I needed to restore to even the slightest of the signs which surrounded me (Guermantes, Albertine, Gilberte, Saint-Loup, Balbec, etc.) the meaning which habit had made them lose for me. And when we have attained reality, if we are to express it and preserve it we must eliminate everything that is not a part of it and which is constantly being introduced by the speed that accompanies habit. Most of all, I would eliminate all words which come from the tongue rather than the mind, humorous remarks of the sort we make in conversation and which after a long conversation with other people we continue to address artificially to ourselves and which fill our minds with untruths, these purely automatic remarks which, in the writer who sinks so far as to transcribe them, are accompanied by the little smile, the little grimace which constantly spoils, for example, the spoken sentence of a Sainte-Beuve, whereas true books must be the product not of daylight and chitchat but of darkness and silence. And as art exactly reconstructs life, an atmosphere of poetry will always hover around the truths that one has reached in oneself, a gentle sense of mystery which is merely the remains of the semi-darkness we have had to pass through, the indication, as precisely marked as on an altimeter, of the depth of a work. (For depth is not inherent in certain subjects as, not being able to go beneath the world of appearances, some materialistically spiritual novelists believe, all of whose noble intentions, like the virtuous tirades common among the sort of people who are incapable of the smallest act of kindness, should not prevent us from noticing that they have not even had the strength of mind to get rid of all the banalities of form they have acquired through imitation.)
As for the truths which the intellect – even of the finest minds – gathers in the open, in front of it, in broad daylight, their value may be very great; but their outlines are starker and they are featureless, without any depth, because no depths had to be negotiated in order to reach them, because they have not been recreated. It is often the case that writers in whose deeps those mysterious truths no longer appear write, after a certain age, only with their intelligence, which becomes increasingly powerful; because of this, the books of their mature years have greater power than those of their youth, but none of the same aura of sweetness.
I felt, however, that these truths which the intelligence derives directly from reality are not to be despised completely, for they could provide a setting, in a material less pure but still imbued with mind, for those impressions which are conveyed to us outside time by the essence common to both past and present sensations, but which, because they are more precious, are also too rare for a work of art to be composed from them alone. I felt thronging within me a crowd of truths relating to passions, characters and conduct, all capable of being used in that way. Their perception caused me joy; yet it seemed to remind me that I had discovered more than one of them in suffering, and others in very ordinary pleasures.
Each person who makes us suffer can be linked by us to a divinity of which he or she is only a fragmentary reflection at the lowest level, a divinity (or Idea) the contemplation of which immediately gives us joy in place of the pain we had before. The whole art of living is to use the people who make us suffer simply as steps enabling us to obtain access to their divine form and thus joyfully to people our lives with divinities.
Then, less dazzling no doubt than the one which had shown me that the work of art was the only means of finding Lost Time again, a new light dawned on me. And I understood that all these raw materials for a literary work were actually my past life; I understood that they had come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in idleness, in tenderness, in sorrow, that they had been stored up by me without my divining their ultimate purpose, even their survival, any more than a seed does as it lays up a reserve of all the nutrients which will feed the plant. Like the seed, I would be able to die when the plant had developed, and I began to see that I had lived for its sake without knowing it, without ever having realized that there should be some contact between my life and the books I had wanted to write and for which, when I used to sit down at my table, I could not find a subject. So all my life up to that day could, and at the same time could not, have been summed up under the title: A vocation. It could not have been, in the sense that literature had not played any role in my life. It could have been, to the extent that this life, the memories of its times of sadness, its times of joy, formed a reserve comparable to that of the albumen stored in the ovule of a plant and from which it draws the nourishment it needs to transform itself into a seed, before anybody is aware that the embryo of a plant is developing, despite the fact that it is the site of secret but very active chemical and respiratory phenomena. In the same way my life was linked to that which would bring about its maturation. And those who might subsequently draw nourishment from it for themselves would have no idea, any more than people do when they eat food grains, that the rich substances which they contain were made for its nourishment, had first nourished the seed and enabled it to ripen.
In this area, comparisons which are false if one takes them as a starting-point can be true if one ends up with them. The man of letters envies the painter, he would like to make sketches, to take notes, but if he does so it is a waste of time. When he writes, though, there is not one gesture of his characters, not one mannerism, one tone of voice, which has not been supplied to his inspiration by his memory, there is not one name of an invented character beneath which he cannot subsume sixty names of characters he has seen, one of whom has posed for the grimace, another for the monocle, this one for anger, that one for the conceited movement of the arm, etc. And then the writer realizes that while his dream of being a painter was not realizable in a conscious and deliberate manner, it has nevertheless been realized and that the writer, too, has created a sketch book without being aware of it.
