

"

distracted, generating vital thoughts only between stretches of inactivity or mediocrity, stretches in which we are not really ourselves', during which it may be no exaggeration to say that we are not quite all there as we gaze at passing clouds with a vacant, childlike expression. Because the rhythm of a conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not. By contrast, a book provides for a distillation of our sporadic minds, a record of its most vital manifestations, a concen- tration of inspired moments that might originally have arisen across a multitude of years, and been separated by extended stretches of bovine gazing. To meet an author whose books one has enjoyed must, in this view, necessarily be a disappointment ['It's true that there are people who are superior to their books, but that's because their books are not Books'], because such a meeting can only reveal a person as they exist within, and find themselves subject to the limitations of time."

"

The disparity may be less dramatic. No doubt he believed precious few of his proustifications, but he nevertheless remained sincere in the message that had inspired and underlay them: I like you and I would like you to like me. The fifteen long-stemmed chrysanthemums, the marvellous planets, the devoted worshippers, the Athenas, goddesses and splendid images were merely what Proust felt he would need to add to his own presence in order to secure affection, in the light of his previously mentioned debilitating assessment of his own qualities [I certainly think less of myself than Antoine (his butler) does of himself ]. In fact, the exaggerated scale of Proust's social politeness should not blind us to the degree of insincerity every friendship demands, the ever-present requirement to deliver an affable but hollow word to a friend who proudly shows us a volume of their poetry or newborn baby. To call such politeness hypocrisy is to neglect that we have lied in a local way not in order to conceal fundamentally malevolent intentions but rather to confirm our sense of affection, which might have been doubted if there had been no gasping and praising, because of the unusual intensity of people's attachment to their verse and children. There seems a gap between what others need to hear from us in order to trust that we like them, and the extent of the

negative thoughts we know we can feel towards them and still like them. We know it is possible to think of someone as both dismal at poetry and perceptive, both inclined to pomposity and charming, both suffering from halitosis and genial. But the susceptibility of others means that the negative part of the equation can rarely be expressed without jeopardizing the union. We usually believe gossip about ourselves to have been inspired by a level of malice far greater [or more critical] than the malice we ourselves felt in relation to the last person we gossiped about, a person whose habits we could mock without this in any way altering our affection for them. Proust once compared friendship to reading, because both activities involved communion with others, but added that reading had a key advantage: In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original purity. There is no false amiability with books."

"It may even be defended in the name of friendship. Proust proposed that "the scorners of friendship can . .. be the finest friends in the world', perhaps because these scorners approach the bond with more realistic expectations. They avoid talking at length about themselves, not because they think the subject unimportant, but rather because they recognize it as too important to be placed at the mercy of the haphazard, fleeting and ultimately superficial medium that is conversation. It means they have no reservations about asking rather than answering questions, seeing friendship as a domain in which to learn about, not lecture others. Furthermore, because they appreciate others' susceptibilities, they accept a resultant need for a degree of false amiability, for a rose-tinted interpretation of an ageing ex-courtesan's appearance or for a generous review of a well-intentioned but pedestrian volume of poetry."

"

However, the immediacy with which aesthetic judgements arise should not fool us into assuming that their origins are entirely natural or their verdicts unalterable. Proust's letter to Monsieur Mainguet hinted as much. By saying that great painters were the ones by whom our eyes were opened Proust was at the same time implying that our sense of beauty was not immobile, and could be sensitized by painters who would, through their canvases, educate us into an appreciation of once neglected aesthetic qualities. If the dissatisfied young man had failed to consider the family tableware or fruit, it was in part out of a lack of acquaint- ance with images which would have shown him the key to their attractions. Great painters possess such power to open our eyes because of the unusual receptivity of their own eyes to aspects of visual experience; to the play of light on the end of a spoon, the fibrous softness of a tablecloth, the velvety skin of a peach or the pinkish tones of an old man's skin. We might caricature the history of art as a succession of geniuses engaged in pointing out different elements worthy of our attention, a succession of painters using their immense technical mastery to say what amounts to, 'Aren't those back streets in Delft pretty?' or, Isn't the Seine nice ourside Paris?" And in Chardin's case, to say to the world, and some of the dissatisfied young men within it, Look not just at

the Roman campagna, the pageantry of Venice and the proud expression of Charles I astride his horse, but also, have a look at the bowl on the sideboard, the dead fish in your kitchen and the crusty bread loaves in the hall.' The happiness which may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception, it reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of falling to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them. Appreciating the beauty of crusty loaves does not preclude our interest in a chateau, but failing to do so must call into question our overall capacity for appreciation."

