My Years With Proust - Day 697

Had not nature herself - if one considered the matter from this point of view - placed me on the path of art, was she not herself a beginning of art, she who, often, had allowed me to become aware of the beauty of one thing only in another thing, of the beauty, for instance, of noon at Combray in the sound of its bells, of that of the mornings at Doncieres in the hiccups of our central heating?  The link may be uninteresting, the objects trivial, the style bad, but unless this process has taken place the description is worthless.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 925

What makes an artist an artist?  Nature vs. nurture is an obvious central theme of our COR 110, Concepts of the Self, course we teach here at Champlain.  This year I had my first year students read snippets of Proust (and, of course, a snippet of Proust is not like a snippet of anyone else) and ask whether Proust wrote with such extraordinary precision and in such remarkable detail because we simply worked to become that writer, had been taught to become that writer, or whether or not he simply saw the world in that way.  The students tend to favor the latter reason, maybe because they think nobody could be forced to "become" Proust (although that might be a natural reaction against the tyranny of their overbearing professor); in fact, they opined that it must have been exhausting to be Proust, to see the world in that precision all the time.  Several times recently I've proposed that the essential human drive is the pursuit of beauty, which I would argue actually explains other typical theories for the basic human emotion: love, freedom, sex (what is more beautiful than a totally fulfilling orgasm?), God. In my COR 220, Aesthetic Expressions, course the students will often struggle, at least initially, with analyzing art, but there are always some students who come to it very naturally, not simply because they went to a more posh school, but rather that they just naturally "see" beauty more readily.  The assumption here is that Proust was one of those individuals, on steroids and infused with gamma rays, who simply saw beauty, and not simply detail, on an unparalleled level, and thus "nature herself - if one considered the matter from this point of view - placed me on the path of art."