Chapter 166 The Seventh Reappearance of Time (15)

How can notebook literature have a certain value?Since what it records are trivial, reality is contained in them as it points out (greatness in the distant roar of airplanes and the lines of the St. the past in the past, etc.), and the little things themselves mean nothing if we don't clean up these realities.What gradually remains in memory is the connected series of imprecise words, nothing remains of our real feelings that constitute our thoughts, our lives, and reality to us.And it is the art of lies that blindly reproduce the so-called "plot truth", which is as simple and flat and unbeautiful as life, and what our eyes see and what our intellect confirms is used again and again tiresomely and in vain , one wonders where the man who engages in such use finds that spark of joy and motivation which keeps him going forward with vigor in his work.On the contrary, the real art book, what Mr. Nobwa would call the art of games for literary lovers, its greatness lies in rediscovering and re-grasping reality, in making us know this reality which is far away from what we see and hear , and that reality that grows farther and farther away from us as the mundane perceptions we use to replace it become thicker, more impermeable, and farther away from us.This reality, which we will probably never know until we die, is actually our life.True life, life finally revealed and brought to light, and thus the only life really experienced, is literature.In a sense, this kind of life exists in every moment of the artist and every human being equally.It's just that people didn't notice it because people didn't want to find out about it.In this way, countless photographic negatives have been piled up in their past, which have never been used.Because intellect does not "wash" them out.Our life is like this, and so is the life of others; in fact, writing is to a writer what color is to a painter. It is not a matter of technique, but a matter of vision.It reveals qualitative differences in the way the world appears to us that cannot be done directly and consciously, and which, without art, would remain the eternal secret of each individual.Only with the help of art can we go out of ourselves and understand what other people see in this world, a world different from ours. Otherwise, the scenes in that world will be as unknown to us as what is on the moon.It is thanks to art that we see not only one world, our world, but multiplied worlds, and we can have as many worlds as there are unconventional artists, as different as The difference between those worlds that have entered infinity is even greater. Regardless of whether the source of light is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, although it has been extinguished for many centuries, they are still sending us their own light.

The work of the artist trying to dig out something different under the material, experience, and vocabulary is the exact opposite of what self-esteem, prejudice, intelligence, and habit do to us every moment when we live against our will. The latter accumulate upon our real impressions all kinds of terms, and the practical ends of life which we mistakenly call, so as to completely conceal our real impressions.In short, art as complex as this is the only art that is alive.Only it can express our life to others, and also make us see our own life, that is, what cannot be "observed", whose appearance we see needs to be translated and often needs to be read backwards and extremely difficult to identify that kind of life.The engineering of our egos, our prejudices, our faculties of simulation, our abstract intellects and habits is what art dismantles; place.There is no doubt a great temptation to reconstruct real life, to restore the youth of impressions.But it also requires courage of all kinds, even emotional courage.For that begins with negating one's most precious illusions, of distrusting the objectivity of one's own formulations, and, instead of coaxing oneself a hundred times into saying, "She's so lovely," one should simply say: "I like to kiss her".Of course, what I feel in moments of love, others feel as well.We feel, but what we feel is like some negatives. If you don't bring them up to the light, you will only see a smear of blackness, and you have to look at them in reverse.Therefore it is only when the intellect has illuminated it and made it intellectualized that it is possible, with great difficulty, to recognize the face of the thing we perceive.

Yet I also found that the pain I first experienced through Hilbert, the pain of realizing that our love does not belong to the person who caused it, is not unhelpful as an auxiliary means of solving the problem ( For, though our lives pass by, it is only in times of pain that our minds, so to speak, tossed in perpetual change and ups and downs, can, as in a storm, take the whole of the regulated The infinity of regulation rises to a certain height, so that we can see it, which we do not see when we stop at the badly angled window, because the blissful tranquility makes it plain and low; Such ups and downs, perhaps, are always present only with certain great geniuses, for whom no painful jolts are needed; yet, when we appreciate the broad and regular development of their cheerful works, we are not so sure tends to infer the joys of life from the joys of the work, which, I'm afraid, is often painful)—the main reason, however, is that if I love more than a certain Hilbert (for which we suffer terribly), Not because we still love some Albertine, but because love is a part of our soul that outlasts the selfish selves that have died away in us and who selfishly wished to keep it, and, whatever it may be, How much pain (and indeed salutary pain) it causes us, it must detach itself from the particular man in order to escape from it the general and give this love, the understanding of this love, to everyone, to the universal, and not To some, then some woman with whom we, successively, as some, then some man, wish to be united.