"By a quirk of physiology, a cake which has not crossed his lips since childhood and therefore remains uncorrupted by later associations has the ability to carry him back to Combray days, introducing him to a stream of rich and intimate memories of the past. Childhood at once seems a more beautiful period than he had remembered, he recalls with new-found wonder the old grey house in which aunt Léonie used to live, the town and surroundings of mbray, the streets along which he used to run errands, parish church, the country roads, the fowers in Léonie's garion and the water lilies floating on the Vivone river. so doing he recognizes the worth of these memories, Inspire the novel he will eventually narrate, which is sense an entire, extended, controlled Proustian moment', to which it is akin in sensitivity and sensual immediacy. If the incident with the madeleine cheers the narrator, it is because it helps him realize that it isn't his life which has been mediocre so much as the image of it he possessed in memory. It is a key Proustian distinction"

"The narrator has been avoiding not only racecourses, but also the seashore. He has been looking at the sea with his fingers in front of his eyes, in order to blot out any modern ships that might pass by and spoil his attempt to view the sea in an immemorial state, or at least as it must have looked no later than the early centuries of Greece. Again, Elstir rescues him from his peculiar habit, and draws his attention to the beauty of yachts. He points out their uniform surfaces, which are simple, gleaming and grey and which, in the bluish haze reflecting off the sea, take on a seductive creamy softness. He talks of the women on board, who dress attractively in white cotton or linen clothes, which in the sunlight, against the blue of the sea, take on the dazzling whiteness of a spread sail."

"

The incident emphasizes once more that beauty is something to be found, rather than passively encountered, that it requires us to pick up on certain details, to identify the whiteness of a cotton dress, the reflection of the sea on the hull of a yacht or the contrast between the colour of a jockey's coat and his face. It also emphasizes how vulnerable we are to depression when the Elstirs of the world choose not to go on holiday and the pre-prepared images run out, when our knowledge of art does not stretch any later than Carpaccio [I450-1525] and Veronese [1528-1588] and we see a two-hundred-horsepower Sunseeker accelerating out of the marina. It may genuinely be an unattractive example of aquatic transport; then again, our objection to the speedboat may stem from nothing other than a stubborn adherence to ancient images of beauty, and a resistance to a process of active appreciation which even Veronese and Carpaccio would have undertaken had they been in our place."

"

The images with which we are surrounded are often not just out of date, they can also be unhelpfully ostentatious. When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes. Chardin opens our eyes to the beauty of salt cellars and jugs, the madeleine delights the narrator by evoking memories of an ordinary bourgeois childhood, Elstir paints nothing grander than cotton dresses and harbours. In Proust's view, such modesty is characteristic of beauty: True beauty is indeed the one thing incapable of answer- ing the expectations of an over-romantic imagination . What disappointments has it not caused since it first appeared to the mass of mankind! A woman goes to see a masterpiece of art as excitedly as if she was finishing a serial-story, or consulting a fortune teller or waiting for her lover. But she sees a man sitting meditating by the window, in a room where there is not much light. She waits for a moment in case something more may appear, as in a boulevard transparency. And though hypocrisy may seal her lips, she says in her heart of hearts: 'What, is that all there is to Rembrandt's Philosopher?'

"Such disastrous encounters with aristocrats might encourage us to give up on our search for so-called eminent figures, who only turn out to be vulgar drones when we meet them. The snobbish longing to associate with those of superior rank should, it seems, be abandoned in favour of a gracious accommodation to our lot. Yet there may be a different conclusion to be drawn. Rather than ceasing to discriminate between people altogether, we may simply have to become better at doing so. The image of a refined aristocracy is not false, it is merely dangerously uncomplicated. There are of course superior people at large in the world, but it is optimistic to assume that they could

be so conveniently located on the basis of their surname. It is this the snob refuses to believe, trusting instead in the existence of watertight classes whose members unfailingly display certain qualities. Though a few aristocrats can match expectations, a great many more will have the winning qualities of the Duc de Guermantes, for the category of 'aristocracy' is simply too crude a net to pick up on something as unpredictably allocated as virtue or refine- ment. There may be someone worthy of the expectations which the narrator has harboured of the Duc de Guer- mantes, but this person might well appear in the unex- pected guise of an electrician, cook or lawyer."

