Category: Lit & Crit
“Everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in some former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body…. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there.” – Marcel Proust, The Captive (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“Nature scarcely seems capable of giving us any but quite short illnesses. But medicine has developed the art of prolonging them.” – Marcel Proust, The Captive (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“What is more usual than a lie, whether it is a question of masking the daily weaknesses of the constitution which we wish to be thought strong, of concealing a vice, or of going off, without offending other people, to do the thing that we prefer? It is the most necessary means of self-preservation, and the one that is most widely used.” – Marcel Proust, The Captive (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“Most people in the industrial world believe in progress the way that peasants in the Middle Ages believed in the wonder-working bones of the local saint. It’s an unquestioned truism in contemporary culture that newer technologies are by definition better than older ones, that old beliefs are disproved by the mere passage of time, and that the future ahead of us will inevitably be like the present, but even more so. For all practical purposes, belief in progress is the established religion of the modern world, with its own mythology — think of all the stories you got in school about brilliant thinkers single-handedly overturning the superstitious nonsense of the past — and its own lab-coated priesthood. Most people these days literally can’t think outside the box of progress. That’s why the only alternative to the endless continuation of business as usual that has any kind of public presence these days is apocalypse — some sudden catastrophe gaudy enough to overwhelm the otherwise unstoppable force of progress. The faith in apocalypse is simply the flipside of the faith in progress — instead of a bigger, better, brighter future, we get a bigger, better, brighter cataclysm. Suggest that the future ahead of us might not be either of those hackneyed stereotypes, and you can count on hearing the echoing bang of minds slamming shut.” – John Michael Greer (interview with Jessa Crispin in Bookslut)
“Humanity is a very old institution. Heredity and cross-breeding have given insuperable strength to bad habits, faulty reflexes. One person sneezes and gasps because he is passing a rosebush, another breaks out in a rash at the smell of wet paint; others get violent stomach-aches if they have to set out on a journey, and grandchildren of thieves who are themselves rich and generous cannot resist the temptation to rob you of fifty francs.” – Marcel Proust, The Captive (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“Beneath any carnal attraction at all deep, there is the permanent possibility of danger.” – Marcel Proust, The Captive (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“Masculinity is, as a word, make-shift, and as a practical concept, uselessly broad, and wide open to opportunism and disingenuity. May infants make a claim to masculinity? Probably not, but everybody else can. Confidence and strength, both of mind and body, a willingness to pay a great price in defense of something nominally outside the realm of masculinity (e.g., a woman or child), a desire for hard-won power and glory, an appetite for raw life, a respect for law and order and genuine authority but a nearly unthinking willingness to destroy persons and institutions when necessary: men may have described and proscribed all that as essential to masculinity, but in practice all that it apparently means is that physicality—a larger frame, bigger muscles, and a hairy body—makes all the difference in the cultivation of psychological, emotional, mental states and conditions that favor, enhance, unleash, condone, sanction, and enjoy violence. Righteous, necessary violence, to be sure, but violence all the same. Masculinity—righteous, necessary violence—equals heroism, then? The bloody kind? The fierce kind? The blackly melancholy kind? The laconic kind? Certainly not the kind who ‘fought but stayed at home.’ It’s interesting to note that Orpheus, who went to Hell to rescue Eurydice, who harrowed, conquered, tamed Hell, may be considered a kind of apotheosis of the masculine, not for his bravery or skill, but because he was an idiot who could not do the one little last thing that would ensure victory over death and a life of happiness. Masculinity equals not merely heroism, but anti-heroism as well. It’s even possible that anti-heroism suits masculinity better than the strait-jacket of simple-minded and stiff-gestured heroism.” – Gary Amdahl, “Two Considerations of Masculinity”
“It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering. And the most terrible reality brings us, at the same time as suffering, the joy of a great discovery, because it merely gives a new and clear form to what we have long been ruminating without suspecting it.” – Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“Just as we do not possess that sense of direction with which certain birds are endowed, so we lack the sense of our own visibility as we lack that of distances, imagining as quite close to us the interested attention of people who on the contrary never give us a thought, and not suspecting that we are at the same moment the sole preoccupation of others.” – Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“The rule among the human race—a rule that naturally admits of exceptions—is that the reputedly hard are the weak whom nobody wanted, and that the strong, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have alone that gentleness which the vulgar herd mistakes for weakness.” – Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“It’s impossible to escape yourself in writing a book; all the darkness or the beauty or fineness inside you will find its way out. Even a writer who’s willing to be inauthentic will be revealed, because the work will feel inauthentic to the reader.” – Averil Dean (interview with Erika Marks at On Writing, Publishing and Other Delicacies)
“We passionately long for there to be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years, we are unfaithful to what we once were, to what we wished to remain immortally. Even without supposing that death is to alter us more completely than the changes that occur in the course of our lives, if in that other life we were to encounter the self that we have been, we should turn away from ourselves as from those people with whom we were once on friendly terms but whom we have not seen for years.” – Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“Theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life.” – Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“If habit is a second nature, it prevents us from knowing our first, whose cruelties it lacks as well as its enchantments.” – Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to kindness and wisdom we make promises only; pain we obey.” – Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“The most dangerous of all concealments is that of the crime itself in the mind of the guilty party. His constant awareness of it prevents him from imagining how generally unknown it is, how readily a complete lie would be accepted, and on the other hand from realising at what degree of truth other people will begin to detect an admission in words which he believes to be innocent. In any case there was no real need to try to hush it up, for there is no vice that does not find ready tolerance in the best society, and one has seen a country house turned upside down in order that two sisters might sleep in adjoining