The slightest signs that appear around me (the Guermantes family, Albertine, Gilbert, Saint-Loup, Balbec, etc.), I have to give back to them the meaning that habit has caused me to ignore.And after we have reached reality, in order to express reality and preserve reality, we will put aside what is different from reality, what is constantly brought to us by the speed acquired by habit.First of all I will reject those words that are easy to say but are not chosen by the heart, those gags, such as the language we use in conversation, artificially going on to ourselves after a long conversation, so that our thoughts are full. Lies, those purely material words, posed with smiles and frowns by writers who have degenerated into words, always falsify the words of people like Sainte-Beuve.True writing is not the product of light and rhetoric, but of darkness and silence.And because art strictly recombines life, the reality we have achieved in ourselves will always have a poetic atmosphere, filled with the comfort brought by a certain mystery, which is nothing but the dark world through which we have to pass. Remnants, indications of the depth of the work correctly marked like altimeters (this depth is not inherent in certain themes, as some materialist spiritualist novelists think, since they cannot penetrate into the world of appearances and, like the usual moral writings of good men who wish to do little good, all their lofty intentions should not prevent us from noticing their ability to escape even the mediocrity which springs from imitated forms. no willpower).

As for the truths sparsely picked up by intellect—even the best intellect—they stand before it, and their significance may be very great; There is really no need to go beyond any depth, because they are not recreated, so they have no depth.Some writers, after reaching a certain age, when the mystical truth no longer arises in them, often write from that time on with more and more powerful intellects, and for this reason their mature works are much better than those of their youth. Stronger and more powerful, but they have lost their former sweetness. I do not think, however, that those realities which the intellect draws directly from reality can be wholly dismissed, since they still make use of less pure, but still impregnated spiritual material, and inlay elements common to past and present sensations. Those impressions that are made on us without time limit.However, because these impressions are relatively precious and rare, it is impossible for a work of art to be composed entirely of them.Since they can be used for this purpose, I feel these realities of sentiments, characters, customs rushing up to me, and the perception of them gives me joy.Yet I vaguely remember that I discovered more than one of them in pain, and others in forced pleasure.In this case, they are certainly not as good as the true brilliance that made me realize that the work of art is the only means of regaining the lost time, and another flame rose in my heart.I realized that all these materials of literary works were my past life; Anticipating where they are going, not even knowing they will survive, not realizing that the seeds contain all the nutrients that will fuel the growth of the plant.I am like the seed that dies as soon as the plant grows, and I feel that I live for it unconsciously, without thinking that my life will one day be related to the books I want to write. When I sat down in front of the desk, I couldn't think of anything to write.So my life can and cannot be boiled down to this proposition: Inspiration.It doesn't come down to that, because literature has played no role in my life.It can be attributed to the fact that this life, its sad events, and its memories of happy events constitute a storage similar to endosperm, which is left in the ovules of flowers and trees, from which the ovules absorb nutrients to become seeds, and plant embryos are still in us. Developed in ignorance, and this embryo is where the chemical reactions and the secret but very active phenomenon of respiration take place.This is how my life adapts to the changes that its maturity brings.