"

once they see them fit the dominant image of an intelligent person, and learn of their formal education, factual knowledge and university degree. Such people would have had no difficulty in recognizing that Proust's maid was an idiot: she thought that Napoleon and Bonaparte were two different people, and refused to believe Proust for a week when he suggested otherwise. But Proust knew she was brilliant ['I've never managed to teach her to spell, and she has never had the patience to read even half a page of my book, but she is full of extraordinary gifts']. This isn't to propose an equally, if more perversely, snobbish argument that education has no value, and that the importance of European history from Campo Formio to the Battle of Waterloo is the result of a sinister academic conspiracy, but rather that an ability to identify emperors and spell aproximately is not in itself enough to establish the existence of something as hard to define as intelligence."

"Trapped inside a novel, these unhappy characters would, after all, be the only ones unable to draw the therapeutic benefits of reading it."

"

After looking at a mountain, if we shut our lids and dwell on the scene internally we are led to seize on its important details, the mass of visual information is inter- preted and the mountain's salient features identified: its granite peaks, its glacial indentations, the mist hovering above the tree line; details which we would previously have seen but not for that matter noticed. Though Noah was six hundred years old when God flooded the world, and would have had much time to look at his surroundings, the fact that they were always there, that they were so permanent in his visual field, would have given him no encouragement to recreate them internally. What was the point of focusing closely on a bush in his mind's eye when there was abundant physical evidence of bushes in the vicinity? How different the situation would have been after two weeks in the Ark, when, nostalgic for his old surroundings, and unable to see them, Noah would naturally have begun to focus on the memory of bushes, trees and mountains, and therefore, for the first time in his six-hundred-year life, begun to see them properly. It suggests that having something physically present sets up far from ideal circumstances in which to notice it. Presence may in fact be the very element that encourages us to ignore or neglect it, because we feel we have done all the work simply in securing visual contact."

"If long acquaintance with a lover so often breeds bore- dom, breeds a sense of knowing a person too well, the problem may ironically be that we do not know them well enough. Whereas the initial novelty of the relationship could leave us in no doubt as to our ignorance, the subsequent reliable physical presence of the lover and the routines of communal life can delude us into thinking that we have achieved genuine, and dull familiarity; whereas it may be no more than a fake sense of familiarity which physical presence fosters, and which Noah would have felt for six hundred years in relation to the world, until the Flood taught him otherwise."

"

Proust compares Albertine to a student who visits Dresden after cultivating a desire to see a particular painting, whereas the Duchesse is like a wealthy tourist who travels without any desire or knowledge, and experiences nothing but bewil- dement, boredom and exhaustion when she arrives. It emphasizes the extent to which physical possession is only one component of appreciation. If the rich are fortunate in being able to travel to Dresden as soon as the desire to do so arises, or buy a dress just after they have seen it in a catalogue, they are cursed because of the speed with which their wealth fulfils their desires. No sooner have they thought of Dresden than they can be on a train there, no sooner have they seen a dress than it can be in their wardrobe. They therefore have no opportunity to suffer the interval between desire and gratification which the less privileged endure, and which, for all its apparent unpleasantness, has the incalculable benefit of allowing people to know and fall deeply in love with paintings in Dresden, hats, dressing gowns and someone who isn't free this evening."