For, driven by the instinct that was in him, the writer, long before he thought that he might one day become one, regularly failed to look at a large number of things that other people looked at, which caused him to be accused by other people of not paying attention and by himself of not knowing how to listen or look; during that time he was telling his eyes and ears to retain for ever things that to other people seemed puerile trivialities, the tone of voice in which a phrase had been said, and the facial expression and movement of the shoulders that at a certain moment, many years before, some person had made about whom perhaps he knows nothing else, and that because this tone of voice was one that he had already heard, or felt that he might hear again, that it was something that might be repeated, something durable; it is this feeling for the general which, in the future writer, itself selects things that are general and that will be able to be part of the work of art. For he has listened to the others only when, stupid or demented as they may have been, repeating like parrots all the things that other people of similar character say, they make themselves into birds of prophecy, mouthpieces of a psychological law. The only things he remembers are the general. It was by tones of voice like these, by such facial movements, even if seen in his earliest childhood, that the life of others was represented in his mind, and when later he comes to write, he will describe a common movement of the shoulders, as realistically as if it had been written in an anatomist’s note-book, but in order here to express a psychological truth, and then on to those shoulders graft somebody else’s neck-movement, each person having contributed his momentary pose.
It may well be that, for the creation of a work of literature, imagination and sensitivity are interchangeable qualities, and that the second may without any great disadvantage be substituted for the first, in the same way as people whose stomach is incapable of digesting pass that function over to their intestine. A man born sensitive but with no imagination might none the less write admirable novels. The suffering that other people caused him, his efforts to prevent it, the conflicts that it and the cruel other person created, all of this, interpreted by the intelligence, might make the raw material of a book not only as beautiful as it would have been if it had been imagined, invented
, but also as unrelated to the daydreams the author would have had if he had been been happily left to his own devices, as surprising for himself, and as accidental as a fortuitous vagary of the imagination.
The stupidest people manifest by their gestures, their comments, their involuntarily expressed feelings, laws of which they are unaware but which the artist manages to catch in them. Because of observations of this sort, the writer is commonly thought to be malicious, wrongly so, because in an idiosyncrasy the artist sees a beautiful generality and no more holds it against the person observed than a surgeon would dismiss someone for suffering from a common circulation disorder; indeed, he is less likely than anyone to make fun of people’s foibles. Unfortunately, he is more unhappy than malicious: where his own passions are concerned, even though he knows all about them in general terms, he has more difficulty is extracting himself from the personal sufferings they cause. Obviously, when some insolent person insults us, we would rather he had been singing our praises, so when a woman we adore betrays us, we feel even more intensely that we would have given anything for it to be otherwise! But the resentment at the affront, or the pain of rejection would then have been territories we would never have known, and discovering them, painful though it is for a man, is a valuable experience for an artist. Which is why the malicious and the heartless, despite both their wishes, feature in his work. The pamphleteer cannot help but share his fame with the riff-raff he has stigmatized. In every work of art one can recognize those the author hated most and also, alas! those whom he loved best. All they have done is to pose for the artist at the moment when, against his will, they were causing him the most suffering. When I was in love with Albertine, I had to recognize that she did not love me, and I was forced to resign myself to the fact that all she would do was show me what it was like to experience suffering, love and even, at the outset, happiness.
And when we try to extract the generalizable features from our grief, to write about it, we are perhaps slightly consoled by one other factor in addition to the ones I adduce here, which is that to think in terms of generalities, to write, is for the writer a healthy and necessary function, the fulfilment of which makes him happy, just as exercise, sweating and baths do men of a more physical bent. In truth, I was a little unwilling to accept this. I was prepared to believe that the supreme truth of life was in art, and, at the same time, I could see that I was no more capable of the effort of remembering that would be necessary if I were still to love Albertine than I was of continuing to mourn my grandmother; all the same, I wondered whether a work of art of which they were unaware would be a fulfilment for them, for the destiny of those poor dead creatures. My grandmother, whom I had with so much indifference watched as she suffered her last moments and died before my eyes! Oh, that I might, in expiation, when my work were finished, fatally injured, suffer for long hours, abandoned by everybody, before finally dying! In addition, I felt infinite pity even for less cherished beings, even for people I cared nothing about, and for all the human destinies, which my thought, in its attempt to comprehend them, had reduced to their suffering or even to their foibles. All those people who had revealed truths to me, and who now were no longer living, appeared to me to have lived lives which had profited only myself, and to have died for my benefit.
