Table of Content
Proust the Albatros
Quotes and comments from this week’s readings
Anna Karenina, Part one, XXIII - part two, V.
À la recherche du temp perdu, La prisonnière, p. 1686-1706
Ramayana, Uttara Kanda, Sarga 26-56
Next week’s readings
Proust the Albatros
As I was reading In Search for Lost Time the other day, I was struck with an image of Proust with his immense imagination that must have been a handicap when it came to actually relating to people. I was reminded of a poem by Baudelaire, where he compares the poet living in society to an albatros forced to walk on a boat.
The Albatross
Often, to amuse themselves, the men of a crew
Catch albatrosses, those vast sea birds
That indolently follow a ship
As it glides over the deep, briny sea.Scarcely have they placed them on the deck
Than these kings of the sky, clumsy, ashamed,
Pathetically let their great white wings
Drag beside them like oars.That winged voyager, how weak and gauche he is,
So beautiful before, now comic and ugly!
One man worries his beak with a stubby clay pipe;
Another limps, mimics the cripple who once flew!The poet resembles this prince of cloud and sky
Who frequents the tempest and laughs at the bowman;
When exiled on the earth, the butt of hoots and jeers,
His giant wings prevent him from walking.— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)
For more translation check here
This applies very well to Proust. The whole of The Search shows that the narrator is completely unable to have normal relationships with the people around him, he prefers the vastness of the world in his mind, the images he can conjure when seeing something or someone. From what I can understand, reading Carter’s Proust in Love, Proust was the same.
I find it hard to believe that someone could actually not care about people, and believe friendship to be a waste of time.
And yet, perhaps I had not been wrong in sacrificing the pleasures not only of society but also of friendship to that of spending the whole day in this green garden. People who have the capacity to do so—it is true that such people are artists, and I had long been convinced that I would never be one—also have a duty to live for themselves. And friendship is a dispensation from this duty, an abdication of self. Even conversation, which is friendship’s mode of expression, is a superficial digression that gives us no new acquisition. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute, whereas the march of thought in the solitary work of artistic creation proceeds in depth, in the only direction that is not closed to us, along which we are free to advance—though with more effort, it is true—toward a goal of truth. And friendship is not merely devoid of virtue, like conversation, it is fatal to us as well. (In The Shadow of Young Girls in Flowers, p. 527-528, trans. W. Carter)
What i think more likely is that due to his intense imagination, Proust slowly decided to cut himself from society, as he felt handicaped in it, and came to believe that people were actually uninterested as a way to vindicate his choice of life.
Quotes and comments from this week’s readings
Anna Karenina, Part one, XXIII - Part two, V
Levin barely remembered his mother. His notion of her was a sacred memory, and his future wife would have to be, in his imagination, the repetition of that lovely, sacred ideal of a woman which his mother was for him. (p. 95)
From this to Freud's idea that men want to have sex with their mother, the leap is not that big. Considering how stupid I think psychoanalysis is (I plan, one day, to write a series of papers explaining why, but as this is not the first time I say that I will write something and said article lingers in limbo without ever seeing the light of day, don’t get your hopes up), it will be no surprise that I think there is another explanation.
Given human life history, unless kids have mothers, their chance of survival is slim. Men will then have a tendency to try to find mates with mothering abilities, in order for their offspring to survive. The easiest to know somebody has these abilities, apart from biological indicators, is to compare a potential mate to somebody known to be a good mother. Usually, this means comparing a potential mate to one's mother and choosing somebody like her. That’s my best attempt at an explanation.
Only now did Vronsky understand clearly for the first time that the husband was a person connected with her. He knew she had a husband, but had not believed in his existence and fully believed in it only when he saw him, with his head, his shoulder, his legs in black trousers; and especially when he saw this husband calmly take her arm with a proprietary air. (p. 105)
I wonder if philosophers have worked on this special kind of belief where you know something but it hasn’t really been fleshed out enough that it can be said to be known.
Ah, I understand nothing anymore! Nowadays they all want to live by their own reason, they tell their mothers nothing, and then look… (p. 123)
This reaction from Kitty’s mother goes to show that “kids these days” has been around for quite a while.
À la recherche du temp perdu, La prisonnière, p. 1686-1706
Son sommeil n'était qu'une sorte d'effacement du reste de la vie, qu'un silence uni sur lequel prenaient de temps à autre leur vol des paroles familières de tendresse. (p. 1688)
Her sleep was only a sort of obliteration of the rest of her life, a continuous silence over which from time to time would pass in their flight words of intimate affection.
Il semble bien que le rêve soit fait pourtant avec la matière parfois la plus grossière de la vie, mais cette matière y est traitée, malaxée de telle sorte, avec un étirement dû à ce qu'aucune des limites horaires de l'état de veille ne l'empêche de s'effiler jusqu'à des hauteurs énormes, qu'on ne la reconnaît pas. (p. 1693)
It may seem indeed that our dreams are composed of the coarsest stuff of life, but that stuff is treated, kneaded so thoroughly, with a protraction due to the fact that none of the temporal limitations of the waking state is there to prevent it from spinning itself out to heights so vast that we fail to recognise it.
Ramayana, Uttara Kanda, Sarga 26-56
For the strength of a woman is not equal to that of a man (Sarga 26)
O lord, foremost of the immortal gods, long ago I created many people. They were all of a single type. They all had the same speech, and they all looked the same in every respect. There was absolutely no difference among them, either in their appearance or in their characteristics. Therefore, with my mind focused, I began to ponder over these people. Then, in order to create some distinction among them, I selected from those people whatever was most excellent in each and every limb and fashioned a woman. (Sarga 30)
You must not grieve, tiger among men, for such is the course of fate. For men like you, strong and wise, never grieve. All accumulations end in loss, all elevations in falls, all unions end in separation, and all life ends in death. (Sarga 51)
I will come back to grief in the Ramayana next time.
Through your mind alone, you are able to conquer yourself by yourself and even all the worlds, Kākutstha. What then to say about suffering such as this? (Sarga 51)
This is very close to what stoics philosophers. I like when similar ideas can be found in different places at different times.
Next week’s readings :
Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part two, V-XXI
Proust, The Prisoner. p. 1706-1746 (ed. Quarto Gallimard) or p. 125-148 (ed. Penguin Classics Deluxe)
Valmiki’s Ramayana, Uttara Kanda, Sarga 57-100. This will be our goodbye to Valmiki, as we’ll be starting Confucius’ Annalects (tr. E. Slingerland).