"

If prostitutes …attract us so little, it is not because they are less beautiful than other women, but because they are ready and waiting; because they already offer us precisely what we seek to attain. O: So he believed that sex was everything men wanted to attain? A: A further distinction might have to be made. The prostitute offers a man what he thinks he wants to attain, she gives him an illusion of attainment, but one which is nevertheless strong enough to threaten the gestation of love. To return to the Duchesse, she fails to appreciate her dresses not because they are less beautiful than other dresses, but because physical possession is so easy, which fools her into thinking that she has acquired everything she wanted, and distracts her from pursuing the only real form of possession which is effective in Proust's eyes, namely, imaginative possession [dwelling on the details of the dress, the folds of the material, the delicacy of the thread], an imaginative possession which Albertine already pursues, through no conscious choice, because it is a natural response to being denied physical contact."

"It may have been a particularly inept kiss, but by detailing Its disappointments Proust points to a general difficulty in a physical method of appreciation. The narrator recognizes that he could do almost anything physically with Albertine, take her on his knees, hold her head in his hands, caress her, but that he would still be doing nothing other than touching the sealed envelope of a far more elusive, beloved person. This might not matter were it not for a tendency to believe that physical contact might in fact put us directly in touch with the object of our love. Disappointed with the kiss, the risk is that we would then ascribe our disappoint- ment to the tedium of the person we were kissing rather than to the limitations involved in doing so."

"

Ruskin sensitized Proust to the visible world, to architec- ture, art and nature. Here is Ruskin awakening his readers' senses to a few of the many things going on in an ordinary mountain stream: If it meets a rock three or four feet above the level of its bed, it will often neither part nor foam, nor express any concern about the matter, but clear it in a smooth dome of water, without apparent exertion, the whole surface of the surge being drawn into parallel lines by its extreme velocity, so that the whole river has the appearance of a deep and raging sea, with only this difference, that torrent-waves always break backwards, and sea-waves forwards. Thus, then, in the water which has gained an impetus, we have the most exquisite arrangements of curved lines, perpetually changing from convex to con

cave, and vice versa, following every swell and hollow of the bed with their modulating grace, and all in unison of motion, presenting perhaps the most beautiful series of inorganic forms which nature can possibly produce. Aside from landscape, Ruskin helped Proust to discover the beauty of the great cathedrals of northern France. When he returned to Paris after his holiday, Proust travelled to Bourges and to Chartres, to Amiens and Rouen. Later explaining what Ruskin had taught him, Proust pointed to a passage on Rouen cathedral in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in which Ruskin minutely described a particu- lar stone figure which had been carved, together with hundreds of others, in one of the cathedral's portals. The figure was of a little man, no more than ten centimetres high, with a vexed, puzzled expression, and one hand pressed hard against his cheek, wrinkling the flesh under his eye."

"

Yet something in this forceful defence of reading and scholarship intimated Proust's reservations. Without draw- ing attention to how contentious or critical the point was, he argued that we should be reading for a particular reason; not to pass the time, not out of detached curiosity, not out of a dispassionate wish to find out what Ruskin felt, but because, to go back with italics, 'there is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt'. We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel, it is our own thoughts we should be developing even if it is another writer's thoughts which help us do so. A fulfilled academic life would therefore require us to judge that the writers we were studying articulated in their books a sufficient range of our own concerns, and that in the act of understanding them through translation or commentary, we would simul- taneously be understanding and developing the spiritually significant parts of themselves.

And herein lay Proust's problem, because in his view, books could not make us aware of enough of the things we felt. They might open our eyes, sensitize us, enhance our powers of perception, but at a certain point they would stop, not by coincidence, not occasionally, not out of bad luck, but inevitably, by definition, for the stark and simple reason that the author wasn't us. There would come a moment with every book when we would feel that something was incongruous, misunderstood or constraining, and it would give us a responsibility to leave our guide behind and continue our thoughts alone. Proust's respect for Ruskin was enormous, but having worked intensely on his texts for six years, having lived with bits of paper scattered across his bed and his bamboo table piled high with books, in a particular burst of irritation at continually being tethered to another man's words, Proust exclaimed that Ruskin's qualities had not prevented him from frequently being 'silly, maniacal, constraining, false and ridiculous"

"The fact that Proust did not at this point turn to trans- lating George Eliot or annotating Dostoevsky signals a recognition that the frustration he felt with Ruskin was not incidental to this author, but reflected a universally con- straining dimension to reading and scholarship, and was sufficient reason never to strive for the title of Professor Proust. It is one of the great and wonderful characteristics of good books (which allows us to see the role, at once

essential yet limited, that reading may play in our spiritual lives) that for the author they may be called 'Conclusions' but for the reader 'Incitements'. We feel very strongly that our own wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off, and we would like him to provide us with answers when all he is able to do is provide us with desires… 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."

