#UneCitationDeProustParJourDeConfinement

Throughout the two lockdowns linked to the Covid-19 epidemic, the société des amis de Marcel Proust posted, on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, a quotation from Proust every day. Find below the full set of these quotations, in descending chronological order:

#UneCitationDeProustParJourDeConfinement

14 December 2020

I felt a sense of weariness and dread on realising that all that long span of time not only had, without interruption, been lived, thought, secreted by me, that it was my life, that it was myself, but further that I had at every moment to keep it attached to me, that it bore me up, perched as I was upon its dizzying summit, and that I could not move without displacing it, as I could with it.

(Le Temps retrouvé)

13 December 2020

As my father always spoke of the Méséglise way as the finest view of the plain that he knew, and of the Guermantes way as typical of river scenery, I gave them, conceiving of them thus as two entities, that cohesion, that unity which belong only to the creations of our mind; the smallest fragment of each of them seemed to me precious and to reveal their particular excellence, whereas, alongside them, before one had reached the sacred soil of one or the other, the purely material roads amid which they lay, as the ideal of plain scenery and the ideal of river scenery, were no more worth looking at than, to a spectator enamoured of dramatic art, the little streets that surround a theatre.

(Du côté de chez Swann)

12 December 2020

So many times, in the course of my life, reality had disappointed me because, at the moment I perceived it, my imagination, which was my only organ for enjoying beauty, could not be applied to it, by virtue of the inevitable law which holds that one can only imagine what is absent.

(Le Temps retrouvé)

11 December 2020

Ever since Swann had been so unhappy, feeling always that kind of shiver that precedes the moment when one is about to weep, he had the same need to talk of his grief that a murderer has to talk of his crime.

(Du côté de chez Swann)

10 December 2020 - 101st anniversary of the Prix Goncourt awarded to "Jeunes Filles en fleurs"

[Certain] amusements possess the true secret of giving us pleasure, which is not to claim to do so but only to help us pass the time of our boredom.

(À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs)

9 December 2020

All the castles of the lands of which she was duchess, princess, viscountess, this lady in fur braving the bad weather seemed to me to carry with her, as the figures carved on the lintel of a portal hold in their hand the cathedral they have built, or the city they have defended. But these castles, these forests, only the eyes of my mind could see them in the gloved hand of the lady in fur, cousin of the king. Those of my body could make out there, on days when the weather threatened, only an umbrella which the duchess was not afraid to arm herself with.

(La Prisonnière)

8 December 2020

It is perhaps an effect of my solitude to feel more deeply the rare precious, dear and beneficial influences. "A ray of sunshine," says Emerson of the solitary man, "suffices to intoxicate him."

(Letter to Joseph Primoli, December 1908)

7 December 2020

We would leave Paris on that one twenty-two train which I had too long delighted in looking up in the railway timetable, where it gave me each time the emotion, almost the blissful illusion, of departure, so much so that I could not imagine that I knew it. As the shaping in our imagination of the features of a happiness depends more on the identity of the desires it inspires in us than on the precision of the information we have about it, I believed I knew that one in its details, and I had no doubt that I would feel a special pleasure in the carriage when the day began to grow cool.

(À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs)

6 December 2020

My health has trained me to do without almost everything and to replace beings with their images and life with thought.

(Letter to Albert Sorel, May 1905)

5 December 2020

If, in my visits to Elstir, I had asked his painting to lead me to the understanding and love of things better than itself, a true thaw, an authentic provincial square, living women on the beach (at most I would have asked of it the portrait of realities I had not known how to fathom, such as a path of hawthorn, not so that it might preserve their beauty for me but that it might reveal it to me), now, on the contrary, it was the originality, the allure of these paintings that excited my desire, and what I wanted above all to see was other paintings by Elstir.

(Le Côté de Guermantes)

4 December 2020

Certainly, in this Balbec so long desired, I had not found the Persian church I dreamed of, nor the eternal fogs. Even the beautiful 1.35 train had not lived up to what I imagined of it. But in exchange for what the imagination leads us to expect and for which we take such useless pains to try to discover, life gives us something that we were far from imagining.

(Albertine disparue)

3 December

For years Bergotte had not left his house. Besides, he had never liked society, or had liked it for a single day, only to despise it like everything else and in the same manner that was his own, namely not to despise because one cannot obtain, but as soon as one has obtained.

