Proust: imagination and desire

Today's Proust sentence concerns the workings of imagination and desire. Swann, in love, has been shifting between two ideas of Odette: Odette as a "perfidious woman," manipulative and faithless, and "the other Odette," gentle, gracious, "shining softly":

Now that, after this oscillation, Odette had naturally returned to the place from which Swann's jealousy had for a time removed her, to the angle from which he found her charming, he pictured her as full of tenderness, with a look of consent, and so pretty thus that he could not help offering her his lips as if she had been there and he had been able to kiss her; and he felt as strong a gratitude toward her for this enchanting, kindly glance as if she had really given it to him, as if it were not merely his imagination that had just portrayed it in order to satisfy his desire.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 314

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Swann’s jealousy

What is Odette doing when she is not with M. Swann? What is she doing at, say, five o’clock? Swann wonders. And wonders:

His jealousy, like an octopus that casts a first, then a second, then a third mooring, attached itself solidly first to that time, five o’clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to yet another.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 294

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Remembering my friend Aldo

On March 14, 1981, my friend Aldo Carrasco wrote:

I for one keep all my friends’ letters for a time; one usually knows when the time comes to throw them away, if ever of course. I always wait because I have never regretted throwing anything out when it was done at the right time, so I trust my instincts there where I do usually nowhere else. That’s a real frightening thought — my letters roaming Boston (et, le monde!) for all eyes to see. I have a responsibility now to all those voyeurs out there; I just can’t give them anything to read. . . .

Last year I made a portrait of sorts of Aldo through the letters I have from him. I think he’d be pleased:

Letters from Aldo

Memorial Day 2007

A professor at Mme. Verdurin’s

A professor from the Sorbonne, Brichot is a visitor among the “faithful” who gather at Mme. Verdurin’s:

At Mme. Verdurin’s, he made a point of seeking his illustrations in whatever was most up-to-date when he spoke of philosophy and history, principally because he thought such subjects were only a preparation for real life and he imagined he would find the little clan putting into practice what he had known before now only from books, and then perhaps also because, having had instilled in him in the past, and having preserved without knowing it, a respect for certain subjects, he believed he was casting off his academic tendencies by taking liberties with them which, on the contrary, appeared such to him only because he had remained an academic.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 261

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Vegan cupcakes

They were chocolate with vanilla frosting. Now they’re gone. My daughter made them, following a recipe in Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero's book Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. Thanks, Rachel!

An awful lot of people reading Proust

At Reading Proust in Foxborough, "Odette" is reading Proust and writing about Proust and collecting links to other people who are reading Proust and writing about Proust and collecting links to other people who are . . . . Here are links to three of her posts:

Memorial Day
Is there enough time to search for lost time?
The Whole World Is Blogging Proust

And all in one place:

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[With apologies to Bob Hilliard and Richard Miles' "The Coffee Song" ("They’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil").]

Odette and Zipporah

[Above, Zipporah, a detail from Sandro Botticelli, Scenes from the Life of Moses (1481-82)]

M. Swann is in the habit of seeing resemblances between people whom he knows and faces in paintings, a habit that allows him to associate the lovely Odette with the words "Florentine painting," making her thus more interesting to him:

Standing next to him, allowing her hair, which she had undone, to flow down her cheeks, bending one leg somewhat in the position of a dancer so that without getting tired she could lean over the engraving, which she looked at, inclining her head, with those large eyes of hers, so tired and sullen when she was not animated, she struck Swann by her resemblance to the figure of Zipporah, Jethro's daughter, in a fresco in the Sistine Chapel.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 230-31

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Movie recommendation: The History Boys

[Note: If you're looking for the poem "Drummer Hodge," you can find it here: "Drummer Hodge."]

The History Boys (2006)
directed by Nicholas Hytner
screenplay by Alan Bennett, from his play
109 minutes

Like Être et avoir, The History Boys is a film about teaching. But I cannot write about it without giving away too much of what happens, so this recommendation will remain cryptic. I’ll make just three observations:

1. The film has been characterized as a British Dead Poets Society. I intensely dislike DPS and see very little resemblance between it and The History Boys.

2. The History Boys has been faulted for pretension. My pretens-o-meter, re-calibrated at regular intervals, finds very little pretension in this film.

3. The scene in which Mr. Hector talks about Thomas Hardy’s poem “Drummer Hodge” is the best film scene about poetry I’ve seen.

[An aside to my ENG 3808 students, if any are reading: I wish I’d known about this film while the semester was on. The History Boys is filled with modern British poetry, more poetry than any movie I’ve seen. You’ll recognize much (perhaps all) of what’s quoted. There’s even a group recitation of Philip Larkin’s “MCMXIV”!]

[An aside to all readers: I’m trying to get “smart” quotation marks and dashes to display properly — I think they add class to the joint. If they’re not displaying properly in your browser, if you’re seeing clumps of garbled characters instead, I’d appreciate your letting me know in a comment or an e-mail. Thanks.]

Swann's little phrase

One year ago, M. Swann was deeply affected by a phrase in a sonata for violin and piano. "The little phrase," as it comes to be called, is affecting him still:

Now, like certain confirmed invalids in whom, suddenly, a country they have arrived in, a different diet, sometimes a spontaneous and mysterious organic development seem to bring on such a regression of their ailment that they begin to envisage the unhoped-for possibility of belatedly starting a completely different life, Swann found within himself, in the recollection of the phrase he had heard, in certain sonatas he asked people to play for him, to see if he would not discover it in them, the presence of one of those invisible realities in which he had ceased to believe and to which, as if the music had had a sort of sympathetic influence on the moral dryness from which he suffered, he felt in himself once again the desire and almost the strength to devote his life.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 218-19

This passage reminds me of the famous line from Rilke's "Archaïscher Torso Apollos" [Archaic Torso of Apollo]:

Du mußt dein Leben ändern.
[You must change your life.]

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