Pleasures and Days

by Marcel Proust

  21

  The Shores of Oblivion

  “They say that Death makes beautiful those whom it strikes down and exaggerates their virtues, but in general it is much truer to say that it was life that failed to do them justice. Death, that pious and irreproachable witness, teaches us, in accordance with truth and love, that in every person there is usually more good than evil.”* What Michelet here says about death is perhaps even truer of that death which follows a great unhappy love affair. Take a person who, after making us suffer so much, ceases to mean anything at all to us – is it enough to say, as does the common expression, that such a person is “dead for us”? We weep for the dead, we still love them, for a long time we are subject to the irresistible attraction of the enchantment that survives them and which often causes us to return to their tombs. But the person who has made us feel every emotion, and by whose essence we are saturated, can no longer even cast on us the merest shadow of any sorrow or joy. Such a person is more than dead for us. After considering such a person as the sole thing of value in this world, after cursing him and despising him, we find it impossible to judge him, the features of his face are barely discernible to the eyes of our memory, exhausted as they are by having gazed on him for too long. But this judgement on the loved one, a judgement which varied so considerably, sometimes torturing our blind hearts with its sharp eyes, sometimes itself turning a blind eye to any failings so as to overcome the cruel discord, must undergo one last swing of the pendulum. Like those landscapes which are revealed to us only when we have reached the summit, from the heights of forgiveness there appears in her true value the woman who was more than dead for us, having once been our life itself. We knew only that she did not return our love, we understand now that she felt real friendship for us. It is not memory which makes her more beautiful, it was love which failed to do her justice. To the man who wants everything, and to whom even everything, were he to obtain it, would not suffice, to receive but a little appears as no more than a cruel absurdity. Now we understand that it was a generous gift from her whom our despair, our irony and our perpetual tyranny had not disheartened. She was always kind. Several of her remarks, mentioned to us only today, strike us as indulgently exact and full of charm – remarks made by the woman we thought incapable of understanding us because she did not love us. Whereas we spoke about her with so much unfair egotism and severity. In any case, do we not owe her so many things? If that great tide of love has withdrawn for ever, nonetheless, when we take a walk within ourselves, we can pick up strange and magical shells and, raising them to our ears, hear with melancholy pleasure and without any pain the vast roar of bygone days. Then we dwell, with a sudden feeling of tenderness, on the woman who, as our ill fortune would have it, was loved more than she loved. She is no longer “more than dead” for us. She is a dead woman, whom we remember with affection. Justice requires us to redress the idea we had of her. And by the powerful virtue of justice, she is raised in spirit within our hearts, to appear before that last judgement which we deliver far from her, tranquilly, our eyes filled with tears.

  22

  Real Presence

  We loved each other in a remote village of the Engadine, with a name of twofold sweetness: the dreaminess of its German sonority faded into the sensuousness of the Italian syllables. All around, three lakes of a mysterious green bathed forests of pine trees. Glaciers and peaks barred the horizon. In the evening, the diversity of perspectives made the effects of light so varied and gentle. Will we ever forget the strolls by the lake of Sils-Maria, as the afternoon drew to its close, at six o’clock? The larches, so black in their serenity when set against the dazzling snow, held out towards the pale blue, almost mauve water their branches of soft and shining green. One evening the hour was particularly propitious to us; in a few moments, the sun, as it sank, made the water pass through every hue and our souls partake of every successive delight. Suddenly we made a movement, we had just seen a little pink butterfly, then two, then five, leaving the flowers on our shore and flutter over the lake. Soon they seemed an impalpable haze of pink as they swept away; then they reached the flowers on the far shore, and returned, recommencing their hazardous crossing, sometimes hovering as if tempted by the lake’s wonderful and subtle tints, like those of a great fading flower. It was too much for us, and our eyes filled with tears. These little butterflies, as they crossed the lake, passed to and fro across our souls – our souls, quivering with emotion at the sight of such varied beauty, ready to vibrate – passed to and fro like the bow of a sweet violin. The lightness of their flight did not graze the waters, but caressed our eyes and our hearts, and at each beat of their little pink wings we felt faint. When we saw them coming back from the far shore, thereby revealing that they were playing, and taking their pleasure as they floated across the waters, we could hear a delightful harmony; meanwhile, they gradually came back, taking a thousand whimsical detours that varied the original harmony and drew the outline of a melody filled with magical fantasy. Our souls, like sounding boards, could hear in their silent flight a music of enchantment and liberty and all the gentle intense harmonies of the lake, the woods, the sky and our lives accompanied it with a sweet magic that made us dissolve in tears.