"

However, Proust was singularly aware of how tempting it was to believe that reading could constitute our entire spiritual life, which led him to formulate some careful lines of instruction on a responsible approach to books: As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realize only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of libraries and then sample passively"

"It obligates us to read with care, to welcome the insights books give us, but not to subjugate our independence, or smother the nuances of our own love life in the process. Otherwise, we might suffer a range of symptoms which Proust identified in the overreverent, overreliant reader"

"

Symptom no. 2: That we will be unable to write after reading a good book This may seem a narrowly professional consideration, but it has wider relevance if one imagines that a good book might also stop us from thinking ourselves, because it would strike us as so perfect, as so inherently superior to anything our own minds could come up with. In short, a good book might silence us. Reading Proust nearly silenced Virginia Woolf. She loved his novel, but loved it rather too much. There wasn't enough wrong with it, a crushing recognition when one follows Walter Benjamin in his assessment of why people become writers: because they are unable to find a book already written which they are completely happy with. And the difficulty for Virginia was that, for a time at least, she thought she had found one. Marcel and Virginia - A short story Virginia Woolf first mentioned Proust in a letter she wrote to Roger Fry in the autumn of I919. He was in France, she was in Richmond, where the weather was foggy and the garden in bad shape, and she casually asked him whether he might bring her back a copy of Swann's Way on his return.

I was 1922 before she next mentioned Proust. She had rumned forty and, despite the entreaty to Pry, still hadn't read anything of Proust's work, though in a letter to E. M Forster, she revealed that others in the vicinity were being more diligent. Everyone is reading Proust. I sit silent and hear their reports. It seems to be a tremendous experience, she explained, though appeared to be procrastinating out of a fear of being overwhelmed by something in the novel, an object she referred to more as if it were a swamp than hundreds of bits of paper stuck together with thread and glue; Tm shivering on the brink, and waiting to be submerged with a horrid sort of notion that I shall go down and down and down and perhaps never come up again.' She took the plunge nevertheless, and the problems started. As she told Roger Fry, Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. "Oh, if I could write like that!" I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation that he procures there's something sexual in it - that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen, and then I can't write like that. In what sounded like a celebration of In Search of Lost Time, but was in fact a far darker verdict on her future as a writer, she told Fry: My great adventure is really Proust. Well - what remains to be written after that? . .. How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped - and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp.

In spite of the gasping, Woolf realized that Mrs Dalloway still remained to be written, after which she allowed herself a brief burst of elation at the thought that she might have produced something decent. I wonder if this time I have achieved something?' she asked herself in her diary, but the pleasure was short-lived: Well, nothing anyhow compared with Proust, in whom I am embedded now. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom. And he will I suppose both influence me and make me out of temper with every sentence of my own. But Woolf knew how to hate her sentences well enough even without Proust's assistance. 'So sick of Orlando I can write nothing,' she told her diary shortly after completing this book in 1928. I have corrected the proofs in a week: and cannot spin another phrase. I detest my own volubility. Why be always spouting words?' However, any bad mood she was in was liable to take a dramatic plunge for the worse after the briefest contact with the Frenchman. The diary entry continued: "Take up Proust after dinner and put him down. This is the worst time of all. It makes me suicidal. Nothing seems left to do. All seems insipid and worthless. Nevertheless, she didn't yet commit suicide, though she did take the wise step of ceasing to read Proust, and was therefore able to write a few more books whose sentences were neither

insipid nor worthless. Then in 1934, when she was working on The Years, there was a sign that she had at last freed her- self from Proust's shadow. She told Ethel Smyth that she had picked up In Search of Lost Time again, which is of course so magnificent that I can't write myself within its arc. For years I've put off finishing it; but now, thinking I may die one of these years, I've returned, and let my own scribble do what it likes. Lord, what a hopeless bad book mine will be!' The tone suggests that Woolf had at last made her peace with Proust. He could have his terrain, she had hers to scribble in. The path from depression and self-loathing to cheerful defiance suggests a gradual recognition that one person's achievements did not have to invalidate another's, that there would always be something left to do even if it momentarily appeared otherwise. Proust might have expressed many things well, but independent thought and the history of the novel had not come to a halt with him. His book did not have to be followed by silence, there was still space for the scribbling of others, for Mrs Dalloway, The Common Reader, A Room of Onè's Own, and in particular there was space for what these books symbolized in this context, perceptions of one's own."