(La Prisonnière)

2 December

The language of the unhappy lover, of the political partisan, of reasonable parents, seems, to those who use it, to carry with it an irresistible self-evidence. Yet one does not see that it persuades those to whom it is addressed: a truth does not impose itself from outside on minds which it must first render similar to the one in which it was born.

(Letter to Émile Henriot, 2 December 1920 - what Proust was writing 100 years ago)

1 December

I thought of the images that had made me decide to return to Balbec. They were quite different from those of before; the vision I had come seeking was as dazzling as the first had been hazy; they were bound to disappoint me no less. The images chosen by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality had destroyed. There is no reason why, outside ourselves, a real place should possess the pictures of memory any more than those of dream.

(Sodome et Gomorrhe)

30 November

I often devoted to imagining Albertine's outing the energy I did not use to take it myself, and spoke to my friend with that ardour which unexecuted plans keep intact. I expressed such a wish to go and see again such-and-such a stained-glass window at the Sainte-Chapelle, such regret at not being able to do it with her alone, that tenderly she would say to me: "But, my dear, since you seem to want it so much, make a little effort, come with us. We shall wait as late as you like, until you are ready. Besides, if it amuses you more to be alone with me, I need only send Andrée home, she'll come another time." But these very entreaties to go out added to the calm which allowed me to stay at home.

(La Prisonnière)

29 November

It is the privilege of those who always live alone to create in their minds substitutes for real people and to be able to love without ever seeing.

(Letter to Robert de Billy, April 1908)

28 November

The persistence in me of an old vague intention to work, to make up for lost time, to change my life, or rather to begin to live, gave me the illusion that I was still just as young; and yet the memory of all the events that had followed one another in my life – and also those that had followed one another in my heart, for when one has changed a great deal, one is led to suppose that one has lived longer – in the course of these last months of Albertine's existence, had made them seem to me much longer than a year.

(Albertine disparue)

27 November

It is an effect of the love that poets awaken in us that we attach a literal importance to things which for them are merely significant of personal emotions. Yet in reality, it is mere chance encounters of relations or kinship which, by giving them the occasion to pass by or stay near them, made them choose to depict this road, this garden, this field, this bend in the river, rather than others. What makes them appear to us different and more beautiful than the rest of the world is that they carry on them, like an elusive reflection, the impression they gave to genius.

(Sur la lecture)

26 November

The countries we desire occupy at every moment a far greater place in our real life than the country in which we actually find ourselves. No doubt if at the time I had paid closer attention myself to what was in my mind when I uttered the words "to go to Florence, to Parma, to Pisa, to Venice," I would have realised that what I saw was not a city at all, but something as different from all that I knew, as delicious, as might be, for a humanity whose life had always passed in winter late afternoons, that unknown marvel: a spring morning.

(Du côté de chez Swann)

25 November

For so many years I have been weaned from all human company that I must accustom myself to deprivations. "You have built around yourself a veritable fortress and never lower the drawbridge for me," the Duc de Luynes wrote to me the other day.

(Letter to Émile Henriot, April 1922)

24 November

I envy Nonelef [Bertrand de Fénelon] and you. I envy each of you for seeing the other, while for my only distraction I am going to turn over in my bed. But how many leagues I travel in my mind and in my heart during this apparent rest!

(Letter to Antoine Bibesco, June 1902)

23 November

I had just been reborn, existence lay intact before me, for that morning, after a series of mild days, there had been a cold fog which had not lifted until around noon. Now, a change in the weather is enough to recreate the world and ourselves, […] by adapting our harmonised desires to the new mode of things. The mist, from the moment I woke, had made of me, instead of the centrifugal being one is on fine days, a withdrawn man, desirous of the fireside corner and the shared bed, a chilly Adam in search of a stay-at-home Eve, in this different world.

(Le Côté de Guermantes)

22 November

The practice of solitude had given him a love for it, as happens with every great thing that we have feared at first, because we knew it to be incompatible with lesser things to which we were attached and of which it deprives us less than it detaches us from them. Before knowing it, all our concern is to know to what extent we shall be able to reconcile it with certain pleasures which cease to be such once we have known it.

