Why is proust closing

Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. But I must return to Swann. Near the end of her novel, we find Edward, one of the main characters, resuming his reading of Proust:. He had turned to the beginning. What a lot of pain there was all the way through. So how was it that the whole thing could vibrate with such a pure joy? This was something which Edward was determined to find out. This joy stems in part, I believe, from the compassion Proust shows for his characters, even those with whom he finds the most fault.

He loves and wants to redeem them all, a sentiment that constitutes a powerful moral force, endowing his characters with life and making them seem real. In the closing pages, Proust urges each of us to comprehend, develop, and deploy our remarkable faculties. He intends his entire enterprise to persuade us that we are incredibly rich instruments, but that most often we let our gifts lie dormant or we squander them.

The joy that so many readers feel at the conclusion of the book derives from the long-delayed triumph of the hero and the realization that we too can, by following his example, attempt to lead the true life. When the Narrator completes his quest, after many ups and downs and misunderstandings, the myriad themes—major and minor—beautifully orchestrated throughout, are gloriously resolved in the grand finale. This happy ending makes In Search of Lost Time a comedy of the highest order, one that amuses, delights, and frequently dazzles, as it instructs.

I read A la recherche du temps perdu. I like it better than going to Palm Beach. Why did Foote always give himself the same reward on finishing one of his own books? And why does he say that reading Proust is better than spending two months in Palm Beach? Born in a Paris suburb in , Proust grew up in cloistered privilege.

Although she was herself Jewish, following custom for mixed marriages, Mme Proust raised her children as Catholics. When Proust was nine, he suffered the first attack of the asthma that would constrict and dominate his life, haunting his time outdoors with the fear of suffocation.

Yet he took evident pleasure in the sensual richness of his natural surroundings, closing family vacations at Illiers with farewell visits to the flowering hawthorns and writing for school exercises descriptions of scenery so romantic and dramatic that some of his teachers cut points for their excessiveness. Into adulthood he retained a habit of falling into startling bouts of absorption in stray details around him.

I had the impression that he heard me coming, that he saw me, but that he did not wish to speak or budge. Although his parents expected him to be a lawyer or a diplomat, the usual careers for literary types of his social class, Proust nursed a secret ambition of becoming a playwright, to make ready for which great part he began pushing his writing exercises outside what the lessons taught or his coordination could manage.

The essays that survive from these years show an ambitious young writer who seeks to impress with his erudition, using the names of great authors like punctuation, who copies the decadent style of overflowing asides and whimsical parentheses that, at the time, signaled consummate literariness, who paints scenery that owes more to verse than to life, but who has a knack for imitating conversation: baggy works that raise around themselves an ambitious frame within which to develop.

Before long on this course, Proust later told a friend, half the class was imitating his use of a decadent style, the other half sneered at him as a poseur, and the faculty treated him as a bad example. We were rough with him. Ce pauvre malheureux! After his mandatory military service, Proust took degrees in law and philosophy, which his parents hoped would steady him for a career.

That year, he joined the staff of one of the leading avant-garde magazines of the era, La Revue Blanche, when it absorbed a smaller publication for which he was a regular contributor, Le Banquet. As a society journalist and writer of short stories, Proust made the first sweep of the setting that would ground so much of his later work. The characters in his early stories are men and women of leisure, languid butterflies that their creator clearly admires as creatures of the unbroken life of beauty and culture that wealth makes possible.

But he also struggles to resist their attractions, using them to examine the dangerous zone where artifice becomes decadence, beauty merely an escape from the tedium of idleness. The trouble with this fiction is that Proust seems to be mostly interested in effects, framing and embroidering his themes rather than putting life into them through dramatic conflict.

Proust winds up with stories that are all situation—all perfume and psychology. In , Proust gathered more than sixty of his stories and sketches, about half of which had been published earlier, into an illustrated collection, Les Plaisirs et les Jours. Proust designed this first book as a comprehensive art object, collaring a musical friend, Reynaldo Hahn, to compose musical settings for an inset of poems, and commissioning the illustrations, pen and ink washes mostly of women, flowers, and violins, from a society painter, Madeleine Lemaire.

For an extra dash of glitter, he coaxed a preface out of a famous name on the edge of his social network, Anatole France. His characters travel, they socialize, they study the fine arts, they woo and betray, they ask the big questions about love, life, and death—but they do not work. Part of the cosmopolitanism in this rendering, of course, is an undertone of mockery regarding cosmopolitan life, an air of detached superiority over a world for which detached superiority is the privileged code of insiders.

This first book failed completely. As late as , the original print run of 1, copies had sold only Even his friends gave it a disappointing reception, and when in the book was ridiculed in an amateur play that some guests put on at a party, Proust responded with more hurt and indignation than one might expect for a little ribbing among friends.