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idolatry. In the religious context, idolatry suggests a fixation on an aspect of religion - on an image of a worshipped deity, on a particular law or holy book - which distracts us from and even contravenes, the overall spirit of the religion. Proust suggested that a structurally similar problem existed in art, where artistic idolaters combined a literal reverence for objects depicted in art with a neglect of the spirit of art. They would, for instance, become particularly attached to a part of the countryside depicted by a great painter, and mistake this for an appreciation of the painter, they would focus on the objects in a picture, as opposed to the spirit of the picture - whereas the essence of Proust's aesthetic position was contained in the deceptively simple yet momentous assertion that 'a picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it' Proust accused his friend, the aristocrat and poet Robert de Montesquiou, of artistic idolatry, because of the pleasure he took whenever he encountered in life an object which had been depicted by an artist. Montesquiou would gush if he happened to see one of his female friends wearing a dress like that which Balzac had imagined for the character of the Princesse de Cadignan in his novel Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan. Why was this type of delight idolatrous? Because Montesquiou's enthusiasm had nothing to do with an appreciation of the dress and everything to do with a respect for Balzac's name."

"Françoise's Chocolate Mousse Ingredients: 100g of plain cooking chocolate, 100g of caster sugar, half a litre of milk, six eggs. Method: Bring the milk to the boil, add the chocolate broken in pieces, and let it melt gently, stirring the mixture with a wooden spoon. Whip the sugar with the yolks of the six eggs. Preheat the oven to 130°C. When the chocolate has completely melted, pour it over the eggs and the sugar, mix rapidly and energeti- cally, then pass through a strainer. Pour out the liquid into little ramekins 8cm in diameter, and put into the oven, in a bain-marie, for an hour. Leave to cool before serving."

"The danger is that La Cuisine Retrouvée will unwittingly throw us into depression the day we fail to find the right ingredients for the chocolate mousse or green bean salad, and are forced to eat a hamburger - which Proust never had a chance to write about. It wouldn't, of course, have been Marcel's intention: picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it."

"There is something eerie about driving into a town which has surrendered part of its claim to independent reality in favour of a role fashioned for it by a novelist who once spent a few summers there as a boy in the late nineteenth century. But Illiers-Combray appears to relish the idea. In a corner of the Rue du Docteur Proust, the pâtisserie-confiserie hangs a large, somewhat puzzling sign outside its door: "The House where Aunt Léonie used to buy her madeleines."

" Combray may be pleasant, but it is as valuable a place to visit as any in the large plateau of northern France, the beauty which Proust revealed there could be present, latent, in almost any town, if only we made the effort to consider it in a Proustian way. Ironically, however, it is out of an idolatrous reverence for Proust, and a misunderstanding of his aesthetic ideas, that we speed blindly through the surrounding countryside, through neighbouring non-literary towns and villages like Brou, Bonneval and Courville, on our way to the imagined delights of Proust's childhood locale. In so doing, we forget that had Proust's family settled in Courville, or his old aunt taken up residence in Bonneval, it would have been to these places that we would have driven, just as unfairly. Our pilgrimage is idolatrous because it privileges the place Proust happened to grow up in rather than his manner of considering it, an oversight which the corpulent Michelin man encourages, because he fails to recognize that the worth of sights is dependent more on the quality of one's vision than on the objects viewed, that there is nothing inherently three-star about a town Proust grew up in or inherently no- star about an Elf petrol station near Courville, where Proust never had a chance to fill a Renault - but where if he had, he might easily have found something to appreciate, for it has a delightful forecourt with daffodils planted in a neat border and an old-fashioned pump which, from a distance, looks like a stout man leaning against a fence wearing pair of burgundy dungarees."

