#swann – @nickkahler on Tumblr

The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, 1913-27

nickkahler

What a contradiction it is to search in reality for memory’s pictures, which would never have the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from not being perceived by the senses. The reality I had known no longer existed.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, 1913-27

nickkahler

When a belief disappears, there survives it - more and more vigorous so as to mask the absence of the power we have lost to give reality to new things - a fetishistic attachment to the old things which our belief once animated, as if it were in them and not in us that the divine resided and as if our present lack of belief had a contingent cause, the death of the Gods.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, 1913-27

nickkahler

I did not at the time represent to myself cities, landscapes, monuments as more or less pleasant pictures, cut out here and there from the same material, but each of them as an unknown thing, different in essence from the others, a thing for which my soul thirsted and which it would profit from knowing. How much more individuality still did they assume from being designated by names, names that were theirs alone, proper names like people have.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, 1913-27

nickkahler

I had no greater desire that to see a storm at sea, not so much because it would be a beautiful spectacle as because it would be a moment of nature’s real life unveiled; or rather for me there were no beautiful spectacles except the ones which I knew were not artificially contrived for my pleasure, but were necessary, unchangeable - the beauties of landscapes or of great art. I was curious, I was avid to know only those things which I believed to be more real than myself, which had for me the value of showing me a little of the mind of a great genius, or the force or grace of nature as it is manifested when left to itself, without the interference of men.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, 1913-27

nickkahler

Reality is therefore something that has no relation to possibilities.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, 1913-27

#marcel proust #in search of lost time #remembrance of things past #quote #lit #literature #swann #swann's way #reality #existentialism #relation #possibility #dimension #fifth dimension #time #memory

nickkahler

It was the novelty of his language that convinced one of the darkness of his intentions.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, 1913-27

#marcel proust #in search of lost time #remembrance of things past #swann #swann's way #quote #lit #literature #novelty #language #darkness #intent #intention

nickkahler

Lights were beginning to go out all around him. Under the trees on the boulevards, in a mysterious darkness, fewer people wandered past, barely recognizable. Now and then the shadow of a woman coming up to him, murmuring a word in his ear, asking him to take her home, would make Swann start. He brushed anxiously against all of those dim bodies as if, among the phantoms of the dead, in the kingdom of darkness, he were searching for Eurydice.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, 1913-27

nickkahler

He had for so long given up directing his life toward an ideal goal and limited it to the pursuit of everyday satisfactions that he believed, without ever saying so formally to himself, that this would not change as long as he lived; much worse, since his mind no longer entertained any lofty ideas, he had ceased to believe in their reality, though without being able to deny it altogether. Thus he had acquired the habit of taking refuge in unimportant things that allowed him to ignore the fundamental essence of things.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, 1913-27

nickkahler

So the ’Méséglise way’ and the ’Guermantes way’ remain for me linked with many of the little incidents of that one of all the diverse lives along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in sudden reverses of fortune, the richest in episodes; I mean the life of the mind. Doubtless it makes in us an imperceptible progress, and the truths which have changed for us its meaning and its aspect, which have opened new paths before our feet, we had for long been preparing for their discovery; but that preparation was unconscious; and for us those truths date only from the day, from the minute when they became apparent.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, 1913-27

nickkahler

For at that time everything which was not I, the earth and other people, appeared to me more precious, more important, endowed with a more real existence than they appear to grown men.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, 1913-27

#marcel proust #in search of lost time #remembrance of things past #time #earth #precious #important #men #existence #reality #swann #swann's way #quote #lit #literature

nickkahler

Even in his most artificial creations, man is still working upon nature; certain places will always impose their own particular empire on their surroundings, hoist their immemorial insignia in the middle of a park just as they would have done far from any human intervention, in a solitude which returns to surround them wherever they are, arising from the exigencies of the position they occupy and superimposed on the work of human hands.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, 1913-27

nickkahler

I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinacy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, 1913-27

#marcel proust #in search of lost time #remembrance of things past #swann #swann's way #friend #company #tree #quote #lit #literature #huddle #touch #experience #perception #obstinancy #implore #sky #pity #wound

nickkahler

A little tap on the window pane, as though something had struck it, followed by a plentiful light falling sound, as of grains of sand being sprinkled from a window overhead, gradually spreading, intensifying, acquiring a regular rhythm, becoming fluid, sonorous, musical, immeasurable, universal: it was the rain.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, 1913-27

#marcel proust #in search of lost time #remembrance of things past #swann #swann's way #rhythm #rain #music #quote #pane #experience #memory #time #space #place #phenomenology #sand #window #overhead #lit #literature

nickkahler

We are very slow to recognize in the particular features of a new writer the model that is labeled ‘great talent’ in our museum of general ideas. Precisely because these features are new, we do not think they fully resemble what we call talent. Instead, we talk about originality, charm, delicacy, strength: and then one day we realize that all of this is, in fact, talent.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, 1913-27

#marcel proust #quote #in search of lost time #swann #swann's way #remembrance of things past #talent #idea #charm #originality #novelty #realization #museum #writing #lit #literature

nickkahler

I never allow myself to be influenced either by atmospheric perturbations or by the conventional divisions of time.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, 1913-27

#marcel proust #in search of lost time #remembrance of things past #swann #influence #atmosphere #perturbation #division #time #punctuality #experience

nickkahler

When nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, until the ruins of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, 1913-27