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JANUARY 2014
Thus He Was Thus He Spake
MARCEL PROUST
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance."
PRABUDDH JEEVAN
Marcel Proust Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic and essayist best known for his monumental novel In Search of Lost Time. Much of it concerns the decline of aristocracy and the rise of the middle class that occurred in France during the end of the 19th century.
Superficially, the narration follows the lives of three families, Marcel's own, the aristocratic de Guermantes and the family of the Jewish bohemian dilettante Swann. Among the characters are faithless coquette Odette, whom Swann marries, Baron de Charlus (with a fetish for Balzac and Latin quotes), Duchess de Guermantes, Mme de Villeparisis, Robert Saint-Loup and Marcel's great love Albertine.
"Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were."
The novel begins with the childhood recollections of a character called Marcel who shares Proust's first name though he is not actually Proust. However both were haunted throughout their lives by their desire to do 'great work'. The memories are occasional and involuntary, triggered when he eats a Madeleine cake dipped in herbal tea such as he had when he was a child. Involuntary gusts of memory have now been baptized Proustian moments by some. In the book, Marcel uses this cake-soaked flavor to return to his childhood home in the town he lived in. This becomes a theme through the book with sensations returning both Marcel and the readers to his previous experiences. More than voluntary memory, Proust called involuntary memory the essence of the past.
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"Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than
Proust was born in a suburb of Paris in the 19th century. His father was a celebrated doctor known for his research work in epidemiology. His mother was the daughter of a wealthy stockbroker. Proust was an asthmatic child but he had been sickly right from birth.
As he grew, he showed an interest in studying law and political science and he even did a bit of military service. His ill health prevented him from pursuing a professional like actively but he had shown an interest in writing right from his early student days; he excelled
in literature in school. His sketches were published in Le Figaro in the 1890s and in Le Banquet, a magazine founded by some of his school friends.
"People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation
to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad."
His first book was Pleasure and Days, a collection of poems, essays and stories that came out in 1896. His sickly nature did not prevent him from enjoying himself socially. He moved around in circles filled with intellectually and artistically energetic people. Greats like John Ruskin, Henri Bergson, Wagner and Anatole France influenced his thoughts. He began work on his masterpiece in 1908 after withdrawing from society almost completely, following the death of his mother.
"Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind."
RESHMA JAIN The Narrators Mobile: 9820427444
"The thirst for something other than what we have...to bring something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it."
Marcel Proust