  I had never spoken to you and you were indeed far from my eyes that year. But how much we loved each other at that time, in the Engadine! Never could I get enough of you, never would I leave you at home. You accompanied me in my walks, you ate at my table, you slept in my bed, you dreamt in my soul. One day – can it be that some sure instinct, some mysterious messenger never alerted you to those childish amusements with which you were so closely associated, and which you lived through, yes, truly lived through, so much did you have within me a “real presence”? – one day (neither of us had seen Italy), we were as if thunderstruck by these words which someone said about the Alp Grüm: “From there you can see right into Italy.” We set off for the Alp Grüm, imagining that, in the spectacle laid out before the peak, just where Italy started, the harsh reality of the landscape would suddenly end, and that, against a dreamlike background, a deep-blue valley would open up. On our way, we reminded ourselves that a frontier does not alter the terrain and that even if it did, it would happen so imperceptibly that we would be unable to notice it easily or all at once. Somewhat disappointed, we nonetheless laughed at having been so childish a few moments before.

  But when we reached the summit, we were dazzled. Our childlike imaginings had come true before our very eyes. At our side, glaciers sparkled. At our feet, torrents zigzagged down a wild, dark-green Engadine landscape. Then there was a rather mysterious hill; and after that, mauve slopes afforded and then withheld glimpses into a real, blue land, a sparkling avenue stretching towards Italy. The names were no longer the same, and immediately harmonized with this new soft sweetness. Someone pointed out the lake of Poschiavo, Pizzo di Verona, the Val di Viola. Then we went to an extraordinarily wild and solitary spot, where the desolation of nature and the certainty that we were here inaccessible to everyone, invisible and invincible too, would have heightened to a frenzy the pleasure of loving each other in that very place. Then I plumbed the depths of my sadness at not having you with me in your material species, other than enrobed in my nostalgia, in the reality of my desire. I went down some way as far as the place, at a still high altitude, where travellers came to take in the view. In an isolated hostel there is a book in which they write their names. I wrote mine and, next to it, a combination of letters that was an allusion to yours, since just then I found it impossible not to provide myself with some material proof of the reality of your spiritual closeness. By putting something of you into this book it seemed to me that I was relieving myself to a corresponding degree of the obsessive weight under which you were suffocating my soul. And then I had the immense hope of taking you there one day to read those lines; and then you would climb even higher with me, to avenge me for all that sadness. Without my having to tell you anything about it, you wo
uld have understood everything, or rather you would have remembered it all; and you would let yourself go as you climbed up, leaning on me a little so that I could feel more fully that this time you were really there; and I, between your lips with their slight but persistent savour of your oriental cigarettes, I would find perfect oblivion. We would utter senseless words aloud, just for the sake of shouting without anyone in the far distance being able to hear us; tufts of short grass, in the gentle breeze of the heights, would quiver alone. The ascent would make you slow down your steps and get rather breathless, and my face would draw near so that I could feel your breath: we would be quite ecstatic. We would also go to where a white lake lies next to a black lake as snugly as a white pearl lies next to a black one. How deeply we would have loved one another in an isolated village of the Engadine! We would have let only mountain guides near us – those men who are so tall and whose eyes reflect things that are not seen by the eyes of other men and are as it were of a different “water”. But I no longer care about you. Satiety came before possession. Platonic love itself has its points of saturation. I would no longer like to take you to this country which, without understanding or even knowing it, you evoke for me with such a touching fidelity. The sight of you preserves but one charm for me, that of reminding me all at once of those names with their strange sweetness, both German and Italian: Sils-Maria, Silva Plana, Crestalta, Samaden, Celerina, Juliers, Val di Viola.