(À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs)

21 November

Think that I live in such suffering that I can no longer receive a visit despite the loyalty that friends I have not seen in twenty years have kept for me, that I never write letters (you are one of the rare exceptions), and at the risk of seeing yesterday's praise turn into tomorrow's savaging, I answer no journalist, do not have the strength three-quarters of the time to raise myself to sign a business paper or a cheque, and compare this with your fine, brilliant health and all that I would do with it, if I were as well as you.

(Letter to Sydney Schiff, October 1921)

20 November

When I was tired of my reading, whatever the weather, I would go out; my body, left motionless during the hours of reading in which the movement of my ideas stirred it in place, so to speak, was like a top which, suddenly released, needs to spend in every direction the speed it has accumulated.

(Du côté de chez Swann, draft)

19 November

No doubt [to write my book] I ought to live even more solitary, and all those people who complain of not having seen me for so long, would it not be they who were wrong, since it was in order to concern myself with them more thoroughly that I would no longer receive them? I would speak to them more about themselves in writing than in being with them.

(Le Temps retrouvé, draft)

18 November - 98th anniversary of the death of Marcel Proust

We passionately desire that there be another life in which we would be like what we are here below. But we do not reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this one, after a few years, we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally. Even without supposing that death would change us more than those changes that occur in the course of life, if in that other life we were to meet the self we once were, we would turn away from ourselves as from those people with whom we were once close but whom we have not seen for a long time.

(Sodome et Gomorrhe)

17 November

I thought of M. de Gurcy's prescription: to go no more into society, to waste no more time on the inferior conversations held there, to realise oneself within, in solitude. This advice corresponded so well to what my conscience told me every day when I came home from an evening out, having spent, without pleasure, hours during which I would have been so happy reading, thinking, working, that I filled it with a meaning it perhaps did not even carry, and which thereby took on still greater force for me.

(Sodome et Gomorrhe, draft)

16 November

Failing outward life, incidents are also brought about by inner life; failing Albertine's outings, the chance encounters met with in the reflections I made alone sometimes provided me with those little fragments of reality which draw to themselves, like a magnet, a little of the unknown which, from then on, becomes painful. However much one lives as though under a pneumatic bell jar, the associations of ideas, the memories, continue to be at work.

(La Prisonnière)

15 November

Yes, travel is disappointing for all those who would deserve, by the force of their desire, to know its joy, because the sight of reality cannot give us what the imagination has coveted.

(Du côté de chez Swann, draft)

14 November

Without being, alas, much further advanced, I like to imagine near [me] the people I would like to see, whom I never see, and of whom I think so often.

(Letter to Mme Scheikévitch, October 1916)

13 November

It often happens that the pleasure which all men take in revisiting the memories their memory has collected is keener in those whom the tyranny of physical illness and the daily hope of their cure deprive, on the one hand, of going to seek in nature the scenes that resemble those memories, and, on the other hand, leave confident enough that they will soon be able to do so, that they remain, as regards them, in a state of desire, of appetite, and do not consider them merely as memories, as pictures.

(La Prisonnière)

12 November

From pure solitude, the lazy mind can draw nothing, since it is incapable of setting its creative activity in motion by itself. But the most elevated conversation, the most pressing advice would likewise be of no use to it, since that original activity they cannot produce directly. What is needed, then, is an intervention which, while coming from another, occurs deep within ourselves; it is indeed the impulse of another mind, but received in the bosom of solitude. Now this is precisely the definition of reading.

(Sur la lecture)

11 November

I weep for the death of everyone, even people I have never seen. This is a sense that the war has added to us, through the dreadful exercise of daily anguish, the one that makes us suffer for strangers.

(Letter to Mme Soutzo, October 1917)

10 November

The various places on earth are beings too, whose personality is so strong that some people die of being separated from them, so distinctive in any case that many seek out the pleasure of their company every year and keep, in their absence, the memory of their charm.

(Jean Santeuil)

9 November

In a situation where someone who was indifferent to me, for whom I had always feigned affection or respect, risked only an annoyance while I was running a danger, I could not have done otherwise than to pity him for his trouble as for a considerable thing and to treat my own danger as nothing, because it seemed to me that it was in these proportions that things ought to appear to him.

