|
Swann's Way
|
Combray
|
Combray
|
|
Combray |
Resurrection of Combray through involuntary memory
Combray
|
Summary These 130 pages give us a rich glimpse into the memories of the author as a young boy growing up in Combray. Quotations “... these Combray streets exist in so remote a corner of my memory, painted in colours so different from those in which the world is decked for me today, ... [65] “... hostelry of the Oiseau Flesche, from whose basement windows used to rise a smell of cooking which rises still in my mind, now and then, in the same warm and intermittent gusts...” [66] “... all this made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of the town: an edifice occupying, so to speak, a four-dimensional space - the name of the fourth being Time - extending through the centuries its ancient nave, which, bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which it emerged triumphant, hiding the rugged barbarities of the eleventh century in the thickness of tis walls...” [83] “He was one of that class of men sho, apart from a scientific career in which they may well have proved brilliantly successful, have acquired an entirely different kind of culture, leterary or artistic, for which their professional specialization has no use but by which their conversation profits.” [91] “I have every useless thing in the world in my house there. The only thing wanting is the necessary thing, a great patch of open sky like this. Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life, little boy”. [93] "...
relegated to the level of those Philistines who, even when an artist
makes them a present of “I would arrange them [actors] in order of talent in lists which I used to recite to myself all day and which ended up by hardening in my brain and hampering it by their immovability.” [101] “I imagined, like everyone else, that the brains of other people were lifeless and submissive receptacles with no power of specific reaction to anything that might be introduced into them; and I had not the least doubt that when I deposited in the minds of my parents the news of the acquaitance I had made at my uncle’s I should at the same time transmit to them the kindly judgement I myself had based on the introduction.” [109] “But none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a real person arouse in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the image was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of real people would be a decided improvement.” [116] “... being still at the age in which one believes that one gives a thing real existence by giving it a name.” [125] “We are very slow to recognize in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the model which is labelled ‘great talent’ in our museum of general ideas. Simply because that physiognomy is new and strange, we can find in it no resemblance to what we are accustomed to call talent. We say rather originality, charm, delicacy, strength; and then one day we realize that it is precisely all this that adds up to talent.” [137] “She [Francoise] already enjoyed a sufficiency of all that my aunt possessed, in the knowledge that the wealth of the mistress automatically elevates and enhances the maid in the eyes of the world.” [148] Comment Why did Proust write the various sections? What is the point of each section? Most sections contribute to the greater whole
|