[“Quote Slam, Cont’d.” Zippy , October 15, 2026. Click for a larger view.]
Zippy is spending a second day visiting the Père Lachaise. Yesterday he was trading remarks with Edith Piaf.
The words from Proust appear in Le Côté de Guermantes [The Guermantes Way ] (1920). Dr. du Boulbon is speaking to the narrator’s grandmother:
«Supportez d’être appelée une nerveuse. Vous appartenez à cette famille magnifique et lamentable qui est le sel de la terre. Tout ce que nous connaissons de grand nous vient des nerveux. Ce sont eux et non pas d’autres qui ont fondé les religions et composé les chefs-d’oeuvre.»In Mark Treharne’s translation (Penguin, 2002):
“Feel comfortable to be called a neurotic. You belong to the splendid, pitiable family that is the salt of the earth. Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. They alone are the ones who have founded religions and created great works of art.”Strange: when I opened my copy of The Guermantes Way and began to thumb pages, I landed almost immediately on page 299 and this passage.
Venn reading
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I have the same edition and underlined the same passage. But I love and shudder at the lines that follow regarding the cost of “exquisite things.” Yikes!
ReplyDeleteYikes indeed. I’ll go there:
ReplyDelete“‘The world will never realize how much it is indebted to them, particularly how much they have suffered in order to present it with their gifts. We appreciate good music, fine paintings, a thousand exquisite things, without knowing what they cost those who created them in terms of insomnia, tears, fitful laughter, nettle rash, asthma, epilepsy, and, worse still, a fear of dying, which you perhaps have experienced yourself, madame,’ he added with a smile at my grandmother, ‘for, when I came-admit it, now-you were not at your most self-assured.’”