76
PARTISAN REVIEW
mental state of reading consists of the imaginary landscape in which the
imaginary characters move, a countryside that seems to belong to "true Na–
ture" with a capital N, Nature "worthy of being studied and explored." And
here the narrator or Proust places a paragraph that sets the tone for the rest
of the book, its essential action and its intellectual life. Let me read the para–
graph. There's no other way to convey the pace and the rhythm of Proust's
style. The prison image in the second sentence recasts the earlier image of
an incandescent filament that cannot make contact with anything. And notice
how insistently he uses the word
soul.
I've checked; it's in the original.
Arne
means our entire mental, emotional, and spiritual equipment. The passage
describes how an irresistible force -later Proust calls it "that immense desire
to know life" - meets an immovable object - the inaccessibility of material,
opaque beings. Just listen.
I'll
go slowly. It's less than a page:
Had my parents allowed me, when I read a book, to pay a visit
to the region it described, I should have felt that I was making an
enormous advance towards the ultimate conquest of truth. For even if
we have the sensation of being always enveloped in, surrounded by
our own soul, still it does not seem a fixed and imlllovable pl'ison;
rathel" do we seem to be borne away with it, and pcrpctually struggling
to transcend it, to break out into the world, with a perpetual discour–
agement as we hear endlessly all around us that unvarying sound
which is not an echo from without, but the resonance of a vibration
from within. We try to discover in things, which become p,"ecious to us
on that account, the reflection of what our soul has projected on to
them; we are disillusioned when we find that in this natural state, they
are devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds , to the
association of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilize all the forces of
that soul in a glitte,"ing array in order to bring our influence
to
bear on
other human beings who, we very well know, are situated outside
ourselves where we can never reach them. And so, if I always imag–
ined the woman I loved in the setting I most longed at the time
to
visit,
if I wished that it wel"e she who would show it to me, who would open to
me the gates of an unknown world, it was not a mere chance associa–
tion of thoughts; no, it was because my dreams of travel and of love
were only moments - which I isolate artificially today as though I were
cutting sections at diffel"ent heights in the jet of a fountain, iridescent
but seemingly without flow or motion - moments in a single,
undeviating, irresistible outpouring of all the forces of my life.
What can I say about such a passage? There's nothing to add. Yet one
