My Year With Proust - Day 32

   "And then I returned to my hawthorns, and stood before them as one stands before those masterpieces of painting which, one imagines, one will be better able to 'take in' when one has looked away, for a moment, at something else; but in vain did I shape my fingers into a frame, so as to have nothing but the hawthorns before my eyes; the sentiment which they aroused in me remained obscure and vague, struggling and failing to free itself, to float across and become one with the flowers.  They themselves offered me no enlightenment, and I could not call upon any other flowers to satisfy this mysterious longing.  And then, inspiring me with that rapture which we feel on seeing a work by our favourite painter quite different from any of those that we already know, or, better still, when someone has taken us and set us down in front of a picture of which we have hitherto seen no more than a pencilled sketch, or when a piece of music which we have heard played over on the piano busts out again in our ears with all the splendour and fullness of an orchestra, my grandfather called me to him, and, pointing to the hedge of Tansonville, said: 'You are fond of hawthorns; just look at this pink one; isn't it pretty?'"

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 147

OK, so I'll hold off delivering one of my favorite passages so far, in an act that almost qualifies as anticipatory but delayed sexual gratification.  While I love the sense of anticipation that Proust creates in this paragraph, I'm also intrigued by our inability to "force" enlightenment.  Proust, after consciously drawing his attention aside, then tries to revisit the hawthorns, almost expecting them to deliver, on demand, on their promise of beauty.  The Buddhists have that term satori or "sudden enlightenment", where total realization of the ultimate reality comes unawares, and maybe after years of unsuccessful study and meditation.  Essentially, it might mean that you can't consciously create enlightenment, whether it is spiritual or one associated only with beauty (if there is a difference, obviously), but you can only put yourself in the position to receive enlightenment.  Like an orgasm, another example of transcendence (there is a reason the French refer to it as the petit mort), you can't force it, and forcing it only makes it more difficult to attain. And then his grandfather makes a suggestion, almost acting like an old man in a call to adventure in Campbell's monomyth, and then Proust experiences transcendent beauty.