(À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs)

8 November

In the appraisal of time passed, only the first step counts. One finds it hard, at first, to imagine that so much time has passed, and then that no more has passed.

(Le Temps retrouvé)

7 November

My aunt had, like every creature, her hours of exception, her hours of longing for some unheard-of change, those hours in which we want something new at any price, and in which, not being capable of drawing from ourselves the source of that change, whether from lack of imagination or lack of will, we would wish it to be imposed on us by force, even a hostile force, of circumstance. We would like the coming minute to bring us the emotion of an event, even an unhappy one, and destiny would fulfil us if, thereby answering our desire for a dramatic turn of events at the centre of a monotonous existence, it changed, in some way despite ourselves, the setting of that destiny.

(Du côté de chez Swann, draft)

6 November

Having lived since the age of fifteen in the midst of the Mmes de Guermantes, I have the strength to brave, in the eyes of those who do not know it, the opinion that I am a snob, not from the outside and ironically as a snobbish novelist would, but from within, striving to make myself into the soul of someone who would like to know a duchesse de Guermantes.

Letter to Jacques Boulenger, 6 November 1920

5 November

The inverted signs by means of which we express our feelings through their opposite are so plain to read that one wonders how there can still be people who say, for instance: "I have so many invitations that I don't know which way to turn," in order to conceal that they have none.

(Sodome et Gomorrhe)

4 November

I now understood what old age was – old age which of all realities is perhaps the one of which we retain, for the longest part of our life, a purely abstract notion, looking at calendars, dating our letters, seeing our friends marry, the children of our friends, without understanding, whether from fear or from laziness, what it means, until the day we perceive an unfamiliar silhouette that tells us we are living in a new world; until the day the grandson of one of our friends, a young man whom we would instinctively treat as a comrade, smiles as though we were mocking him, we who have appeared to him as a grandfather.

(Le Temps retrouvé)

3 November

An American woman who assures me that she is very beautiful and twenty-seven years old writes to me that for three years she has done nothing but read my books day and night. And I would not repeat it (for I never repeat such things), were it not for the conclusion, which, if it does not diminish her, humiliates me: "And after three years of uninterrupted reading, my conclusion is this: I understand nothing of it, absolutely nothing. Dear Marcel Proust, don't play the poseur, come down for once from your empyrean. Tell me in two lines what you meant to say." As in two thousand she has not understood it, or I did not know how to express it, I judged it useless to reply to her. And she will think me a poseur.

(Letter to Walter Berry, December 1921)

2 November

No doubt I had long been, through the power exercised by my imagination, prepared to believe true what I feared rather than what I would have wished.

(Sodome et Gomorrhe)

1 November

The first mornings of November, in Paris, in houses, the proximity and the deprivation of the spectacle of autumn ending so quickly without our witnessing it give a nostalgia, a veritable fever for dead leaves, which can go so far as to prevent sleep.

(Du côté de chez Swann)

31 October

If only I had been able to begin writing! But, whatever the conditions in which I approached this project (just as, alas, that of drinking no more alcohol, of going to bed early, of sleeping, of being well), whether with passion, with method, with pleasure, depriving myself of a walk, postponing it and keeping it as a reward, taking advantage of an hour of good health, making use of the forced inaction of a day of illness, what always ended up emerging from my efforts was a blank page, virgin of any writing, as inescapable as that forced card which, in certain tricks, one inevitably ends up drawing, however one had previously shuffled the deck.

(Le Côté de Guermantes)

30 October

One benefits from no lesson because one does not know how to descend to the general, and one always imagines oneself to be facing an experience that has no precedent in the past.

(Le Côté de Guermantes)

10 May

A writer we adore becomes for us a sort of oracle whom we would like to consult on everything.

(Jean Santeuil)

[last day, conclusion of the series]

9 May

Others besides me, and I am glad of it, have the enjoyment of the universe. I no longer have movement, nor speech, nor thought, nor even the simple well-being of no longer suffering. So, expelled so to speak from myself, I take refuge in the volumes which I feel with my hands for want of reading them, and I take towards them the precautions of the burrowing wasp. Curled up like it and deprived of everything, I now do nothing but provide them, through the world of minds, with the expansion that is denied to me.