-------- ① Everyone who has caused us pain may be worshiped as a god by us, but they are actually only a partial reflection of divinity, the highest stage; divinity (idea), meditation can give us joy immediately, rather than we bear it past pain.The whole art of living consists in delightfully filling our lives with divinities of every kind by treating those who cause us pain only as steps that allow us to enter the form of their gods. — Author's note. In this matter, the same contrasts are false if they start from them, and true if they end with them.Scholars and inkmen are envious of painters, and they also want to do sketches and sketches. If he does this, he will fail miserably.But when he was writing, the actions, mannerisms, and accents of his characters were all inspired by his memory.Under the name of a fictional character, there is no way he can't put the names of sixty people he has seen, some of them make a grimace, some offer a monocle, someone is angry appearance, someone is left with pretentious gestures and so on.At this time, the writer found that his dream of becoming a painter could not be fulfilled consciously, but this long-cherished wish had already been realized, and the writer completed his sketchbook unconsciously.For, driven by instincts of his own, the writer, long before he is confident that he will ever be a writer, regularly omits so much that other people notice that he is reproached with absent-mindedness, and he thinks he is He is neither good at listening nor observing, but it is during this time that he instructs his eyes and ears to always catch those trivial things that others think are meaningless. The tone of voice, the look on his face, the way he shrugs his shoulders, he may not know anything else about this person, and he has been doing this for years, because he has heard the tone of voice, or has a presentiment. I will hear it again, and feel that this is something that can be renewed and lasted.For he listened to others only when they were so stupid or so mad that they parroted and repeated the words of those who resembled them in character, so that he even made himself a seer bird, the mouthpiece of a psychic law.He only remembers general things.In such tones, such expressions, the lives of other people, though they had been seen and heard in his distant childhood, came to him in such a tone, and later, when he wrote, that life of others would be Coming to collaborative action, entering into his work with a shoulder action common to many, as real as what an anatomist jots down in a workbook, only here to express a certain psychological truth, and on his shoulders The tops follow the neck movements of the other, and each assumes his momentary pose①.

-------- ①In the process of creating literary works, it is not certain that imagination and sensitivity are two irreplaceable qualifications, nor can it be said that the latter cannot replace the former without serious disadvantages, just like people with weak stomachs let their intestines The road undertakes the function of digestion.A person who is naturally sensitive but lacks imagination can also write a very good novel.The pain others inflict on him, his efforts to prevent it, the conflicts he creates with a cruel secondary figure, all intelligently articulated are the stuff of a work which Not only is it not inferior to that which it is so imaginatively concocted, but if it is left to its own development, it is equally capable of transcending the author's dreams and wit, and equally capable of rising and falling like the unpredictable willful waves of the imagination, beyond one's own surprise. ——Author's note.

The stupidest people show in their actions, their words, and their unconscious emotions certain regularities, which they themselves are not aware of, but which the artist catches.Ordinary people find this observation of the writer abominable, and they mistake the writer.For in a comical person the artist sees a perfect generalization, and he does not ascribe errors to the observed person any more than a surgeon despises a rather common circulatory disorder.Therefore, he does not look down on those joke baskets more than anyone else.It is a pity that his misfortune was greater than his abomination, and when his own emotions were involved, though he was equally aware of their generality, it was not so easy to rise above the pain they caused.When an insolent man insults us, no doubt, we would rather have him praise us, especially when the woman we love betrays us, what price are we not willing to pay for another end!However, at this moment, the feeling of being insulted and the pain of being abandoned will become the soil that we have never set foot in. The discovery of it is so painful for others, but it becomes precious for artists.Vicious and ungrateful people could not help him, and could not help themselves, to appear in his writings, attacking the writer for unintentionally linking the villains he denounced with his honor.In any work we can identify the person the artist hated most, alas, and the woman he once loved.For the artist, too, they are merely posing for a moment against his will and inflicting great pain on him.That is, when I was in love with Albertina, I knew clearly that she didn't love me. I had to accept the only thing she let me understand, which is what it is to feel pain, what it is to experience love, and even, in What is happiness in the beginning.

