My Year With Proust - Day 258

   And then, the last carriage having rolled by, when one feels with a throb of pain that she will not now come, one goes to dine on the island; above the quivering poplars which endlessly recall the mysteries of evening more than they respond to them, a pink cloud puts a last touch of living colour into the tranquil sky.  A few drops of rain fall soundlessly on the ancient water which, in its divine infancy, remains always the colour of the weather and continually forgets the reflexions of clouds and flowers.  And after the geraniums have vainly striven, by intensifying the brilliance of their scarlet, to resist the gathering twilight, a mist rises to envelop the now slumbering island; one walks in the moist darkness along the water's edge, where at the most the silent passage of a swan startles one like the momentarily wide-open eyes and the swift smile of a child in bed at night whom one did not suppose to be awake.  Then one longs all the more to have a lover by one's side because one feels alone and can believe oneself to be far away from the world.

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, p. 400

There are a number of reasons why I cull out specific passages from Remembrance of Things Past for my own clumsy reflection.  Certainly I'm trying to make sense of the novel and so sometimes I out paragraphs because they introduce a new character or more fully flesh out a character.  Or a particular scene seems to be an important plot point and thus I should tag it, if for no other reason than I can come back and take a look at it as the story plays itself out.  However, sometimes I pull out a passage simply because it is beautiful, because, come on, we don't just read for the story or for attaining knowledge, we, maybe most of all, read for beauty.  I find this brief sliver to be mysterious and elegiac.  Proust is describing the island in the Bois de Boulogne where he is hoping to spirit away Mme de Stermaria for their assignation; and as we discussed earlier, he chose the place and then the woman to fit the fantasy.  Naturally the beauty will take you to more profound places because beauty, true beauty, never exists at the surface level anyway, and thus you are already swimming beneath the surface.  The language is lush and evocative, and who but Proust "walks in the moist darkness" or notices that "the geraniums have vainly striven, by intensifying the brilliance of their scarlet, to resist the gathering twilight"?  And after Proust has lulled you into this "slumbering island," he concludes with this line:  "Then one longs all the more to have a lover by one's side because one feels alone and can believe oneself to be far away from the world."  Often I find myself posing questions because I'm just not ready to answer them, and this has raised another one: When have I felt most alone, and wanted someone by my side?  When have I felt myself to be most far away from the world?  From the beginning I envisioned this process as one of scaffolding: reading and taking notes, and then coming back weeks later to reconsider the marked passages, and then sometimes typing them into the blog as rough drafts and reconsidering them again after a few more days, and then finally writing up my reflections - and then down the road re-reading my entire blog posts on Proust and editing them once again.  This is definitely one that I will revisit time and again.  This one paragraph, as much as any other, offers us even more proof of the brilliance of Proust and, I would argue, for the essential role that literature plays in our lives.