These notes cover pp. 298 - 502 in Volume Two, Within a Budding Grove, in the Modern Library edition (Moncrieff / Kilmartin / Enright).
It was a smaller group that met last night, with a more intimate feel to it, and perhaps that's why it was such a no-holds-barred discussion!
Certain members... um... expressed themselves with considerable passion, particularly on the subject of the visual arts. As well they should.
On occasion, though, the various positions in ther room clashed, and the result was a night of oohs and aahs and fireworks, and then relief and laughter, and, finally, many good memories that will last a long time.
1. Tom's Presentation: General vs. Specific Beauty
As the designated presenter, I began the meeting by reading aloud a passage from "Place-Names, the Place," in which the adolescent Narrator describes feeling entranced by a "tall girl... carrying a jug of milk" who, moving from window to window, serves coffee and milk to passengers on the train to Balbec when it stops briefly at an unnamed station.
Unable to take his eyes off of this girl, the Narrator observes:
"Flushed with the glow of morning, her face was rosier than the sky. I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and happiness. We invariably forget that these are individual qualities, and, mentally substituting for them a conventional type at which we arrive by striking a sort of mean among the different faces that have taken our fancy, among the pleasures we have known, we are left with mere abstract images which are lifeless and insipid because they lack precisely that element of novelty, different from anything we have known, that element which is peculiar to beauty and to happiness. And we deliver on life a pessimistic judgment which we suppose to be accurate, for we believed that we were taking happiness and beauty into account, whereas in fact we left them out and replaced them by syntheses in which there in not a single atom of either. So it is that a well-read man will at once begin to yawn with boredom when one speaks to him of a 'good book,' because he imagines a sort of composite of all the good books that he has read, whereas a good book is something special, something unforeseeable, and is made up not of the sum of all previous maserpieces but of something which the most thorough assimilation of every one of them would not enable him to discover, since it exists not in their sum but beyond it. Once he has become acquainted with this new work, the well-read man, however jaded his palate, feels his interest awaken in the reality which it depicts. So, completely unrelated to the models of beauty which I was wont to conjure up in my mind when I was by myself, this handsome girl gave me at once the taste for a certain happiness (the sole form, always different, in which we may acquire a taste for happiness), for a happiness that would be realized by my staying an living there by her side" (WBG, 318-319).
Having introduced my theme -- that true beauty and happiness require, above all, specificity -- I went ahead and presented as promised the painting, inspired by Proust's descriptions of the sea, that I had made the previous week.
It turned out, much to my surprise, that I had sufficiently lowered expectations in my email a few days before, to the point that the group's response was better than my painting deserved (or perhaps they were being excessively polite?).
Everybody had been primed by my email to see something "Insipid. Bland. Cloying. Generalized." Although the painting is, I will continue to insist, all of these things, a few members also saw in it some redeeming virtues.
Two or three in the group (I was too shocked at that point to put faces to voices, so I don't remember who spoke first) mentioned that my use of perpective in the painting made the sea loom larger than life, as if it were about to pour in through the window. Conversely, Dirk expressed his appreciation for the fact that the window frame, and the lavender curtains, kept the sea at a safe remove from the viewer (after all, Dirk exclaimed, the sea is "full of things that can sting and pinch and bite you, and kill you if they can!").
Someone else in the group mentioned that they liked the repetitive, loopy motif that I gave to the water. Heather characterized this motif as "blackberry bushes." Marie-José remarked that, while of course I had no skills or technique whatsoever (both true), I had managed to create something with... some limited appeal. Thank you Marie-José!
This positive response from the group led me to a realization. Yes, my impetus for the painting had been too general (my only thought, I'm afraid, had been of painting the sea, as seen by the Narrator through his window at the Grand Hotel, and somehow showing it permeating the room). And yes, as a result, I had failed to achieve the specificity required for beauty.
And yet, by trying, by going for it anyway, despite my lack of skills or technique, I had ended up producing something indisputably specific after all -- if only as an object, and not a work of art. It has perspective. It has loops. It has lavender curtains. The lesson? Do something! Go for it anyway. Proust was right: there is beauty and happiness in specificity, even in the specificity of failure.
