My Year With Proust - Day 261

   Albertine spoke hardly at all, sensing that my thoughts were elsewhere.  We went a little way on foot into the greenish, almost submarine grotto of a dense grove on the dome of which we heard the wind howl and the rain splash.  I trod underfoot dead leaves which sank into the soil like sea-shells, and poked with my stick at fallen chestnuts prickly as sea-urchins.

   On the boughs of the trees, the last clinging leaves, shaken by the wind, followed it only as far as their stems would allow, but sometimes these broke and they fell to the ground, along which they coursed to overtake it.  I thought joyfully how much more remote still, if this weather lasted, the island would be the next day, and in any case quite deserted.  We returned to our carriage and, as the squall had subsided, Albertine asked me to take her on to Saint-Cloud.  As on the ground the drifting leaves, so up above the clouds were chasing the wind.  And a stream of migrant evenings, of which a sort of conic section cut into the sky made visible the successive layers, pink, blue and green, were gathered in readiness for departure to warmer climes.  To obtain a closer view of a marble goddess who had been carved in the act of springing from her pedestal and, alone in a great wood which seemed to be consecrated to her, filled it with the mythological terror, half animal, half divine, of her frenzied leaps, Albertine climbed a knoll while I waited for her in the road.  She herself, seen thus from below, no longer coarse and plump as a few days earlier on my bed when the grain of her neck appeared under the magnifying glass of my eyes, but delicately chiselled, seemed like a little statue on which our happy hours together at Balbec had led their patina.  When I found myself alone again at home, remembering that I had been for an expedition that afternoon with Albertine, that I was to dine in two days' time with Mme de Guermantes and that I had to answer a letter from Gilberte, three women I had loved, I said to myself that our social existence, like an artist's studio, is filled with abandoned sketches in which we fancied for a moment that we could set down in parchment from our need of a great love, but it did not occur to me that sometimes, if the sketch is not too old, it may happen that we return to it and make of it a wholly different work, and one that is possibly more important than what we had originally planned.

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 403-404

Proust returns from spending time with Albertine, and reflects upon three different women that he had loved: "When I found myself alone again at home, remembering that I had been for an expedition that afternoon with Albertine, that I was to dine in two days' time with Mme de Guermantes and that I had to answer a letter from Gilberte, three women I had loved, I said to myself that our social existence, like an artist's studio, is filled with abandoned sketches in which we fancied for a moment that we could set down in parchment from our need of a great love, but it did not occur to me that sometimes, if the sketch is not too old, it may happen that we return to it and make of it a wholly different work, and one that is possibly more important than what we had originally planned."  I love his point about our lives, like an artist's studio, being filled with "abandoned sketches," which, specifically, in this instances, deals with the women in his life, but more generally could be thought to speak to our entire life.  Essentially, maybe we need to return to those sketches later, when we're better able to address them.  Not surprisingly, I guess, I found myself thinking about the artist Jan Van Eyck, who either invented oil-based painting or made profound early innovations in oil-based painting, which meant that since the paintings now took a lot longer to dry you could revisit them and devote more time to them; you were better able to appreciate them and, for lack of a better term, "finish" them.  In the case of Van Eyck it meant that he could add extraordinarily fine detail, even down to using single hair brushes.  I just think this is an amazingly apt metaphor.  How often do we throw away our live's "sketches" - our relationships or our projects - not because they are worthless, but because we lack the skill or the knowledge or the maturity or the patience to "finish" them.  Maybe we need to need to remember to more deliberately set aside our sketches, hopefully in a safe place, and not discard them, and then reconsider them when we are better, more experienced artists.  It also makes me think that Albertine is not quite the "abandoned sketch" that Marcel portrays her to be.

Jan Van Eyck's painting of Giovanni Arnolfini, which may or may not be of a wedding, but it is fascinating painting.  Here's a link to a talk from the Khan Academy, which breaks down some of the different parts of the painting.

Twice last week in my first year Concepts of the Self class I had my students grapple with sections from Proust, much to the amazement/horror of my first years (and my colleagues). We're discussing David Linden's The Accidental Mind, and I was nudging my students to consider the complexity of perception and memory.  So, when Proust wrote a paragraph such as, "Albertine spoke hardly at all, sensing that my thoughts were elsewhere.  We went a little way on foot into the greenish, almost submarine grotto of a dense grove on the dome of which we heard the wind howl and the rain splash.  I trod underfoot dead leaves which sank into the soil like sea-shells, and poked with my stick at fallen chestnuts prickly as sea-urchins" it wasn't simply a case of him desperately loving adjectives, but that he actually saw the world in a richer, more detailed, more expansive way.  My students determined that it must have been exhausting to be Proust.