"In the preface to his translation of Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, Proust had written enough to turn the Illiers- Combray tourist industry into an absurdity had anyone bothered to listen: We would like to go and see the field that Millet .. shows us in his Springtime, we would like Claude Monet to take us to Giverny, on the banks of the Seine, to that bend of the river which he hardly lets us distinguish through the morning mist. Yet in actual fact, it was the mere chance of a connection or family relation that gave . Millet or Monet occasion to pass or to stay nearby, and to choose to paint that road, that garden, that field, that bend in the river, rather than some other. What makes them appear other and more beautiful than the rest of the world is that they carry on them, like some elusive reflection, the impression they afforded to a genius, and which we might see wandering just as singularly and despotically across the submissive, indif- ferent face of all the landscapes he may have painted. It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes. To forget this may sadden us unduly. When we feel interest to be so dependent on the exact locations where certain great artists found it, a thousand landscapes and areas of experience will be deprived of possible interest, for Monet only looked at a few stretches of the earth"

"The moral? That there is no greater homage we could pay Proust than to end up passing the same verdict on him as he passed on Ruskin, namely, that for all its qualities, his work must eventually also prove silly, maniacal, constrain- ing, false and ridiculous to those who spend too long on it. To make [reading] 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. Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside."

[robertogreco]

“Writer Orhan Pamuk Presenting the Museum of Innocence”:

“A tribute to the unimportant daily life objects and their valuable meaning for our memory and connection with time lost.” Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk delves into the deeply personal and intricate world of his Museum of Innocence, both the novel he published in 2008 and the museum he opened in Istanbul in 2012. Blurring the lines between fiction and reality, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk shows us around his Museum of Innocence in Istanbul. It is a physical manifestation of his protagonist Kemal’s unfulfilled love and longing, embodied in everyday objects meticulously collected and a personal reflection of life in Istanbul in the late 20th century. Orhan Pamuk originally wanted to be a painter but failed, he says. Instead, at the age of mid-forties, he realized that he “wanted to create an artwork combined with literature, and this is my first attempt at combining the two.” Pamuk began collecting everyday objects for the museum and writing the novel at the same time, the objects inspired the novel and vice versa: “It’s not that I had a collection, then I thought about a home for my collection. I collected and wrote and wrote and collected.” When planning the museum, Orhan Pamuk wanted the visitors who had not read the novel to “have a sense of the quality of the surface of the objects, the texture of life of Istanbul between 1970s and early 2000s, and also the visual atmosphere of Istanbul.” Pamuk did not write for six months but was busy composing one by one glass vitrines, boxes, and units in the manner of Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, and Juan Gris: “This museum is based on the things that this generation of surrealistic artists developed with the concept of ready-mades.” Throughout the interview, Pamuk reveals his lifelong fascination with objects as vessels of memory and nostalgia. “Objects have the power to trigger our memories,” he notes, comparing his work to Marcel Proust’s exploration of involuntary memory. He believes that even the smallest items have the power to transport us back in time: “A movie ticket found in a jacket can be the only reason you remember the film 20 years later”, Pamuk reflects, highlighting the profound relationship between memory and material objects. At the museum, Orhan Pamuk’s manifesto for museums is written as he believes, he says, that museums “should not be a safe or heaven for precious things only. The museum should honor the objects of daily. Museums should not only dramatize the history of a nation, or a group, or a gender, or a Chinese army but should also go and explore the dramas of individual beings.” Pamuk argues that “the future of museums should be inside our own personal homes.” Orhan Pamuk concludes: “I am inviting you to a new artificial space which will envelop you and will make you ask questions about being, time, remembering attachment, love, jealousy, anger, and these objects are there to generate these things or make you ask these questions about your life”. Orhan Pamuk, born in Istanbul in 1952, is one of Turkey’s most acclaimed writers. Known for novels like My Name is Red, Snow, and Istanbul: Memories and the City, his work examines themes of identity, memory, and the cultural tensions between East and West. In 2006, Pamuk received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his contributions to world literature. Orhan Pamuk was interviewed by Christian Lund in Istanbul in September 2024. Camera: Rasmus Quistgaard Edited by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen Produced by Christian Lund Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2024