And so I had been wrong in confining myself, hitherto, to the later volumes of Hugo. Of the earlier ones, it was only with a fractional part that Mme de Guermantes embellished her conversations. But it is precisely by thus quoting an isolated line that one multiplies its power of attraction tenfold. The lines that had entered or returned to my mind during this dinner magnetised in turn, summoned to themselves with such force, the poems within which they were normally embedded, that my electrified hands could not hold out for longer than forty-eight hours against the force that drew them towards the volume in which were bound up the Orientales and the Chants du Crepuscule.
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 570-571
First off, I guess I need to apologize for dropping the ball lately. I'm several days behind, which I have to blame on trying to balance four trips at once (actually, seven, but that's another story) and also for appearing in the school play (more on that shortly).
Proust is reflecting upon Mme de Guermantes quoting Hugo, and also on the power of Hugo. I'm often horrified at the severe limits of my so-called education, and I'm afraid that way too much of Hugo falls beyond the boundary line of my knowledge. How have I reached fifty-six years old and have read so little of Hugo? Another project for next year, clearly.
I'm interested by Proust's notion of how by "quoting an isolated line that one multiplies its power of attraction tenfold." I was just talking about the power of quotes the other day, while trying to get my students away from just looking for quotes to justify their arguments (and instead actually grappling with the deeper conceptual tools that the quotes express) while also admitting that I'm very much a quote whore (as I'm a film whore and a Twitter whore and a literature whore - you get the point). Any book that I've owned for some time is both dog-eared and also thoroughly scribbled over, including my attempts to cull out meaningful passages. I have a feeling that this is going to be one of those posts that I'll revisit time and again, in this case maybe as a repository for my favorite quotes.
I find that many of them are from Proust himself, including one of my favorites, which may have found its way onto my tombstone: "It was in vain that I lingered before the hawthorns." I was just quoting that to my friend Sanford in a letter the other day (my birthday gift to him this year was a promise to write him an actual physical letter once a month.).
"The mind becomes dyed by the color of its thoughts." Marcus Aurelius
"Everyone sees the Unseen in proportion to the clarity of their heart." Rumi
Now, what do these three quotes have in common? Beyond the facts that I love all three of them - and will repeat them at any given opportunity - they are in some ways taken out of context. I've been repeating the Marcus Aurelius quote for decades, and I do love the Meditations, but in other ways I suspect I would have found Marcus to be pretty severe, and, as much as I romanticize Stoicism, I don't think I'd be a very good Stoic. I'm probably about as good a Stoic as I am a Muslim, at least in regards to carefully following all the rules. In regards to Rumi, I'm very guilty of short-changing the quote (and concept). I believe the rest of the line is (I'm paraphrasing), is "this relates to the time devoted to polishing the heart" - which actually related to a Hadith from the Prophet wherein he said that there is a polish for everything, and that the best polish for the heart is the remembrance of God. So, the best way to God is to remember God, but I think I use it in a truncated form (because, well, it's less to remember - and we know from my time in the play that I can't remember lines) but also because I think it hints at something more universal in regards to the Unseen. Even the Proust quote in some ways is taken out of context, because I tend to use it to mean that you can't reject the allure of beauty, but it can also mean that beauty is unattainable. So, the power of these quotes relates to the fact that by taking them out of context you over simplify them, and thus, oddly, increase their power by playing down the nuances.
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