And when we try to extract and write from our sorrows, I may find some consolation for a different reason than I have enumerated here, namely, that thinking and writing in general are important to writers. Speech is a legitimate and necessary duty, and doing it makes me happy, as training, sweat, and bathing make an athlete.To be honest, I'm a little bit against it.I think that the supreme truth of life exists in art. On the other hand, although I have no ability or the effort required to make memories of loving Albertina or crying grandmother, I am still thinking about a film where they cannot Whether the known works of art can be regarded as a fulfillment for them, for the fate of these two poor women who have passed away.I once stood by indifferently and watched the dying and dying grandmother beside me!After my work is done, I am hopelessly wounded and deserted, and may I endure long sufferings to atone for my sins before I die!Furthermore, I even felt great pity for those who were not very close or even connected, pity so many people, who, in trying to comprehend their fate, took advantage of their suffering, or were simply ridiculous. people.All these dead people who had revealed the truth to me seemed to me to have lived only for my benefit, and seemed to have died for me.It is sad for me to think that my love, which I take so seriously, will be so light and detached in my works, and be implemented by various readers in their feelings for other women, but I should do it for Is this behind the infidelity outraged?Must I be outraged that someone or someone may have made women I don't know the object of my affections?This infidelity, this division of love between several persons, began in my lifetime, even before I wrote this book!I have suffered deeply for Gilbert, Madame de Guermantes, and Albertine one by one.One by one I left them behind, only my love for all kinds of people endured.One of those memories of mine will be profaned by some strange reader, whom I have already spoiled.I've almost made myself feel abominable, like some nationalist party, in whose name the hostilities continue, and in whose interests a war is waged, in which so many noble victims suffer Suffering and cadavers filling the ravine, not even knowing how the battle ended (which was at least some kind of compensation for my grandmother), and the party might hate itself too.And my only consolation for her ignorance that I was at last beginning to write (and this is the dead man's share) is that if she could no longer rejoice in my progress, she had long since ceased to think I had nothing to do, long ago believed that I would not I wasted my life, and my inaction and wasted years had caused her such great pain.Of course my grandmother and Albertine were not the only ones there, there were many other people whom I absorbed only a word or a look, but I can't remember them as individuals.A work is a vast cemetery, and most of the names on the gravestones have been worn away and are no longer legible.Sometimes, on the contrary, the name is well remembered, but it is not known whether anything of the person survives in the pages.That girl with sunken eyes speaks slowly, is she here?If she does rest here, in which part?I don't know anymore, how can I find people under the flowers?However, since we live far away from the individual, since our strongest feelings, such as my love for my grandmother, for Albertine, we no longer feel after a few years, since they have It's just a word we don't understand, since when everything we love is dead, we can still talk to the world and go to their homes to tell them about those old people, so if there is anything that can make us learn to understand The method of those forgotten words, shouldn't we use this method?Would it not be necessary to do this first by translating them into a common, or at least a lasting, language which would make the dead in their truest essence the eternal possession of all?Even the law of change which renders these words incomprehensible, if we manage to explain it, would not our weakness become a new strength?

Moreover, the writings that sorrow helps us write can also be understood as ominous signs of our future pain and auspicious omens of consolation.In fact, if love and sorrow have served the poet, and helped him to shape his work, if strange women, whom he least expects, either in malice or in mockery, each has served Adding their own masonry to the construction of magnificent buildings they will not see, it is not sufficiently considered that the life of the writer does not end with the completion of his work, which has caused him to suffer enormous, written into his life. The nature of pain and suffering in the work, which continues after he has finished the work, makes it possible for him to fall in love with another woman in the same situation, if time is in the environment, the subject itself, in his desire for love and resistance to pain The variations that have been caused have not caused the slightest deviation in this situation.From this first point of view, the work should be regarded as an unfortunate love, which must be the harbinger of other loves, which will make life like the work, and make the poet hardly need to write anymore. In everything he could find an early image of future events.Just like my love for Albertine, no matter how big the difference is, it has long been recorded in my love for Hilbert. In those happy days, when I first heard her aunt say Albertine's name and paint her countenance, I did not expect that day that this insignificant germ would one day develop and last my whole life.

