Your Quote of the Day

The problem with Proust is that his book comes to an end too quickly.

Gunsmoke ran more than twenty seasons.

Yeah--but that was romantic and somewhat mawkish. The stuff of legend. How wonderful you all are.

Proust began early, as I did myself, to realise what idiotic scumbags adults actually were.

speak for yourself

I only threw Gunsmoke in there to see you recoil in horror.

Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for one night. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life._unknown genius

A fool and his money are soon elected. Will Rogers.

The model for Legrandin? I don't know - could have been any of the scientific types of these times with a nostalgia for the (by then totally passé) "renaissance man" mixture of science and letters in one coherent whole.

Legrandin is an engineer; he has a serious, modern job but he feels he should have been an artist... Historically, the emergence of a scientific & technical community that is distinct from the world of letters (and usually scornful of the humanities, or in Legrandin's case, nostalgic of it) is what that character illustrates.

The work of Proust does not require reference to real-life models, in that his thesis illustrated in La Recherche is that the artist or poet is not the same person as the real man holding the pen. The dominant literary critics of the times were the Goncourt brothers (who founded the most prestigious French literary prize) and their approach to literary critique was to dig into an author's life in order to explain his art. Proust said: that's bogus. You cannot understand the artist by understanding the man, those are two very different persons. And he wrote the best ever French novel to prove his point... So trying to find real-life figures behind his work goes against his own project, I think. He is not trying to caricature real people, he is trying to paint human types, reaching out for the universal rather than the individual.

Don't let the opinions of the average man sway you. Dream, and he thinks you're crazy. Succeed, and he thinks you're lucky. Acquire wealth, and he thinks you're greedy. Pay no attention. He simply doesn't understand.
- Robert G. Allen

But he needs a context to do that doesn't he. The universal seen through the context. In regard to pride say.

It's 20 years since I spent a lovely summer in the garden reading that wonderful book. It was as if I had experienced another lifetime.

I know Albertine was female.

And he creates an entire invented context for that -- Balbec and the likes do not actually exist in real life.

If you wish, your question about the possible real-life examples behind a Proust character is a little bit like asking, about the David of Michel Angelo, "from what quarry did the marble come from?". Only die-hard sculpture fanatics would be interested in the answer, I should think.


Good point. Proust's real life romantic interests were male... The narrator is (once or twice in the novel I think) called "Marcel" and he looks superficially like Proust, but he is a rather different person than Marcel Proust: hetero, Christian, etc.

“I dined with Legrandin on the terrace of his house by moonlight. "There is a charming quality, is there not," he said to me, "in this silence; for hearts that are wounded, as mine is, a novelist whom you will read in time to come asserts that there is no remedy but silence and shadow. And you see this, my boy, there comes in all our lives a time, towards which you still have far to go, when the weary eyes can endure but one kind of light, the light which a fine evening like this prepares for us in the stillroom for darkness, when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence.”

― Marcel Proust

What anybody makes of that, vonny, is a function of the type of sense of humour they have.

Whatever the experts say I think MP was taking the piss from first to last.

It's not really that "when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence" is pretty hilarious itself but so also is seeing the effect such wordplay has on impressionable, innocent souls of the type who are thrummingly campaigning to save the earth, or the whales, or the spotted small tit, or whatever else is being neglected which is both at risk and is also photogenic.

Sewer rats, being neither at risk or photogenic, are useless.

My problem is being raised in Lancashire where the TV series Brass was made. "The flute of silence" indeed. Brass is effrontery. Brass is money. Brass tacks are what we get down to up here.

They do for me. Seaside girls are the same the world over.



I do have a bit of a die-hard streak I'm afraid.

I'm not convinced that the work is separate from the man.

I "read" the book during a hot summer on a lounger in my garden over 20 years ago. I intend reading it again with more care this year if I can find the time.

“I don’t mind you thinking I’m stupid, but don’t talk to me like I’m stupid.”
- Harlan Ellison

“Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”
– Mark Twain

I wasn't actually vonny. It was a compliment to your intelligence that I would take the time of day to discourse with you. There are a large number of ladies on A2K and I don't bother with most of them.

I was merely, in my own way, trying to give you an angle on Proust which I think will enable you to enjoy the book. I dare say all the literature lessons you have wearily sat through did not provide such an angle and nor did they make any attempt to; having taken your stupidity for granted as schoolteacher types tend to do.

Just read over--"when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence.” as many times as it does to get you guffawing ---you'll get the picture.

I can imagine Marcel having heard someone deliver themselves of such a line at a social evening and him turning to the camera, like Benny Hill sometimes did, with that faint smile which he showed in the photo of him in the straw boater.

Okay - okay - for once you made me laugh!

“One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.
He said, "My son, the battle was between 2 "wolves" inside us all. One was Evil. It was anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other was Good. It was joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: "Which wolf wins?"

The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed.”
― Cherokee Indian

Nice...


Me neither, but it was Proust's idea and he did have a point that art has a degree of autonomy from life. The danger with a reductionist analysis à la Goncourt is one can get so busy looking at the author's relationship with his parents and when he got his first dog, that one forgets about the author's aesthetic project, the artistic intention, the competition with this or that other artist, the will to move beyond previous artistic limits, etc.