My Year With Proust - Day 48

"Then, quite apart from all those literary preoccupations, and without definite attachment to anything, suddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight reflect from a stone, the smell of a road would make me stop still, to enjoy the special pleasure that each of them gave me, and also because they appeared to  be concealing, beneath what my eyes could see, something which they invited me to approach and seize from them, but which, despite all my efforts, I never managed to discover.  As I felt that the mysterious object was to be found in them, I would stand there in front of them, motionless, gazing, breathing, endeavouring to penetrate with my mind beyond the thing seen or smelt.  And if I had then to hasten after my grandfather, to proceed on my way, I would still seek to recover my sense of them by closing my eyes; I would concentrate upon recalling exactly the line of the roof, the colour of the stone, which, without my being able to understand why, had seemed to me to be teeming, ready to open, to yield up to me the secret treasure of which they were themselves no more than the outer coverings.  It was certainly not any impression of this kind that could or would restore the hope I had lost of succeeding one day in becoming an author and poet, for each of them was associated with some material object devoid of any intellectual value, and suggesting no abstract truth.  But at least they gave me an unreasoning pleasure, the illusion of a sort of fecundity of mind; and in that way distracted me from the tedium from the sense of my own impotence which I had felt whenever I had sought a philosophic theme for some great literary work."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p.188

What strikes me, at first blush, about this passage is that as much as Proust was trying to take a systematic approach to becoming a writer it was already too late; he had been born a writer.  My first year students are always amazing by the concept of synesthesia in Linden's The Accidental Mind.  For lack of a more elegant definition, synesthetiacs experience a blending of sensory perception.  So, for example, a synesthesiac might taste color.  It's one of the theories that attempt to explain why artists become artists; that is, they are just constructed differently.  He's frustrated by his initial inability to express the "secret treasure" in everyday items, but how many people even understand that there are these hidden worlds that exist beneath the surface? Oh, and I think we can agree that this is far more than an "illusion of a sort of fecundity of mind" with Proust.  One wonders how hard it would have been to be Proust (beyond all the emotional sturm und drang of his life)?  It seems like it would be like trying to pass through life with heightened senses that made everything scream out at you.