PARTISAN REVIEW
name of your parents, who left us so prematurely. I did not have the
honor of knowing them well, but I remember how much my father
appreciated your father and what a pleasure it was for my mother to
see Mme. Proust.
It
was most considerate of you to send us their message
from beyond the grave. I will soon return to Paris and
if
I succeed at all
in overcoming the need for isolation which I have felt since the death
of him who absorbed my every interest and inspired my every joy, I
would be very happy to meet you and talk with you of the past.
Very affectionately,
H.
VAN BLARENBERGHE
This
letter touched me very much. I pitied one who suffered so,
I pitied
him,
yet I envied him: he still had his mother. In consoling
her he would console himself. I could not agree to his suggestion of
a meeting, only because I was .prevented by practical details. But
above
all
the letter wrought a favorable change in my memory of
him.
The good relations to which he alluded were really of the most banal
social kind. At the tables where we sometimes dined, I had scarcely
had a chance to talk with
him,
but the great intellectual distinction
of our hosts on those occasions remained for me, and still remains,
a guaranty that Henri van Blarenberghe, under his rather conven–
tional exterior-the index, perhaps, of his surroundings rather than
of his real personality-hid an original and lively nature. Besides,
among those strange flashes of the memory which our brain, so small
and yet so vast, stores in prodigious number,
if
I seek those. which
represent Henri van Blarenberghe, the flash which always remains
most vivid to me is of a face smiling in a way that was particularly
fine, the lips still parted after having thrown off some witty remark.
Pleasant and rather distinguished, so I "resaw" him, as one might
say. Our eyes have more part than we can believe in this active
exploration of the past which we call memory.
If
you look at someone
while his mind is intent upon bringing back something from the past,
restoring it to life for an instant, you
will
see that his eyes go suddenly
blind to the surrounding objects which they reflected an instant before.
"Your eyes are blank, you are somewhere else," we say; however, we
see only the external signs of the phenomenon that takes place
in
the
mind. At such a moment the most beautiful eyes in the world no
longer touch us with their beauty; they are, to change the meaning
of a phrase of Wells's, no more than "machines to explore time,''
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