(Letter to Gaston Gallimard, October 1922)

8 May

Everyone announces that the war has transformed minds, but announces it in a style that shows all too well that it has transformed nothing at all, in which the same follies, the same banalities recur, either worse still, or seeming so by their confrontation with the great things they imagine themselves to be expressing.

(Letter to Daniel Halévy, 16 November 1914)

7 May

Viollet-le-Duc said that the hospital at Beaune was so beautiful that it made one want to fall ill. One can see clearly that he did not know what it is to be ill.

(Letter to Marie Nordlinger, October 1903)

6 May

I felt clearly that the disappointment of travel, the disappointment of love, were not different disappointments, but the varied aspect taken, according to the fact to which it applies, by the powerlessness we have to realise ourselves in material enjoyment, in effective action.

(Le Temps retrouvé)

5 May

If my parents had allowed me, when I read a book, to go and visit the region it described, I would have thought I was taking an inestimable step in the conquest of truth. For if one has the sensation of being always surrounded by one's soul, it is not like being in a motionless prison; rather, one is as though carried along with it in a perpetual surge to go beyond it, to reach the outside, with a sort of discouragement, always hearing around oneself that identical sonority, which is not an echo from without but the reverberation of an inner vibration.

(Du côté de chez Swann)

4 May

I was one of those who find pleasure only in the imagination, and in what it presents to them as reality, need, in order to take pleasure in something, to attach it to some aesthetic reality. Reading Balzac's purely society short stories such as Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan gave charm, for me, to the society life of the Restoration which otherwise would have had none; reading Le Rouge et le Noir or La Chartreuse de Parme gave charm to the Paris of 1830 or the Milan of 1815 which by themselves, without that, might have been what interested me least; Stendhal's depiction of a life in which one takes pleasure only in balls made me take pleasure in spectacles which I would not have liked on their own.

(À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, draft)

3 May

My solitary life has allowed me to recreate in my mind those I loved, and I always have near me a dear Antoine, as in the days when he was so good to me. But you, after so long, do you still remember me?

(Letter to Antoine Bibesco, November 1909)

2 May

Since I have been at Cabourg, I have been able to get up and go out every day, which had not happened to me for six years. And I am so afraid that the enchantment will cease if I move that I put off the departure for Brittany every day, thinking that Mama would not have wanted to see me stir from a place where I am living, relatively, in a bearable way. But it also grieves me that Mama did not see me like this. It breaks my heart to wake up having slept a little and know she doesn't know it, to come back from a walk without having the hitherto inevitable attacks that used to distress her. This moral suffering is not the only thing that makes my stay cruel. I was calmer, happier in my bed than feverish with caffeine on the roads, seeing nothing, unable to love the most beautiful things I see.

(Letter to Mme de Caraman-Chimay, August 1907)

1 May

Existence has scarcely any interest except on those days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.

(À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs)

30 April

I do not like being the friend who burdens those who are ill with his own displays of concern, demands "news," bothers everyone and puts "his own worry" ahead of your ailments.

(Letter to Robert de Billy, May 1909)

29 April

The bonds between another being and ourselves exist only in our thoughts. Memory, as it weakens, loosens them, and, despite the illusion by which we would like to be deceived and by which, out of love, out of friendship, out of politeness, out of deference to others, out of duty, we deceive others, we exist alone. Man is the being who cannot escape from himself, who knows others only within himself, and, in saying the contrary, lies.

(Albertine disparue)

28 April

In country, solitary lives, the meeting with a human being one has not seen for a long time, or an introduction to someone one does not know, ceases to be that tedious thing it is in Parisian life, and delightfully interrupts the empty space of lives too isolated, where even the hour of the post becomes pleasant.

(Sodome et Gomorrhe)

27 April

The terrible blows of suffering that nature deals me each time I break the rules of the restricted, almost vegetative life it prescribes for me are so cruel and so prolonged that this makes the observance of even an austere rule easier and makes one find a negative sweetness in enforced rest.

(Letter to Jacques-Emile Blanche, October 1918)

26 April

We picture the future to ourselves as a reflection of the present projected into an empty space, whereas it is often the very imminent result of causes that escape most of us.

