This reaction from the disappointment which great works of art cause at first may in fact be attributed to a weakening of the initial impression or to the effort necessary to lay bare the truth - two hypotheses which recur in all important question, questions about the truth of Art, of Reality, of the Immortality of the Soul; we must choose between them; and, in the case of Vinteuil's music, this choice was constantly presenting itself under a variety of forms. For instance, this music seemed to me something truer than all known books. At moments I thought that this was due to the fact that, what we feel about life not being felt in the form of ideas, its literary, that is to say intellectual expression describes it, explains it, analyses it, but does not recompose it as does music, in which the sounds seem to follow the very movement of our being, to reproduce the extreme inner point of our sensations which is that part that gives us that peculiar exhilaration which we experience from time to time and which, when we say "What a fine day! What glorious sunshine" we do not in the least communicate to others, in whom the same sun and the same weather evoke quite different vibrations. In Vinteuil's music, there were thus some of those visions which it is impossible to express and almost forbidden to contemplate, since, when at the moment of falling asleep we receive the caress of their unreal enchantment, at that very moment in which reason has already deserted us, our eyes seal up and before we have had time to know not only the ineffable but the invisible, we are asleep. It seems to me, when I abandoned myself to his my hypothesis that art might be real, that it was something even more than the merely nerve-tingling joy of a fine day or an opiate night that music can give; a more real more fruitful exhilaration, to judge at least by what I felt. It is inconceivable that a piece of sculpture of a piece of music which gives us an emotion that we feel to be more exalted, more pure, more true, does not correspond to some definite spiritual reality, or life would be meaningless.
Marcel Proust, The Captive, p. 381
We're picking up where we left off yesterday (as we will pick up tomorrow where we're leaving off today, in one of those Proustian paragraphs). Proust is talking about music that he initially didn't like but then grew to love, either because he learned to overlook the ugliness or understand the beauty. Not surprisingly, this is only the jumping off place for an even more profound discussion; as he tells us: "This reaction from the disappointment which great works of art cause at first may in fact be attributed to a weakening of the initial impression or to the effort necessary to lay bare the truth - two hypotheses which recur in all important question, questions about the truth of Art, of Reality, of the Immortality of the Soul; we must choose between them . . ." So, we can grow to love art (or Art) if we can grow immune to the ugliness or understand the beauty, but is this also true of reality (or Reality) and the Immortality of the Soul (or the immortality of the soul)? Is there ugliness to the Immortality of the Soul? Doubtless there is ugliness on the road to the Immortality of the Soul, especially if we factor (and that's a very big if) in that religion is a necessary part of that path. Even if we divorce religion from the process there is certainly ugliness on that thorny path as we strive to control our ego (as we say in Islam, "the most excellent jihad is the conquest of the self"). But what about the Immortality of the Soul in and of itself? Would our short but tangible mortal life suddenly become ugly if it was truly nothing more than a glorified hiccup, a proving ground where joys are a penalty? Maybe an Immortality of anything, even of bliss, would be the ugliest of ugly paths. Never changing, never growing, never desiring - how can that be anything other than ugly?
No comments:
Post a Comment