It was sad for me to think that my love, which I had prized so highly, would in my book be so detached from an actual person that the readers of all sorts would apply it in all its detail to what they had felt for other women. But ought I to be scandalized by this posthumous infidelity, or by the fact that some person or other might provide unknown women as objects of my feelings, when this infidelity, this division of love among a number of beings, had begun in my lifetime, and even before I started to write? I had indeed suffered one after another for Gilberte, for Mme de Guermantes, for Albertine. One after another, too, I had forgotten them, and only my love, dedicated to different beings, had lasted. The profanation of one of my memories by unknown readers was something I had already accomplished myself. I felt something close to horror at myself, as perhaps might some nationalist party in whose name hostilities had been fought out, and who alone would benefit from a war in which large numbers of noble victims had suffered and died, without even knowing (which for my grandmother at least would have been some compensation) the outcome of the struggle. And my only consolation for the thought that she did not know that I was finally setting myself to work was that (such is the lot of the dead), while she was unable to enjoy my progress, she had long since ceased to to be aware of my inaction, my failed life, which had been such a source of unhappiness to her. And certainly it was not only from my grandmother or from Albertine, but from many others as well, that I had been able to incorporate a remark, a look, although I might no longer remember them at all as individuals; a book is a great cemetery where the names have been effaced from most of the tombs and are no longer legible. Yet there are times when one remembers a name perfectly well, but without knowing whether anything of the person who bore it survives within these pages. That girl with the very deep-set eyes and the drawling voice, is she here? And if she really does repose here, then do we any longer know in what part, or how to find her underneath the flowers?
But since we live our lives detached from individual beings, since after a few years our strongest feelings, such as had been my love for my grandmother and for Albertine, are forgotten, since they mean no more to us than words we cannot understand, since we can talk about these dead people with society acquaintances in houses we still frequent with pleasure even though everything we loved is dead, then, if there is a way for us to learn to understand these forgotten words, ought we not to use it, even if it entails first transcribing them into a universal, but at least therefore permanent, language, and thereby making out of those who are no longer with us, in their truest essence, an acquisition of lasting value for all human beings? Indeed, if we could succeed in explaining the law of change which made these words unintelligible to us, would not our weakness become a new kind of strength?
In addition to that, the work to which our sorrows have contributed may be interpreted, so far as our future is concerned, both as a baneful sign of suffering and as an auspicious sign of consolation. Indeed, when we say that the loves and sorrows of a poet have been useful to him, have helped him to build up his work, when unknown women who never had the slightest idea that they might, by an act of malice here, or a mocking remark there, each have brought their stone to the construction of the monument which they will never see, we tend to forget that the writer’s life does not come to an end with this work, that the temperament which has caused him to have these sufferings, the ones that have entered into his work, will still be his when the work is finished, will make him love other women in conditions which would be almost identical, if all the modifications which time brings to circumstances did not result in slight variations, in the subject himself, in his appetite for love and in his resistance to pain. From this first point of view, then, the work is to be regarded solely as if it were an unfortunate love which fatally presages more of the same, assuming that the life to come will resemble the work, and that the poet will have almost no further need to write, because for most of the time he will be able to find the shape of future events anticipated in what he has already written. Thus my love for Albertine, to the extent that it is different from it, would already be inscribed in my love for Gilberte, in the middle of which happy time I had first heard Albertine’s name spoken, and her character described, by her aunt, without my having the slightest idea that this insignificant seed would grow, expand and one day spread its branches over the whole of my life.
But from another point of view, the work is a sign of happiness, because it shows us that in every love the general is to be found alongside the particular, and shows us how to pass from the latter to the former by means of exercises which fortify us against unhappiness by detaching our attention from its cause in order to focus on its essential qualities. In
deed, as I was shortly to discover for myself, even while you are in love and suffering, if you have finally achieved your vocation, then during the hours you are working you feel very strongly that the being whom you love is dissolving into a greater reality, and you start intermittently to forget her and, while you are working, suffer no more from love than from any purely physical illness that has nothing to do with the loved being, such as some sort of heart ailment. It is true, though, that this is a matter of timing and that the effect seems to be the opposite if the work comes more slowly. Because there are some individuals who, having managed, in spite of us, by their unkindness or their insignificance to destroy our illusions, have themselves been reduced to nothing and severed from the chimera of love we had conjured up in our minds; and if we then set to work, our mind raises them up again, identifies them, for the purposes of our self-analysis, with individuals who have loved us, and in such cases literature, reconstructing the demolished work of amorous illusion, gives a sort of afterlife to feelings which were no longer in existence.
In Search of Lost Time Page 27