My Year With Proust - Day 169

"Elstir at this period was no longer at that youthful age in which we look only to the power of the mind for the realisation of our ideal.  He was nearing that age at which we count on bodily satisfactions to stimulate the force of the brain, at which mental fatigue, by inclining us towards materialism, and the diminution of our energy, towards the possibility of influences passively received, begin to make us admit that there may indeed be certain bodies, certain callings, certain rhythms that are specially privileged, realising so naturally our ideal that even without genius, merely by copying the movement of a shoulder, the tension of a neck, we can achieve a masterpiece; it is the age at which we like to caress Beauty with our eyes objectively, outside ourselves, to have it near us, in a tapestry, in a beautiful sketch by Titian picked up in a second-hand shop, in a mistress as lovely as Titian's sketch.  When I understood this I could no longer look at Mme Elstir without a feeling of pleasure, and her body began to lose its heaviness, for I fill it with an idea, that idea that she was an immaterial creature, a portrait by Elstir.  She was one for me, and doubtless for him too.  The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 910

Here you have more reflections on Elstir and his wife, and on art, and on life.  Do we reach an "age at which we count on bodily satisfactions to stimulate the force of the brain . . .?"  According to Proust, "it is the age at which we like to caress Beauty with our eyes objectively, outside ourselves, to have it near us, in a tapestry, in a beautiful sketch by Titian picked up in a second-hand shop, in a mistress as lovely as Titian's sketch."  Essentially, do we reach a period when we're tired of dissecting the world with cold reason and would prefer to dance with a more ethereal but oddly more tangible Beauty?  A few years ago I was involved in an illogically beautiful and beautifully illogical relationship that, although it clearly had its intellectual benefits (far more than she realized), was extraordinary because of its immediate and intimate and profoundly sweet lived reality.  Beyond personal happiness, I think it inspired more pure creativity on my part than decades of attempting to live the life of the mind ever did, not only because what she brought to the relationship but also because of what she  brought out of me.

In the end, I think I'm just going to be drawn back to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

XXVI

Why, all the Saints and Sage who discuss'd

Of the Two Worlds so wisely - they are thrust

Like foolish Prophets forth; their Words to Scorn

Are scatter'd, and their Mouth are stopt with Dust.

XXVII

Myself when young did eagerly frequent

Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument

About it and about; but evermore

Came out by the same door where in I went.

XXVIII

Wit them the seed of Wisdom did I sow,

And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow;

And this was all the harvest that I reap'd -

"I came like Water, and like Wind I go." . . .

XIV

Waste not your Hour, nor in vain pursuit

Of This and That endeavour and dispute;

Better be jocund with the fruitful Grape

Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit.

LV

You know, my Friends, with what a brave Carouse

I made a Second Marriage in my house;

Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,

And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.

LVI

For "Is" and "Is-not" though with Rule and Line

And "Up-and-Down" by Logic I define,

Of all that one should care to fathom, I

Was never deep in anything but - Wine.

LVII

Ah, but my Computations, People say,

Reduced the Year to better reckoning? - Nah

'Twas only striking from the Calendar

Unborn To-morrow, and dead Yesterday.

LVIII

And late, by the Tavern Door agape,

Came shining through the Dusk an Angel Shape

Bearing a Vessel on his Shoulder; and

He bid me taste of it; and 'twas - the Grape!

And, yes, I fully take ownership of the inherent irony of the fact that if you don't understand the use of metaphor and the concepts of Sufism, essentially the same logic and education decried in the poem, you will miss the point.