2. Miriam Gets a Bee in Her Bonnet, and then the Bee Gets Free and Flies Away
I started to express something along these lines to the group, but Miriam cut me off. She emphasized, no doubt correctly, that the less said the better about our own paintings, since, after working on it so closely, the artist has very little idea anymore of what he or she has done.
At this point, though, Miriam proceeded to share with the group her strong opinion about the right way to paint the sea inspired by Proust, and the wrong way.
She asserted that for Proust the visual arts, much like his writing, have, as their basis, the principle of close observation, i.e., to paint the sea you must look at the sea.
"Without a strictly phenomenological approach," Miriam insisted, "you simply could not hope to grasp the details of visual data that the Impressionists obsessed over. Our memory does not store visual information for very long; we must constantly refresh ourselves by way of direct observation."
As she spoke it was apparent that she held at bay, but barely, a great deal of emotion under her words. Was it pent-up anger at amateur artists or stored-up enthusiasm for plein air painting? I wasn't sure. Surely, I mused to myself as I listened to her speak, as an artist herself Miriam has spent countless hours wrestling with these very questions. She has, no doubt, practiced this principle of close observation. Day after day she has submitted herself to the discipline, the self-denial, the almost monk-like humility, required to do it right... She knows of which she speaks.
But some in the group did not agree with the substance of what she was saying. (I wasn't sure I did either, but at first I held my tongue.) Marie-José, in her decisive, English-tea-time-accent (where did you acquire that accent, M-J?), proclaimed from deep within the cushions of the couch: "But of course, that is not true!"
"The artist," she continued, "must always draw deeply from his or her own visions. She must meditate on the subject inwardly, as well as outwardly. When making a sculpture I can only look at the model so long; then I must stop looking!"
Don too objected to Miriam's premise. With his upturned collar, and his gray hair pressed down over his forehead, he looked like an urban warrior, or a member of the Resistance (which Resistance? Some Resistance.). "When I write short stories," he said, "I draw almost entirely from my memories. My memory is... unusually good. It's like playing a movie, and I simply write that movie down in its every detail: the sound of the gravel underfoot, the color of the ash in the ashtray, the innocuous words said in passing that changed everything."
"But I'm not talking about writing," said Miriam. "I'm talking about the visual--"
"I painted for many years," said Don sharply. "It's exactly the same."
"Actually, Miriam?" I heard myself saying. (I was taking the risk of ganging up on her, because I knew Miriam could handle it.) "Have you ever had a shamanic journey?"
Everybody laughed.
"No, no, I'm serious," I carried on. "I have. And if you know me at all then you know that I don't believe in some supernatural spirit world outside of us. I believe that it is all in here [I said, pointing to my head]. The details that you see when you go into a deep meditation, as in a shamanic journey, are not at all like usual memories. You can revisit the living room of your childhood home, as I did once, and see the individual brown and white threads of the shag carpet again, each little dab of wax holding them at their root, the specks of dust slowly turning in the sunlight. You can smell the smoke from Dad's pipe in the air. It is vivid beyond belief. And it's all stored somewhere in your head. There is no direct observation in it at all."
The debate went back and forth. At some point, in a stroke of genius that seemed obvious as soon as it was done, Miriam returned us to Proust. She read the following:
"... the better part of our memories exist outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected" (WBG, 300).
For a moment she seemed to have enlisted Proust on her side and silenced the rest of us, namely, by having him echo her point that observable details are a more reliable source of inspiration than our own fitful memories.
But luckily I recalled that passage and remembered that it had more to it than that. I asked Miriam to read just a few more sentences, starting from where she left off. She graciously picked the book back up and continued: "... what our mind, having no use for, had rejected..."
"... the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again. Outside us? Within us, rather, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged" (WBG, 300).
Aha! "Outside us? Within us, rather..."
So Proust now seemed to be taking both sides of the argument we were having. It is true that our memories, the sources of our inspiration, are within us, as Marie-José, Don and I were arguing. But often the only available path to these memories is through paying attention to those tiny, overlooked details that have escaped the "broad daylight of our habitual memory" and so stayed fresh. Our inspiration is more likely to be found in the actual blatter of rain, not in the abstract memory of a rainy day.
3. The Sea, the Lonely Sea
Having reached a point at which we stood together, as it were, one foot on the sand, one foot in the sea, it seemed a good time to move on.