  23

  An Interior Sunset

  Like nature, intelligence offers us an array of sights. Never have sunsets or moonlit nights, which have often made me melt into a frenzy of tears, surpassed in the passionate outburst of tenderness they provoke in me that vast and melancholy blaze which, during my walks at the end of the day, then casts its hues on the waves in our soul, as numerous as those the setting sun makes shine on the sea. Then we press on more quickly through the gathering night. More than a knight filled with intoxication and giddiness by the accelerating speed of his adored mount, we yield trembling with trust and joy to the tumultuous thoughts which we feel hold us in their thrall more and more irresistibly the more we possess them and can direct them. Filled with affectionate emotion we make our way through the dark countryside and greet the oaks filled with night, like the solemn field, like the epic witnesses of the momentum that impels us forward and fills us with rapture. On looking up skywards, we cannot fail to recognize, exultantly, in the gaps between the clouds still touched by the sun’s farewell, the mysterious reflection of our thoughts: we plunge deeper and deeper into the countryside, and the dog which follows us, the horse which carries us, or the now silent friend (less, at times, when there is no living creature with us), the flower in our buttonholes or the walking stick waved about joyfully by our feverish hands, receive in glances and tears the melancholy tribute of our frenzy.

  24

  As by Moonlight

  Night had fallen; I went to my room, now too filled with anxiety to remain in the dark without seeing the sky, the fields and the sea gleaming in the sunlight. But when I opened the door, I found the room lit as if by the setting sun. Through the window I could see the house, the fields, the sky and the sea, or rather it seemed to me as if I could “see” them again in a dream; the gentle moon reminded me of them rather than showing them to me, shedding over their outlines a pale splendour which did not scatter the darkness that lay as dense as oblivion over their shapes. And I spent hours gazing into the courtyard at the memory, mute, vague, enchanted and pallid, of the things which, during the daytime, had given me pleasure or pain, with their cries, their voices or their persistent hum.

  Love has faded, I feel afraid at the threshold of oblivion. But here, tranquil now, a little pale, quite close to me and yet distant and already vague, as if in the moonlight, are all my past times of happiness and all my healed sorrows, gazing at me wordlessly. Their silence fills me with affection while their distance and their wavering pallor intoxicate me with sadness and poetry. And I cannot stop gazing at this interior moonlight.

  25

  A Critique of Hope in the Light of Love

  Hardly has an as yet future hour become the present for us than it is divested of its charms, only to recover them, it is true – if our soul is wide and deep enough and able to arrange a fine set of perspective views – when we have left it far behind us, on the roads of memory. Thus the poetic village, towards which we were spurring on our impatient hopes and our weary mares, once again breathes (as soon as we have passed the hill) those veiled harmonies, whose promises the vulgarity of its streets, the jumble of its houses – brought so close together that they flowed into one another on the horizon – and the lifting of the blue mist that seemed to imbue it, had all belied. But like the alchemist, who attributes each of his failures to an accidental cause (a different one each time), far from suspecting an incurable imperfection in the very essence of the present, we accuse the malignity of particular circumstances, the responsibilities of this or that envied position, the bad character of this or that desired mistress, the poor state of our health on a day which was to have been a day of pleasure, or the bad weather or the bad hostelries on our journey, of having poisoned our happiness. Thus, certain that we will manage to eliminate these causes that destroy all fruition, we ceaselessly appeal, with an at times muted but never entirely disillusioned confidence, from a realized (that is, disappointed) dream to a dreamt-of future.

