My Years With Proust - Day 694

   As for the inner book of unknown symbols (symbols carved in relief they might have been, which my attention, as it explored my unconscious, groped for and stumbled against and followed the contours of , like a diver exploring the ocean-bed), if I tried to read them no one could help me with any rules, for to read them was an act of creation in which no one can do our work for us or even collaborate with us.  How many for this reason turn aside from writing! What tasks do men not take upon themselves in order to evade this task! Every public event, be it the Dreyfus case, be it the war, furnishes the writer with a fresh excuse for not attempting to decipher this book: he wants to ensure the triumph of justice, he wants to restore the moral unity of the nation, he has no time to think of literature.  But there are mere excuses, the truth being that he has not or no longer has genius, that is to say instinct.  For instinct dictates our duty and the intellect supplies us with pretexts for evading it.  But excuses have no place in art and intentions count for nothing: at every moment the artist has to listen to his instinct, and it is this that makes art the most real of all things, the most austere school of life, the true last judgment.  This book, more laborious to decipher than any other, is also the only one which has been dictated to us by reality, the only one of which the "impression" has been printed in us by reality itself.  When an idea - an idea of any kind - is left in us by life, its material pattern, the outline of the impression that it made upon us, remains behind as the token of its necessary truth.  The ideas formed by the pure intelligence have no more than a logical, a possible truth, they are arbitrarily chosen.  The book whose hieroglyphs are patterns not traced by us is the only book that really belongs to us.  Not that the ideas which we form for ourselves cannot be correct in logic; that they may well be, but we cannot know whether they are true.  Only the impression, however trivial its material may seem to be, however faint its traces, is a criterion of truth and deserves for that reason to be apprehended by the mind, for the mind, if it succeeds in extracting this truth, can by the impression and by nothing else be brought to a state of greater perfection and given a pure joy.  The impression is for the writer what experiment is for a scientist, with the difference that in the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes the experiment and in the writer it comes after the impression.  What we had not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours.  From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 913-914

Proust asks us, "How many for this reason turn aside from writing!" I've often asked myself why I stopped writing twenty years ago (which I've discussed occasionally as part of this two year joust with Proust), and there are certainly a lot of reasons. First the "duh" reason, and also the biggest lie: life got busy and complicated.  When I'm at my most harshly self-critical I will focus in on my cowardice, my inability to face criticism.  Or I'll focus on my laziness.  My lack of talent is a given, but that doesn't explain why I stopped trying to write.  Or maybe it wasn't failure that terrified me, but whether the challenge of digging that deep and the terror of what I might find, both the deeper truths and the grappling with unpleasant realities that getting there required: "As for the inner book of unknown symbols (symbols carved in relief they might have been, which my attention, as it explored my unconscious, groped for and stumbled against and followed the contours of , like a diver exploring the ocean-bed), if I tried to read them no one could help me with any rules, for to read them was an act of creation in which no one can do our work for us or even collaborate with us."

But here's the thing, a true artist - and I'm not artist by even the most generous definition - would not have shied away from any of these challenge.  As Proust opines, "But excuses have no place in art and intentions count for nothing: at every moment the artist has to listen to his instinct, and it is this that makes art the most real of all things, the most austere school of life, the true last judgment."  Now, is art the "true last judgment"?  If it is the most individualistic, the most instinctual, of activities then I would have to agree with Proust.  Consequently, it makes the challenge of creating art - and understanding art for that matter - an extraordinarily difficult challenge.  Proust adds, "This book, more laborious to decipher than any other, is also the only one which has been dictated to us by reality, the only one of which the "impression" has been printed in us by reality itself."  By "book" he doesn't mean Remembrance of Things Past (although it would be a classic example), but any novel (or any work of art in a broader textual sense).