“Love, for Proust, is agonising jealousy; there is no room for fondness or companionship. Finally, there is disillusion and indifference, and the sorrow felt by Swann when he realises he has wasted his life pining for a woman he doesn’t even like.
The narrator sees a poetic vision of beauty and elegance, the Guermantes and their friends framed in a box at the theatre, glistening with jewels and unattainable glamour, but already ironic laughter is not far away. When he meets them, and is invited to dinner, he soon discovers the distressing banality of the world of the rich and nobly born. It is one more disillusion. Even the celebrated wit of the Duchess herself is simply paradox spiced with malice.
The third occasion the narrator is projected into lost time is when he treads on a loose cobblestone in a Paris courtyard. He finds himself in St Mark’s, walking on the uneven marble floor. Venice, for him, is art. Unlike love, or Paris society, art never disappoints, or disillusions. He knows he has within him a work of art waiting to be written. After one last party with his friends grown old and wrinkled, where he finds the grandees, formerly so exclusive, married to the very people they refused to receive, he shuts himself up and works until his dying day.”
I’ve worked really hard in this month of January; no time for anything else.
“Pinter’s silence is due to fear. Fear of being known. Fear of knowing other people. Fear of intimacy. Silence to protect ourselves.”
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