France, four francs. Item, paintings by Madeleine Lemaire, four francs. Item, music by Reynaldo Hahn, four francs. Item, prose by me, one franc. Item, a few lines of verse by me, fifty centimes. But it was a world he clearly loved and connected closely with his creativity. His serious tenure there had begun when, at seventeen, Proust had befriended Laure Hayman, a courtesan who began inviting him to her salons as a kind of mascot, acting for him as a delegate to the upper crust of the demimonde.

It was France, it was a different time. Proust admired the older woman for her intellectual gifts, her deadly charm, and her artistic sense, which she displayed in a collection of fine porcelain. He later used her as a model for Odette. Naturally, using people as models for fictional characters is not the same as casting them in parts for the stage.

His social benefactors multiplied rapidly, and with them the drawing-rooms open to Proust, who was wealthy but still the half-Jewish son of a bourgeois. Others later remembered him as a winning conversationalist, showing off his wide reading and charming out the stories behind the displays of custom and lineage, examining the elaborate codes that mapped the articulations of social power, material that he later used in his long novel His letters, which largely concern the exchange of courtesies from this world, also suggest a way in which it provided a social space where he could formalize and analyze the aristocratic element in his own aesthetic.

If his theatrical politeness, which had been part of his reputation since his boyhood, already suggested an ironic awareness, a slight heightening, of the ritual character of all social life, the world of the salons elaborated social manners into a courtly dance, in the round of which he could present himself as a kind of page, gifted but deferential, epicurean in the give and take of flattery. At one of these functions in , he found an important patron in Charles Ephrussi, the director of the prestigious art journal, the Gazette des Beaux-Arts.

The son of a banking family, an art critic, a collector and sponsor of exhibitions, Ephrussi cultivated young writers and painters, introducing them to his connections in society and the arts. The Benedictine is the scholar, the art historian of deadly erudition, the perfectly mannered yet slightly rigid man who is never seen without trimmed beard and brushed coat; and yet also the dandy attending several parties daily, welcome in the best circles, the elegant figure with a cane under his arm who carries a top hat as a kind of emblem.

Later Proust used him as a model for Charles Swann. For instance, the narrator compares the tumult of a Paris air raid at night with the violent rhythm of an El Greco painting, or the shimmering, unreal quality of a dream, with its indistinct play of sorrow and delight, with the delicate atmospherics of Watteau. Other painters Proust makes this use of include the Impressionists, Botticelli, Rembrandt, and especially Vermeer.

In fact, as Chernowitz remarks, Proust took art as such a natural part of life that he sketches character partly in terms of attitude towards art. Mme Verdurin cares about art only when it touches on her little salon Chernowitz, Swann, the connoisseur, falls into his disastrous love for Odette when he realizes that she resembles the graceful figures of Botticelli.

In , Proust had begun working covertly on a long novel. Scholars discovered this manuscript in the nineteen-forties, more than a thousand pages of sketches, dialogues, and descriptions to which Proust had added intermittently over four or five years before abandoning the effort for Ruskin. They titled it Jean Santeuil. Before Proust finished those final two volumes, however, the Great War began, and with it the total disruption of French society--and his book. Bernard Grasset was called to military service, the printer's lead was commandeered for a more bloody purpose, and Proust's epic was closed down "for the duration," as we learned to say on two occasions the first half of the 20th century.

He became so dependent upon her that, unusual for him, he wrote her by name into the second book of the Search.

In , Proust found a new publisher, Gaston Gallimard, whose firm had earlier rejected Swann's Way , and in November of that year he told Gallimard that he was ready to send him the manuscript of the second book of what he now believed would be a four-part story: Swann's Way , In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower , The Guermantes Way , and Finding Time Again.

Apparently the third volume was also sometimes called Sodom and Gomorrah. Proust at one point actually likened this experience to that of a military commander: "A general is like a writer who sets out to write It was in June of that year that copies of the revised Swann's Way and -- at last! The Search was now essentially complete, as Proust explained to a critic: "the last chapter of the last volume was written right after the first chapter of the first volume.

Everything in between was written afterward but long ago. The war made it impossible to have proofs, now illness prevents me from correcting them. The Guermantes Way was to be published in two parts, with the first volume available in October and the second in May , in an edition that also contained an introduction to Sodom and Gomorrah.

At this point, Proust envisioned that his account of male and female homosexuality would sprawl across multiple volumes, an idea that he would later jettison in favor of retitling the later two -- the "Albertine cycle" -- as The Prisoner and The Fugitive.

However, life has the final word in these matters, and Proust became fatally ill while he was correcting the proofs of The Prisoner. We cannot know what further changes he would have made to that book, never mind the two that followed it.