The discussion had become, well, not heated exactly, but intense in all the right ways (imagine! a group of people sitting around a room, truly caring about the sources of art...).
So I took this opportunity to turn us back to the central role of the sea in the "Place-Names, the Place" chapter. What is it doing there? I asked. Why is the image of Proust's Narrator confronting the wide-open sea -- this "vast, dazzling, mountainous ampitheatre" (WBG, 341; Florence drew our attention to this description) as he calls it -- so arresting? Did anyone want to comment specifically on how the setting of Balbec spoke to him or her?
Jeff remarked that, as he reads, he is very aware of how private his responses are. He was inspired to create a work of art that expresses the way that he alone thinks of the sea. With this in mind he set to work. Inside a FedEx box Jeff laid down a series of horizontal stripes of colored fabric. When you lift the cover flap, therefore, you see a highly textured, brightly colored representation of deep water, shallow water, horizon line, lower sky, upper sky. We passed it around. I called it "Sea in a Box!" which cracked me up, the idea of containing something of such a scale in something so portable. It was quite colorful and pleasing to the eye, and the way that the sea was contained and stratified did suggest a unique way of looking at it.
Jeanne was next and showed us her creation: an elaborately folded "book" representing her own response to Proust's description of the sea at Balbec, mixed with her memories and associations of floating in the sea in Hawaii, where she lived for a number of years. One side of the book showed the sea and shore, greens and blues and browns, at daytime; the other, heavier, moodier, steeped in blacks and dark blues, showed the sea and shore at nighttime. We took turns opening it and closing it. Don lingered with it in his lap as he said, "Well, I wanted to create a work of art for this meeting..." For a moment I thought he was going to try to pass off Jeanne's book as his own. But he continued, closing up Jeanne's book: "But I didn't get a chance."
Heather too presented a work. She declared that she was the least creative person in the room, but then she brought out three simple pastel drawings of a coastline, one with a figure in it. They were full of volume and had a mysterious melancholy to them as well. We took turns leaning over the area where she had arranged them in the middle of the carpet, and enjoying their qualities.
4. The Little Deaths that Happen Everyday (No, Not That Kind; Get Your Mind Out of the Gutter, Dirk)
There was a slight pause in our conversation, and I took advantage of it to shift to another observation from this chapter that had intrigued me. When the Narrator first arrives at his room at the Grand Hotel in Balbec, he is unsettled by the unfamiliar furniture and its arrangement -- all of it so unlike his bedroom at home. In speaking of the discomfort he feels with these changes, he writes:
"It is they -- even the meanest of them, such as our obscure attachments to the dimensions, to the atmosphere of a bedroom -- that take fright and refuse, in acts of rebellion which we must recognize to be a secret, partial, tangible, and true aspect of our resistence to death, of the long, desperate, daily resistence to the fragmentary and continuous death that insinuates itself throughout the whole course of our life, detaching from us each moment a shred of ourself, dead matter on which new cells will multiply and grow (WBG, 340).
Don said that this passage, and this chapter as a whole, were particularly profound to him because he has experienced this sense of repeated little deaths throughout his life. There are many occasions, he explained, when he looks back and recognizes that some incident, which seemed minor at the time, forever changed him. He feels a constant sense of saying goodbye to old selves.
Again, the emotional stakes were rising; again, in a good way. Marie-José questioned Don's outlook, however.
"I can't stand this kind of talk," she exclaimed. "It is false. Significant events in our lives do not happen in a sudden moment, a single incient. That is a literary device, nothing more. Things actually happen due to a slow accumulation, and it is almost always unnoticable."
At this Don got his back up. "No, you are wrong. I might not have known as it happened, but looking back I can point ot exact moments in time when something changed for me and will never go back."
"But this is the narrative you have cree-ated for yourself!" said Marie-José, sitting forward now, always glad to discover a difference of opinion.
"What about PTSD?" Don retorted. "A single moment in someone's life, perhaps a few seconds only, and nothing will ever be the same! What about that?"
