My Year With Proust - Day 170

"Only, after that rising tide of genius which sweeps over and submerges an artist's life, when the brain begins to tire, gradually the balance is disturbed and, like a river that resumes its course after the counterflow of a spring tide, it is life that once more takes the upper hand.  But, while the first period lasted, the artist has gradually evolved the law, the formula of his unconscious gift.  He knows what situations, if he is a novelist, what scenes, if he is a painter, provide him with the material, unimportant in itself but essential to his researches, as a laboratory might be or a workshop.  He knows that he has created his masterpieces out of effects of attenuated light, out of the action of remorse upon consciousness of guilt, out of women posted beneath trees or half-immersed in water, like statues.  A day will come when, owing to the erosion of his brain, he will no longer have the strength, faced with those materials which his genius was wont to use, to make the intellectual effort which alone can produce his work, and yet will continue to seek them out, happy to be near them because of the spiritual pleasure, the allurement to work, that they arouse in him; and, surrounding them besides with an aura of superstition as if they were superior to all things else, as if there dwelt in them already a great part of the work of art which they might be said to carry within them ready-made, he will confine himself to the company, to the adoration of his models.  He will hold endless conversations with the repentant criminals whose remorse and regeneration once formed the subject of his novels; he will buy a house in a countryside where mists attenuate the light, he will spend long hours looking at women bathing; he will collect sumptuous stuffs.  And thus the beauty of life, an expression somehow devoid of meaning, a stage this side of art at which I had seen Swann come to rest, was that also which, by a slackening of creative ardour, idolatry of the forms which had inspired it, a tendency to take the line of least resistance, must gradually undermine an Elstir's progress."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 910-911

Proust, as part of his continuing reflection on Elstir and art, devotes time to the topic of the decline of the artist.  "He knows what situations, if he is a novelist, what scenes, if he is a painter, provide him with the material, unimportant in itself but essential to his researches, as a laboratory might be or a workshop.  He knows that he has created his masterpieces out of effects of attenuated light, out of the action of remorse upon consciousness of guilt, out of women posted beneath trees or half-immersed in water, like statues."  Two things jump to mind immediately: 1) how much of this is Proust's own precognition of his own eventual demise as an artist, and 2) how much of this touches upon all of us as we grow older even if we're not artists, although I suppose all of us are artists after a fashion even if we're just fancifully sketching in our own lives.

He proposes that eventually, "A day will come when, owing to the erosion of his brain, he will no longer have the strength, faced with those materials which his genius was wont to use, to make the intellectual effort which alone can produce his work, and yet will continue to seek them out, happy to be near them because of the spiritual pleasure, the allurement to work, that they arouse in him; and, surrounding them besides with an aura of superstition as if they were superior to all things else, as if there dwelt in them already a great part of the work of art which they might be said to carry within them ready-made, he will confine himself to the company, to the adoration of his models."  The artist is no longer inspired by the people and objects that used to empower his or her work, but he keeps them around out of the sake of familiarity if not nostalgia.  If he's not careful, then runs the real risk at this point of being a parody of himself.  I remember once seeing a poster of the Rolling Stones all lined up at, I think, CBGBs in the mid-1970s, and I was struck by the fact that they were already a parody of themselves; they were there because that is what the Rolling Stones did.  It's not quite the same thing, I suppose, because they were just surrounding themselves with the vestiges of their own fame, although maybe that's all that drove them in the first place.  Now, do non-artists do the same thing?  Doubtless, we do, which is why it is so essential for each of us, as with artists who really mean something, to completely recreate ourselves with regularity.