From another point of view, however, the work is a harbinger of happiness, for it tells us that in any love there is the general beside the particular, and it strengthens the sense of sorrow for the deepening of its essence by ignoring its cause. The exercise of resistance to complete the transition from special to general.In fact, as I later experienced, even in moments of love, moments of pain, if the calling finally becomes a reality in our work, then we can feel very clearly that the loved one dissolves into a deeper In the vast reality, we even forget him from time to time. When we are working, we no longer feel the pain of love. It seems that it is just some kind of purely physical pain, which has nothing to do with our beloved, as if it is a kind of pain. heart disease.Indeed this is a fleeting issue, and the consequences seem even more counterproductive if the work starts later.For those who, out of their wickedness, out of their worthlessness, disregard our disapproval, destroy our illusions, annihilate themselves, and escape from the illusion of love that we forge for ourselves, if at this moment we Going to work, our hearts, out of our need for self-analysis, will lift them up again to the position of being able to love us, and in this case, get rid of the illusion of love and start working again A certain literature will give a certain survival after death to certain feelings that have ceased to exist.Of course, we will have to re-experience that characteristic pain with the courage of a doctor who injects himself with another harmful injection.At the same time, however, we must also think about it in some general form, which will enable us to escape its oppression at a certain speed, make all people share our pain, and even give A certain joy.Wherever life builds a wall, wisdom makes an exit there.For if there is no cure for unrequited love, one can escape from the pain of acknowledgment, if only from deriving from it the consequences it entails.Wisdom does not consider those closed situations of life with no way out. So, I have to accept the idea that even the closest people can only pose to the writer, as in the studio, because anything lasts only when it becomes general and the soul renounces itself. Sometimes, while a painful piece is still in its rough state, a new tenderness, a new pain, is born, which enables us to complete and flesh out that piece.As for those useful deep sorrows, we can't complain too much, because they don't fail, and don't make us wait long.Just have to hurry because they won't last long.We may comfort ourselves when they are too strong, and if our hearts are not strong enough to take it, we shall die.For happiness alone is good for the health of the body, but sorrow is for the strength of the mind.Besides, doesn't it always reveal a law to us?It is also indispensable to bring us back to the truth again and again, to pull out the weeds of habit, doubt, rashness, indifference, and force us to take things seriously!Indeed, this truth is difficult to coexist with happiness, health, and not always with life.Too much sorrow leads to death.Whenever new sufferings become too severe, we feel yet another vein swell, winding down one temple, and extending under our eyes.The old Rembrandts and the old Beethoven were taken with a grain of salt, and that's how their hideous, haggard faces gradually formed.Bags under the eyes and wrinkles on the brow are nothing without the pain of the heart.But since some forces can be transformed into other forces, since continuous heat can be turned into light, and electricity in thunderbolts can be used to photograph, since the dull pain of our soul can build upon itself Every new sorrow is like a tower Let us accept the physical pain it bestows for the spiritual knowledge it brings!Let our flesh fall apart, since every little piece that fell off this time is shining brightly and clearly, and supplementing the insufficiency of the work at the cost of pain and suffering that other more talented people do not need, They are added to our work, making our life more solid as the passions grind it down.Thoughts are substitutes for sorrow, and at the same time that sorrow after sorrow turns into ideas, they partly lose their harmful effect on our hearts. At first, the transformation itself even bursts into joy.Moreover, they are merely substitutes in the temporal domain, since the first element seems to be ideas, and grief is only the way in which certain ideas first enter our minds.Within this group of ideas, however, there are several categories, some of which are instantly joyful. -------- ①In love, our lucky opponent, or rather our enemy is also our benefactor.He immediately adds a great value to a person who only excites our petty carnal desires, a value that has nothing to do with her, but is confused by us.Pleasure does not turn into love if we don't have a rival, if we don't have one, or if we don't believe in one.Because they