5. Inside the Adolescent Mind, or, All the Wasted Time We Spend Looking at, Thinking About, Dreaming of, Girls (and Boys) We Will Never Know
Faced with another aaah moment, with everybody still looking up into the sky, I decided to set off a line of firecrackers nearer to home and pull the attention a new direction. So I brought up a new and important topic: all the time I wasted in high school and college and grad school... and after, thinking about whether that girl locking her bike up outside the library had caught my eyes or not, and if so, if I should say something (which invariably I declined to do).
"Isn't it fascinating," I said, "that Proust's Narrator spends so many of his waking hours creating little fantasies, little puzzles to solve, involving girls he happens to see serving coffee through the windows of a train, or sitting in the shade next to a bridge, or making deliveries to the hotel reception. What a waste! It brought me right back to all the time I wasted in my 20s and 30s, wondering about this girl or that girl, every five minutes someone new, when I could have been doing something else!"
Renée was the first to offer a different perspective. "This is what we were supposed to do!" she insisted. "That's how we learned what kind of boy we liked, what the rules of attraction are, how we want to carry ourselves in public, what we think of being admired, how we cope with being rejected." Everybody seemed to pile on at this point. "It's natural, Tom!" I heard someone say. "That's called courtship!" said someone else.
"So in other words," I responded, "when our children are teenagers and they are spending hours worrying about some possible look from some boy or girl that they barely met, we should remember, This is Important! Is that what you are saying?"
"Yes," said Dirk. "When I am taking photographs I always look for the quality in someone that is the most ephemeral and the most individual. That is really what we are talking about. I fall in love every week with someone I see. I ask to take his or her picture. So often, especially with children, once I have my camera in hand then the spontaneous indivdual expression is lost. They will go into a practiced pose. But when I catch this ephemeral moment on camera: that is beautiful."
Without meaning too we had circled back to the point about specificity. But here was another point too: that we escape the heavy hand of Habit sometimes best in passing moments, forgettable, inconsequential, in-between experiences, which suddenly open up a whole world of perception to us. Proust says that most of the older guests at the Grand Hotel are closed-off to this world, sticking to their daily routine instead:
"...by engulfing them thus in a system of habits which they knew by heart it sufficed to protect them from the mystery of life that was going on all around them" (WBG, 353).
But the Narrator could not join them.
"Alas for my peace of mind," he remarks, "I had none of the detachment that all these people showed" (WBG, 355).
Instead he would meet "... one of these creatures -- flowers of a fine day but unlike the flowers of the field, for each of them secretes something that is not to be found in another and that will prevent us from gratifying with any of her peers the desire she has aroused in us -- a farm girl driving her cow or reclining in the back of a waggon, a shopkeeper's daughter taking the air, a fashionable young lady erect on the back seat of a landau, facing her parents" (WBG, 396).
This strikes me as the very passage that gives the title to this second volume. It is easily skipped over, mere rhapsody over young girls in flower, but it contains a very profound observation about our perception of other people: the promise of time, the possibility of intimacy with him or her, is built into even our most fleeting observations.
If we could rid ourselves entirely of habit and live in the moment, if we could disenthrall ourselves from our conception of the future and its possible rewards, then Proust asserts we could all live in this specific, ecstatic space all the time. Of one girl he remarks:
"Was it because I had caught but a momentary glimpse of her that I had found her so attractive? It may have been. In the first place, the impossibility of stopping when we meet a woman, the risk of not meeting her again another day, give her at once the same charm as a place derives from the illness or poverty that prevents us from visiting it, or the lustreless days which remain to us to live from the battle in which we shall doubtless fall. So that, if there were no such thing as habit, life must appear delightful to those of us who are continually under the threat of death -- that is to say, to all mankind" (WBG, 398).
Can we just all agree that the old cliché about how life would be unbearable if it was eternal, and thank god for death because it gives meaning to our lives -- is completely ridiculous? If we had eternal life we could concentrate on every gorgeous moment without fear of losing it. Anyone who says anything else is just trying to make us all feel better about our mortality, which is actually not good, not good at all.