(La Prisonnière)

25 April

My aunt must have known perfectly well that she would never see Swann again, that she would never leave the house again, but this final confinement must have been rendered fairly easy for her for the very reason which, in our view, ought to have made it more painful: namely that this confinement was imposed on her by the diminishing of her strength which she could observe every day, and which, by turning every action, every movement, into a fatigue, if not a suffering, gave for her, to inaction, to isolation, to silence, the restorative and blessed sweetness of rest.

(Du côté de chez Swann)

24 April

I will gladly exchange with you address and telephone number (102 boulevard Haussmann - 292 05). But alas, these are keys which no longer fit the locks that I am giving you, and they will not help you to see me. For several years I have seen no one, except at Cabourg where the air helps me get up a little. In Paris, I barely get up once every two weeks and see no one at all.

(Letter to Paul Soufflot, September 1909)

23 April

It seems that we may, at our choice, deliver our life to one or the other of two forces, to one or the other of two currents, one which comes from ourselves, from our deep impressions, the other which comes to us from outside. The first naturally carries pleasure with it (hence the joy of creators, that joy I had felt on the Guermantes way as I tried to understand the impression aroused in me by the two steeples). The second is not accompanied by pleasure; we add pleasure to it through reflection, but it is artificial, hence, among fashionable people, an incurable boredom.

(Le Côté de Guermantes, draft)

22 April

How would I know that, while my whole past life spent maintaining so many friendships and pleasures, which seems to me to perpetually offer so many correct ideas, general observations, permanent facts, would only prompt me to write banal pages, how would I know that on the sand of some beach in Belgium, seen only once for an hour, lies a precious truth, if a good wind did not lead me there, by the only paths that lead there, those of the imagination?

(Jean Santeuil)

21 April

We can talk for a whole lifetime without saying anything but endlessly repeating the emptiness of a minute, whereas the movement of thought in the solitary work of artistic creation proceeds in the direction of depth, the only direction that is not closed to us, in which we can make progress, with more difficulty it is true, towards a result of truth. We are not like buildings to which stones can be added from outside, but like trees which draw from their own sap the next node of their stem, the upper storey of their foliage.

(À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs)

20 April

Balzac, who is regarded as a great painter of society, painted it from his room, but the following generation, enamoured of his books, suddenly peopled itself with Rastignacs, with Rubemprés, whom he had invented, but who came to exist.

(Letter to Lionel Hauser, 20 April 1920)

19 April

For years, I have read nothing but Joanne guides, geographies, château directories, everything that allows me to plan journeys, to search out towns, and… not to leave.

(Letter to Madame de Caraman-Chimay, July 1907)

18 April

Events transform thoughts less than one believes, especially collective events, in which thought participates more by imitation, by contagion of feelings that are not deeply felt, not very personal.

(Le Temps retrouvé, draft)

17 April

One always likes a little to get out of oneself, to travel, when one reads.

(Sur la lecture)

16 April

Those who set out on a journey to see with their own eyes a desired city imagine that one can taste, in reality, the charm of the dream.

(Du côté de chez Swann)

15 April

The madman who believed that furniture lived and talked with it acts just like a labourer who interrupts a masterpiece to receive, out of politeness, a visitor, and does not answer, as Nehemiah did from his ladder, "non possum descendere, magnum opus facio" ["I cannot come down, I am doing a great work"], which ought to be the motto of every artist, whom it is as absurd to reproach for shutting himself away in his ivory tower as it is to reproach bees for their wax hive or caterpillars for their cocoon.

(Le Temps retrouvé, draft)

14 April

In the solitary man, seclusion, even absolute and lasting until the end of life, often has as its principle a disordered love of the crowd, which so far outweighs every other feeling that, unable to obtain, when he goes out, the admiration of the concierge, the passers-by, the waiting coachman, he prefers never to be seen by them, and for that renounces every activity that would make it necessary to go out.

(À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs)

13 April

Thought is a kind of telescope which allows us to see distant and immense sights.

(Jean Santeuil)

12 April

He waited for bad news as for Easter eggs, hoping that things would go badly enough to terrify Françoise, but not so badly that he himself would materially suffer from it.

(Le Temps retrouvé)

11 April

I am that strange human being who, while waiting for death to deliver him, lives with the shutters closed, knows nothing of the world, remains motionless like an owl, and, like the owl, sees only a little clearly in the darkness.

(Sodome et Gomorrhe)

10 April

When one has imagination as you do, one possesses all the landscapes one has loved, and that is the heart's inalienable treasure.

