My Year With Proust - Day 161

"But if already, before this point, on my arrival at Rivebelle, I had flung irretrievably away from me those crutches of reason and self-control which help our infirmity to follow the right road, if I now found myself the victim of a sort of moral ataxia, the alcohol that I had drunk, in stretching my nerves exceptionally, had given to the present moment a quality, a charm, which did not have the effect of making me more competent or indeed more resolute to defend it; for in making me prefer it a thousand times to the rest of my life, my exaltation isolated it therefrom; it as enclosed in the present, like heroes and drunkards; momentarily eclipsed, my past no longer projected before me that shadow of itself which we call our future; placing the goal of my life no longer in the realsation of the dreams of the past, but in the felicity of the present moment, I could see no further than it.  So that, by a contradiction which was only apparent, it was at the very moment in which I was experiencing an exceptional pleasure, in which I felt that my life might yet be happy, in which it should have become more precious in my sight, it was at this very moment that, delivered from the anxieties which is had hitherto inspired in me, I unhesitatingly abandoned it to the risk of an accident.  But after all, I was doing no more than concentrate in a single evening the carelessness that, for most men, is diluted throughout their whole existence, which every every day they face unnecessarily the dangers of a sea-voyage, or a trip in an aeroplane or a motor-car, when there is waiting for them at home the person whom their death would shatter, or when the book whose eventual publication is the sole reason for their existence is still stored in the fragile receptacle of their brain.  And so too in the Rivebelle restaurant, on evenings when we stayed there after dinner, if anyone had come in with the intention of killing me, since I no longer saw, saved in a distance too remote to have any reality, my grandmother, my life to come, the books I might write, since I now clung body and soul to the scent of the woman at the next table, to the politeness of the waiters, to the contours of the waltz that the band was playing, since I glued to the sensation of the moment, with no extension beyond its limits, nor any object other than not to be separated from it.  I should have died and with that sensation, I should have let myself be slaughtered without offering any resistance, without a movement, a bee drugged with tobacco smoke that had ceased to take any thought for preserving the accumulation of its labours and the hopes of its hive."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 873-874

Proust is a tad drunk at the Rivebelle restaurant, and, typically, in his recounting of the evening he makes it both light as a feather and yet heavy with analysis.  The next time I'm at Smitty's Pub to watch a Vikings game I'll be sure to comment on my impending "moral ataxia," which has quickly become one of my favorite phrases.  What I like about this description is Proust's ability to capture the fluidity of time and space when one has been gently imbibing.  Like "heroes and drunkards," one moment has now stretched out disproportionally to overshadow the rest of life.

The other reason why I like this section is that it gives Proust the observer, writer and genius a gentle human face.  "But after all, I was doing no more than concentrate in a single evening the carelessness that, for most men, is diluted throughout their whole existence . . ."