6. Last Reflections of the Evening
Next it was time for Renée's contribution to our sea-inspired art. She mentioned by way of introducing her pieces that she did not fully understand what had been requested of us ("even though the person lives in the same house and I could have asked him" -- "the person"? really honey?). Nevertheless, she had two photographs of the sea to share with us, that she had pulled up on her iPad. We passed them around: one showed a child (our son, Cole) running madly, his shadow trailing him, on a windy beach, headed at full tilt towards the raging ocean. In the foreground stood his father, immobilized, deep in thought, looking out over the horizon. The second showed a tangle of trees, a rock streaked with orange minerals, and in the background the ocean that Renée grew up knowing on Stradbroke Island, near Brisbane, in Australia. Both were stunning, and like Proust's descriptions, they showed how wildly different the sea can look at different times and under different conditions.


The meeting ended with Lucie reading aloud two poems by Baudelaire. Even for those of us who do not understand French, they were memorable to hear. They were as follows:
Harmonie du soir
Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige
Chaque fleur s'évapore ainsi qu'un encensoir;
Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!
Chaque fleur s'évapore ainsi qu'un encensoir;
Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu'on afflige;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!
Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir.
Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu'on afflige,
Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir!
Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir;
Le soleil s'est noyé dans son sang qui se fige.
Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir,
Du passé lumineux recueille tout vestige!
Le soleil s'est noyé dans son sang qui se fige...
Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!
— Charles Baudelaire
Evening Harmony
Now is the time when trembling on its stem
Each flower fades away like incense;
Sounds and scents turn in the evening air;
A melancholy waltz, a soft and giddy dizziness!
Each flower fades away like incense;
The violin thrills like a tortured heart;
A melancholy waltz, a soft and giddy dizziness!
The sky is sad and beautiful like some great resting-place.
The violin thrills like a tortured heart,
A tender heart, hating the wide black void.
The sky is sad and beautiful like some great resting-place;
The sun drowns itself in its own clotting blood.
A tender heart, boring the wide black void,
Gathers all trace from the pellucid past.
The sun drowns itself in clotting blood.
Like the Host shines O your memory in me!
— Geoffrey Wagner, Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (NY: Grove Press, 1974)
L'invitation au voyage
Mon enfant, ma soeur,
Songe à la douceur
D'aller là-bas vivre ensemble!
Aimer à loisir,
Aimer et mourir
Au pays qui te ressemble!
Les soleils mouillés
De ces ciels brouillés
Pour mon esprit ont les charmes
Si mystérieux
De tes traîtres yeux,
Brillant à travers leurs larmes.
Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.
Des meubles luisants,
Polis par les ans,
Décoreraient notre chambre;
Les plus rares fleurs
Mêlant leurs odeurs
Aux vagues senteurs de l'ambre,
Les riches plafonds,
Les miroirs profonds,
La splendeur orientale,
Tout y parlerait
À l'âme en secret
Sa douce langue natale.
Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.
Vois sur ces canaux
Dormir ces vaisseaux
Dont l'humeur est vagabonde;
C'est pour assouvir
Ton moindre désir
Qu'ils viennent du bout du monde.
— Les soleils couchants
Revêtent les champs,
Les canaux, la ville entière,
D'hyacinthe et d'or;
Le monde s'endort
Dans une chaude lumière.
Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.
— Charles Baudelaire
Invitation to the Voyage
Think, would it not be
Sweet to live with me
All alone, my child, my love? —
Sleep together, share
All things, in that fair
Country you remind me of?
Charming in the dawn
There, the half-withdrawn
Drenched, mysterious sun appears
In the curdled skies,
Treacherous as your eyes
Shining from behind their tears.
There, restraint and order bless
Luxury and voluptuousness.
We should have a room
Never out of bloom:
Tables polished by the palm
Of the vanished hours
Should reflect rare flowers
In that amber-scented calm;
Ceilings richly wrought,
Mirrors deep as thought,
Walls with eastern splendor hung,
All should speak apart
To the homesick heart
In its own dear native tongue.
There, restraint and order bless
Luxury and voluptuousness.
See, their voyage past,
To their moorings fast,
On the still canals asleep,
These big ships; to bring
You some trifling thing
They have braved the furious deep.
— Now the sun goes down,
Tinting dyke and town,
Field, canal, all things in sight,
Hyacinth and gold;
All that we behold
Slumbers in its ruddy light.
There, restraint and order bless
Luxury and voluptuousness.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, Flowers of Evil (NY: Harper and Brothers, 1936)
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See you all next time. Please leave comments and add what I have left out!
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