  But certain reflective and sorrowful men, even more radiant than others with the light of hope, discover rather quickly that – alas! – this light does not gleam at the hours when we expect it, but emanates from our hearts overflowing with rays that are unbeknown to nature and which pour them out in torrents over hope without managing to kindle any fire. These men no longer feel the strength to desire what they know not to be desirable, or to wish to fulfil dreams that will wither in their hearts as soon as they try to pluck them outside themselves. This melancholy predisposition is singularly strengthened and justified in love. Imagination, as it ceaselessly and repeatedly goes over its hopes, wonderfully sharpens its disappointments. Unhappy love, which makes it impossible for us to experience happiness, also prevents us from discovering how null and void that happiness is. But what lesson of philosophy, what advice of old age, what foiled ambition can surpass in melancholy the joys of a happy love affair? You love me, my darling girl; how could you have been so cruel as to tell me? So that is the ardent happiness of shared love, the mere thought of which made me feel giddy and my teeth chatter!

  I undo your flowers, I lift your hair, I tear off your jewels, I touch your flesh, my kisses cover your body as tumultuously as the rising sea beating against the sand; but you yourself elude me, and with you goes happiness. I have to leave you, I return home alone and sadder. Accusing this latest calamity, I return to you for ever; it is my last illusion which I have torn down, I am doomed to unhappiness for ever.

  I do not know how I had the courage to tell you this, it is the happiness of my whole life that I have just pitilessly rejected, or at least my life’s consolation, since your eyes, whose trusting happiness still sometimes filled me with intoxication, will now no longer reflect anything but the sad disenchantment of which your sagacity and your disappointments had already warned you. Since this secret, which one of us was keeping hidden from the other, has now been uttered aloud, there is no longer any happiness for us. We no longer even have the disinterested joys of hope. Hope is an act of faith. We have disabused its credulity: it is dead. Having abandoned the quest for fulfilment and pleasure, we can no longer derive any enchantment from hoping. Hoping without hope, which would be so wise, is impossible.

  But come to me, my darling girl. Wipe your eyes, just to see… I don’t know if it is tears which are blurring my view, but I think I can make out over there, behind us, great fires being lit. Oh, my darling, how I love you! Give me your hand, let us go towards those lovely fires, but not too close… I think that it is indulgent and mighty
Memory which wishes us well and is at this very moment doing so much for us, my dear.

  26

  Undergrowth

  We have nothing to fear, but much to learn from the vigorous and pacific tribe of trees which endlessly produces for us fortifying essences and tranquillizing balms, and in whose graceful company we spend so many fresh, silent and enclosed hours. During those scorching afternoons when the light, by its very excess, evades our gaze, let us go down into one of the Normandy “estates” from which rise supple, tall and thick-leaved beeches, whose foliage parts that ocean of light like a slender but sturdy barge, and retain of it no more than a few drops that tinkle melodiously in the black silence of the undergrowth. Our spirit does not experience, as it does by the seaside, in the plains, or on the mountains, the joy of spreading over the world, but the happiness of being separated from it; and, hemmed in on every side by trunks that can never be uprooted, it flings itself upwards, as do the trees. Lying on our backs, our heads resting on the dry leaves, we can follow from the depths of our deep repose the joyful agility of our spirit mounting, without causing the foliage to tremble, to the highest branches where it settles at the edge of the gentle sky, next to a singing bird. Here and there, a patch of sunlight stagnates at the foot of the trees which, at times, dreamily dangle, in the golden light, the leaves on the tips of their branches. Everything else, relaxed and immobile, remains silent, in a sombre bliss. Soaring and erect, amid the vast offering of their branches, and yet rested and calm, the trees, through their strange and natural posture, invite us with grateful murmurs to feel kinship with a life so ancient and so young, so different from ours and yet appearing as its dark and inexhaustible reservoir.