"The scenery became hilly and steep, and the train stopped at a little station between two mountains. Far down the gorge, on the edge of a hurrying stream, one could see only a solitary watch-house, embedded in the water which ran past on a level with its windows. If a person can be the product of a soil to the extent of embodying for us the quintessence of its peculiar charm, more even than the peasant girl whom I had so desperately longed to see appear when I wandered by myself along the Meseglise way, in the woods of Roussainville, such a person mu have been the tall girl whom I now saw emerge from the house and, climbing a path lighted by the first slanting rays of the sun, come towards the station carrying a jar of milk. In her valley from which the rest of the world was hidden by these heights, she must never see anyone save in these trains which stopped for a moment only. She passed down the line of windows, offering coffee and milk to a few awakened passengers. Flushed with the glow of morning, her face was rosier than the sky. I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness. We invariably forget that these are individual qualities, and, mentally substituting for them a conventional type at which we arrive by striking a sort of mean among the different faces that have taken our fancy, among the pleasures we have known, we are left with mere abstract images which are lifeless and insipid because they lack precisely that element of novelty, different from anything we have known, that element which is peculiar to beauty and to happiness. And we deliver on life a pessimistic judgment which we suppose to be accurate, for we believed that we were taking happiness and beauty into account, whereas in face we left them out and replaced them by syntheses in which there is not a single atom of either."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 705
This is actually one of my favorite sections, and a lengthy one, so I'm going to divide it up into more manageable passages so that I can give them the time and attention they deserve (or at least the time and attention that my poor efforts can reach). Proust is on a train heading for Balbec when he stops at a little station in the mountains and upon seeing a local woman walk over the deliver coffee and milk to the train passengers we experiences a flood of emotions. He reflects, "I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness." Proust proposes that these are individual qualities which we lose sight of because we either register them as caricatures or synthesize them with any number of other experiences. Of course, how does one define happiness and beauty, and in doing so how do you recognize them? Certainly any number of great thinkers have grappled with this question; my students struggle with Plato's definition of happiness in The Republic (although, to be fair, they struggle with everything in The Republic). Is it as simple as Dudley's observation in The Bishop's Wife that youth and beauty are the same thing? I suspect that the problem relates to trying to identify or define both happiness and beauty. Maybe we have to echo Potter Stewart and simply acknowledge that "I know it when I see it." I'm going to think over this the next couple days and compile a list of the times in my life when I've experienced happiness and beauty. Not only will it, inshallah, help me better analyze this passage, but it will put me in a much better place emotionally and spiritually as I head back to Indiana for my mother's funeral; as Marcus Aurelius reminds us, "the soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts."
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