rooms as soon as their hostess learned that theirs was more than a sisterly affection.” – Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“The flip side of brutality and evil is, dependably, sentimentality. The hit man kissing the picture of his sainted mother before he exterminates a mark, the mawkish evocations of home and youth in Nazi propaganda, the image of the pristine Southern belle under siege that propelled so many lynchings, the need for cleansing, cleansing…. Sentimentality is the perfume that disguises, and even justifies, this lust for brutal cleansing and killing. But the inverse is also true: that an attitude, or a pose, of cool and bracing willingness to face evil and brutality, and to dismiss its opposite as wish fulfillment, might function as a sea wall against a tide of shame and grief so heavy that it can’t be faced directly. The stink of mistakes made, or possibilities lost, can make an image of the good intolerable. If it is too expensive to look at what might have been and realize that one may just not have been good enough, it can be a comfort to think that it was never possible in the first place. This evasion is possible on a societal level, as well as in the private hearts of individuals. The novel is the best tool we have for understanding the one level in terms of the other.” – Tom Piazza, “The Devil and Gustave Flaubert”
“Writers are a pretty low class. True, it’s not a bad thing to meet them once in a way, for thanks to them, when one reads a book or an article, one ‘gets to know the inside story,’ one ‘sees people in their true colours.’ On the whole, though, the wisest thing is to stick to dead authors.” – Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“We can as we choose abandon ourselves to one or other of two forces, of which one rises in ourselves, emanates from our deepest impressions, while the other comes to us from without. The first brings with it naturally a joy, the joy that springs from the life of those who create. The other current, that which endeavors to introduce into us the impulses by which persons external to ourselves are stirred, is not accompanied by pleasure, but we can add pleasure to it, by a sort of recoil, in an intoxication so artificial that it turns swiftly into boredom, into melancholy—whence the gloomy faces of so many men of the world, and all those nervous conditions which may even lead to suicide.” – Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“I usually compare the novel to a mammal, be it wild as a tiger or tame as a cow; the short story to a bird or a fish; the micro story to an insect (iridescent in the best cases).” – Luisa Valenzuela (as quoted in Robet Shapard’s “The Remarkable Reinvention of Very Short Fiction”)
“It is very rarely that any of us has the courage of his own originality and does not apply himself diligently to resembling the most approved models.” – Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“It would seem that in an egalitarian society social etiquette would vanish, not, as is generally supposed, from want of breeding, but because on the one side would disappear the deference due to a prestige which must be imaginary to be effective, and on the other, more completely still, the affability that is gracefully and generously dispensed when it is felt to be of infinite price to the recipient, a price which, in a world based on equality, would at once fall to nothing like everything which has only a fiduciary value.” – Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“An artist has no need to express his thought directly in his work for the latter to reflect its quality; it has even been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.” – Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“A dead writer can at least be illustrious without any strain on himself. The effulgence of his name stops short at his gravestone. In the deafness of eternal sleep he is not importuned by Glory.” – Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“The short story has been all over and there’s no telling where else it will go. All over, but not everywhere. It’s not an exhaustible form, any more than the novel is or the poem.” – Noy Holland (in Hilary Plum’s “Stop Up Your Ears and Secede”)
“Character is a function of language—a collection of errors and deviations that resonate with certain behaviors. As with every other element in fiction, it is a record of a writer’s decisions.” – Noy Holland (in Hilary Plum’s “Stop Up Your Ears and Secede”)
“Character starts with the alphabet. Letters: words: sentences. Any individual human is immensely complex and contradictory and it would be sheer tedium to encounter this complexity, fully and accurately recorded on the page. ‘Fleshed out,’ I believe the term is.” – Noy Holland (in Hilary Plum’s “Stop Up Your Ears and Secede”)
“‘Do you hear voices?’ asks the doctor. I say yes. What I hear is the muttering phantom, the mouse gnawing at the door. The wind in the mind of the trees. Nothing mindful or coherent. From the muttering, I try to make coherence: people call this voice, but why not call it character? If character is a locus which allows one to speak… ‘certain sorts of sentences?’ Suppose I observe or remember in a person a quirk, a gift, a flaw. An exemplary tic. How does that tic or quirk or flaw influence how a person perceives and therefore words experience? The worded experience, the linguistic field, is character and voice at once, a record of perception. So, yes: I go word by word by ear for as long as I can, according to my awareness of what I’ve said and did not mean to say. And yes: this is messy and inefficient and—worst—insufficient, particularly in longer fictions. Insufficient because you don’t get structure by keeping your ear to the ground. You have to stand up, and I never want to do so too soon, never want to see too far or control too much, which for me feels deadly. The ordering impulse is crucial but I don’t want it to be dominant or inhibiting. When it’s dominant the terms we commonly use—character, voice, plot, setting—begin to make sense; the story bleeds out; it’s anybody’s. More chatter in a chattering world.” – Noy Holland (in Hilary Plum’s “Stop Up Your Ears and Secede”; emphases and ellipsis in original)
“We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say this we think of that hour as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time; it does not occur to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned and can mean that death—or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again—may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon whose timetable, hour by hour, has been settled in advance. One insists on one’s daily outing so that in a month’s time one will have had the necessary ration of fresh air, one has hesitated over which coat to take, which cabman to call; one is in the cab, the whole day lies before one, short because one must be back home early, as a friend is coming to see one; one hopes that it will be as fine again tomorrow; and one has no suspicion that death, which has been advancing within one on another plane, has chosen precisely this particular day to make its appearance, in a few minutes’ time.” – Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“Submit to being called a neurotic. You belong to that splendid and pitiable family which is the salt of the earth. Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realise how much it owes to them, and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not know what they cost those who wrought them in insomnia, tears, spasmodic laughter, urticaria, asthma, epilepsy, a terror of death which is worse than any of these, and which you perhaps have experienced.” – Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)