(Letter to Mme Williams, 1909)

9 April

To have a body is the great threat to the mind; human, thinking life, of which one should perhaps say less that it is a miraculous refinement of animal and physical life, but rather that it is an imperfection, still as rudimentary as is the common existence of protozoa in polyparies, or the body of the whale, etc., in the organisation of spiritual life. The body encloses the mind in a fortress.

(Le Temps retrouvé)

8 April

Since the death of her husband, my aunt had no longer wished to leave, first Combray, then within Combray her house, then her room, then her bed, and no longer "came down," always lying in an uncertain state of grief, physical weakness, illness, fixed idea and devotion. […] Her bed ran alongside the window; she had the street before her eyes and read there from morning to night, to relieve her boredom, in the manner of Persian princes, the daily but immemorial chronicle of Combray, which she would then discuss with Françoise.

(Du côté de chez Swann)

7 April

Ever since I had seen them in Elstir's watercolours, I sought to find again in reality, and loved as something poetic, the interrupted gesture of knives still lying askew, the swollen roundness of a crumpled napkin on which the sun inlays a patch of yellow velvet, the half-emptied glass which thereby shows to better advantage the noble flare of its shape, and in the depths of its translucent glass, like a condensation of daylight, a remnant of dark wine sparkling with light nonetheless, the shifting of volumes, the transmutation of liquids by the lighting, the changing of plums from green to blue and from blue to gold in the fruit-dish already half stripped, the parading of the old-fashioned chairs which twice a day come to take their places around the cloth spread on the table as on an altar where the festivals of gourmandise are celebrated, and on which, at the bottom of the oysters, a few drops of lustral water remain as in tiny stone stoups; I tried to find beauty where I had never imagined it might be, in the most ordinary things, in the deep life of "still lifes."

(À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs)

6 April

Perhaps the great sobriety of my life without travel, without walks, without society, without light, is a contingent circumstance that sustains in me the perpetuity of desire.

(Letter to Marthe Bibesco, April 1912)

5 April

We are beings who go outward only by starting from within ourselves and who, when we go outward, still remain within ourselves. From this come our desires and our disappointments. We always dwell in our thought and we see the outside only from within, like a man who could see nature only from his drawing room, with the windows open.

(Du côté de chez Swann, draft)

4 April

The sickly state that was going to confine me to a nursing home seemed to me less regrettable, if the beautiful things spoken of in books were no more beautiful than what I had seen.

(Le Temps retrouvé)

3 April

It is better to dream one's life than to live it, even though living it is still dreaming it. Shakespeare's plays are more beautiful, seen in the study, than performed in the theatre. The poets who created the imperishable mistresses of literature have often known only mediocre inn servants, while the most envied voluptuaries have no idea how to conceive of the life they lead, or rather, that leads them.

(Les Plaisirs et les Jours)

2 April

"The imagination tends so strongly towards experience, it has such a need to know – as something realised, existing, falling within the senses, contiguous with other realities – what it has dreamed, that, for want of the journey, it wants to read guidebooks, history books, geography books, which bring back into reality the object of its dreams or its memory."

(Du côté de chez Swann, draft)

1^st April

"Observers of the greatest merit have been seen to rise up against the doctrine of contagion and the practical consequences that were claimed to follow from it. The suppression of quarantines, the abolition of all obstacles that might hinder trade, and the free movement of travellers and goods: such are the most immediate results of this new opinion. One understands, then, the favour it has naturally enjoyed among mercantile peoples; and one was hardly surprised, at the sanitary conference in Constantinople, to see the representative of England rise up in the name of humanity against measures intended to restrict freedom of trade
and hinder commercial transactions."

(Essai sur l'hygiène internationale) (by Adrien Proust, a little jest for April Fools' Day)

31 March

"Ah! Combray, when shall I see you again, poor land! When shall I be able to spend the whole blessed day beneath your hawthorns and our poor lilacs, listening to the finches and the Vivonne which sounds like the murmur of someone whispering!"

