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ayegomorrah 's review for:
Swann's Way
by Marcel Proust
Swann!! I see you I understand you I cry with you. Heartbreaking and literally triggering to read during a breakup and experience the way Proust describes heartache and longing and rabid jealousy and mental illness and all consuming obsessions and an illogical hunger for truth fom the perspective of someone who can’t see the torture they are putting themselves through. Or maybe he can totally see it but just doesn’t know how to stop. Book 1 is separated by these deep dives of a person or place where you become engulfed in the tiny details of a moment or an idea, I’ve never read anything like it, I have no idea how Proust can write so much about one thing and not only not run out of stuff to say but not run out of novelties. Setting the scene of a world in which no one knows anything real about each other but everyone talks about each other incessantly is the foundation for the intrapersonal dramas that develop. The total vapidness of noble society creates a perfect background for the flawed relationships between everyone and especially between Swann and the bane of his existence, Odette. How great are those two names together as a couple???! Our made up perceptions of each other, the insecurities of being alive and alone, the repetition of suffering, the abandoned child turned anxious adult, longing for a past that only exists as a memory, being plagued with nostalgia. I am fascinated by the unchanging nature of neurosis across centuries when reading old books. How similar we all are. I love Odette as a symbol, the ghost of romance, a stand in for loving the idea of someone more than you actually love them, how we fall in love with the way someone makes us feel, the speed in which love makes us absolutely bat shit crazy. I hope things work out for him….perhaps with Princess de Laumes???! And omg Gilberte??!? The drama. Onto book 2….
“To my mind, a new book was not just an object among many similar ones, bus as unique as a person, with no reason for existing except in itself”
“The unforgiving need to pursue such a relentless, changeless, fruitless activity was so odious to him that one day when he found a swelling in his abdomen, he felt a pang of genuine joy at the thought that it might be a fatal tumor, that from then on he would not have to bother about a thing, since illness could take him over and put him through the motions of life until the not too distant day when it would have finished with him. In fact, the recurring wish for death that often unconsciously visited him at that period was not so much a desire for release from the cruelty of his suffering as an attempt to escape from the unremitting monotony of effort”
“It may be that the only ultimate truth of existence lies in the nothingness to come and that it is our inner life that is unreal; but in that case, we feel, these ideas and musical utterances which only exist through that inner life must also be devoid of reality. We may perish, but we hold as hostages these captives from a divine world which will have to take their chance with us.”
“The frequent thought that the day would come when he would fall out of love with Odette had filled him with panic and he had resolved to be ever on the alert, so that as soon as he felt the initial symptoms of a weakening of his love he would be able to cling to it and prevent it from fading. However now that his love for her had in fact begun to weaken, he noticed a corresponding and simultaneous weakening of his resolve to remain in love with her. For it is impossible to respond to the feelings and desires of the person one was before.”
“My whole insatiable curiosity about life was directed solely at finding out about things which I believed were more real than I was myself, things whose value for me lay in that they gave a glimpse if not of how some great genius had thought, then of the power or grace to be found in Nature when it is left to its own devices and is not tampered with by men.”
“Places we used to know are not situated solely in the world of space; that is merely where the mind puts them, for the sake of convenience. They were never anything more than a slender slice of reality, surrounded by the mass of contiguous impressions which composed our total life at a particular time. The memory of a certain impression is nothing other than one’s regret for a certain moment; and houses, thoroughfares and paths through the wood are, alas, as fleeting as the years.”
“To my mind, a new book was not just an object among many similar ones, bus as unique as a person, with no reason for existing except in itself”
“The unforgiving need to pursue such a relentless, changeless, fruitless activity was so odious to him that one day when he found a swelling in his abdomen, he felt a pang of genuine joy at the thought that it might be a fatal tumor, that from then on he would not have to bother about a thing, since illness could take him over and put him through the motions of life until the not too distant day when it would have finished with him. In fact, the recurring wish for death that often unconsciously visited him at that period was not so much a desire for release from the cruelty of his suffering as an attempt to escape from the unremitting monotony of effort”
“It may be that the only ultimate truth of existence lies in the nothingness to come and that it is our inner life that is unreal; but in that case, we feel, these ideas and musical utterances which only exist through that inner life must also be devoid of reality. We may perish, but we hold as hostages these captives from a divine world which will have to take their chance with us.”
“The frequent thought that the day would come when he would fall out of love with Odette had filled him with panic and he had resolved to be ever on the alert, so that as soon as he felt the initial symptoms of a weakening of his love he would be able to cling to it and prevent it from fading. However now that his love for her had in fact begun to weaken, he noticed a corresponding and simultaneous weakening of his resolve to remain in love with her. For it is impossible to respond to the feelings and desires of the person one was before.”
“My whole insatiable curiosity about life was directed solely at finding out about things which I believed were more real than I was myself, things whose value for me lay in that they gave a glimpse if not of how some great genius had thought, then of the power or grace to be found in Nature when it is left to its own devices and is not tampered with by men.”
“Places we used to know are not situated solely in the world of space; that is merely where the mind puts them, for the sake of convenience. They were never anything more than a slender slice of reality, surrounded by the mass of contiguous impressions which composed our total life at a particular time. The memory of a certain impression is nothing other than one’s regret for a certain moment; and houses, thoroughfares and paths through the wood are, alas, as fleeting as the years.”