(Le Côté de Guermantes)

30 March

"I have thought of you and formed, with the vain indiscretion of friends and philosophers, useless wishes; for instance, that some event might isolate you and wean you from the pleasures of the mind, allow time for a true hunger to be reborn in you, after a sufficient fast, for those fine books, those fine paintings, those fine countries, which you leaf through today with the lack of appetite of someone who has spent the whole of New Year's Day paying visits, during which he has not stopped eating candied chestnuts."

(Letter to Jean Cocteau, December 1910)

29 March

"There are moments when the thought of the Rembrandts, the desire for Rembrandt, overwhelms us. We are hungry for that darkness, we would like to see that glow, we picture to ourselves those golden flesh tones. Does this not also happen to us with places? Today, I would like to see a whole forest: those yellowed trees that I desire, that I feel, I would like to walk beneath them, and have things come to satisfy the hunger of my mind."

(Jean Santeuil)

28 March

"My dear Reynaldo, what happiness it will be to see each other again when these dreadful days are over, and if we do not have too many friends to mourn. Besides, I weep just as much for strangers."

(Letter to Reynaldo Hahn, 30 August 1914)

27 March

"As happens every time that remarks heard about someone we do not know have had the power to awaken in us the idea of a great talent, of a kind of genius, deep within my mind I credited Doctor Du Boulbon with that limitless confidence inspired in us by one who, with an eye more penetrating than another's, perceives the truth."

(Le Côté de Guermantes)

26 March

"The sight of certain paintings by Chardin teaches us what was real and beautiful in a humble dining room. From the day we saw it at the Louvre and grasped its original meaning, by virtue of that incalculable fecundity of works of art, such a painting spreads within us, and countless are the Chardins that our modest dining room presents to us every day, in which we never tire of seeing a first ray of sunlight pass, through intermediate tones between the dull and the bright, over the folds of the tablecloth and the raised edge of the knife that meets it."

(À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, draft)

25 March

"The only beautiful things a poet can find are within himself. Give him a moment of inspiration, that is, allow him to enter into communication with himself, and you will give him happiness. But give him riches, honours, pleasures, and you will give him nothing, for you will thereby draw him all the more out of himself."

(Jean Santeuil)

24 March

"Elstir, obliged to remain shut up in his studio, on certain spring days when knowing that the woods were full of violets gave him a craving to look at them, would send his concierge to buy him a bunch; then, moved, hallucinating, it was not the table on which he had placed the small vegetal model, but the whole carpet of the undergrowth where he had once seen, by the thousand, the serpentine stems bending beneath their blue beaks, that Elstir believed he had before his eyes, like an imaginary zone enclosed within his studio by the limpid scent of the evocative flower."

(La Prisonnière)

23 March

"Why do you travel so often? Carriages carry you so slowly to where your dream would take you so swiftly. To be beside the sea, you have only to close your eyes. Let those who have only the eyes of the body move their whole retinue and settle with it at Pozzuoli or Naples. You wish, you say, to finish a book there? Where will you work better than in town? Within its walls, you can conjure up whatever vast settings you please."

(Les Plaisirs et les Jours)

22 March

"The soldier is persuaded that a certain indefinitely extendable delay will be granted him before he is killed, the thief, before he is caught, men in general before they must die. That is the amulet that preserves individuals – and sometimes peoples – not from danger, but from the fear of danger, in reality from the belief in danger, which in certain cases allows them to brave it without there being any need to be brave."

(À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs)

21 March

"From my bed I can be visited by the stream and the birds of the Pastoral Symphony, which poor Beethoven enjoyed no more directly than I do, since he was deaf. He consoled himself by trying to reproduce the song of the birds he could no longer hear. At the distance separating genius from the absence of talent, I too compose pastoral symphonies in my own way, by painting what I can no longer see!"

(Letter to Mme Straus, March 1913)

20 March

"Where life walls us in, intelligence pierces a way out."

(Le Temps retrouvé)

19 March

"When I was a child, no figure in sacred history seemed to me as wretched as Noah, because of the flood that kept him shut up in the ark for forty days. Later, I was often ill, and for long days I had to remain in 'the ark.' I understood then that Noah could never have seen the world so well as from the ark, despite it being closed and night having fallen upon the earth."

(Les Plaisirs et les Jours, preface)

18 March

"On days when we find ourselves outside the ordinary current of life, even the simplest things begin again to give us sensations that habit normally spares our nervous system."

(Le Temps retrouvé)