don't actually need to exist.What is good enough for us is the life of illusion, the life of illusion produced by our suspicion and jealousy of rivals who do not exist. ——Author's note. All the above considerations gave me a stronger and more accurate awareness of the truth that I often have a premonition, especially when Mrs. Cambremer is thinking about how I can snub Elstier for Albertine's sake. When she was an eminent person, even from an intellectual point of view, I felt that she was wrong, but I don't know what I underestimated: we start to learn to be men of letters with all kinds of lessons.The objective value of art is negligible here.What needs to be brought to light, the truth, is our feelings, our passions, the feelings and passions of each of us.A woman we need, a woman who tortures us, causes a surge of emotion in our hearts, which is differently deep and differently vital to the emotions that a superior who has a stake in us may cause.What remains to be seen is whether, in the light of our lives, we feel that the desertion of a woman who pains us is insignificant in comparison with the truths that desertion reveals to us about the A woman who suffers and exults is not well understood.Either way, such betrayals are not uncommon.A writer can start his big book without worry.Let intellect begin his work, and there will be enough sorrow in the process to take charge of its completion.As for happiness, it has almost only one purpose, making unhappiness possible.We should forge in happiness a bond of trust and attachment so sweet and so strong that its interruption is sufficient to cause that precious misery called unhappiness.Unhappiness is neither cruel nor fruitful if you have never had happiness, even the desired happiness. And this is better for writers than for painters. In order to gain volume and concentration, generalization and literary reality, just as a painter needs to see many churches before he can paint one, so a writer needs to meet many people before he can describe a feeling. .For if art is long-lived and short-lived, we may say, on the contrary, that if inspiration is short-lived, the feelings it is supposed to portray are short-lived.When inspiration reappears, when we are able to work again, the woman who once posed before us for a feeling no longer makes us feel it.To continue to portray this feeling has to be based on another woman, and if this is a betrayal of the former, then, from a literary point of view, it is precisely the similarity between our emotions that makes a work both ours and ours. The reminiscence of old love is also the similarity of our expectations for relatives, so there is nothing wrong with such a substitution.Some people always want to guess who the author is talking about when researching works, and that is one of the reasons why this kind of research is futile.Because, a work, even a blunt confession, is at least sandwiched between several small things in the author's life. A copy of love.Since we are not as faithful to those we love the most as we are to ourselves, sooner or later we forget them—since this is one of our characteristics—in order to love others again.The woman we love so deeply does at best add to the affair a special form that keeps us faithful to her even in the midst of infidelity.We'll need to do the same morning walks for later women, or the same evening escorts, or pay her a hundred times as much money (this circulation of money is a strange thing, we give money to women, and they make us unhappy , that is to say, to enable us to write books, we can even say that works are like artesian wells, and the deeper pain digs our hearts, the richer the content of the work).These substitutions add a certain impartiality to the work, making it more universal, and it is also a solemn admonition that it is not persons to whom we should be devoted, not persons who actually exist and are therefore easily articulated, but It is a concept.And it has to be quickened so that the opportunity is not lost when there are these models at their disposal.Because those who pose happiness for us generally do not perform many times, and those who pose pain for us, that pain is also fleeting.Moreover, even if she did not provide us with writing material when she revealed the truth of the pain to us, she still promoted our writing.Imagination, thinking, can be wonderful tools in their own right, but they can also lose their vitality.At this point, pain sets them in motion.And those who pose pain for us perform for us so many times repeated performances in the studio we go to only at such times, in our inner studio!These periods seem to be a picture of the various pains in our lives.因为，它们也包含着形形色色的痛苦，并且就在我们以为事情已经平息的时候，新的痛苦又冒了出来。就各种意义而言的新痛苦：也许是因为不可逆料的处境迫使我们进入与自我的更深层的接触。爱情不时使我们陷入的窘境教育我们、一而再再而三地为我们揭示构成我们的是什么材料。所以，当弗朗索瓦丝看到阿尔贝蒂娜随时随地都能走进我家，象条狗一样到处乱跑、把什么都弄得乱糟糟的，把我毁了，还把我弄得那么伤心的时候对我说（因为那时我已经写过几篇文章，译过一些东西）：“啊！先生要是不接待这个女人，而是用一个教养有素的小秘书，帮助先生整理整理这些文稿有多好！”我也许不该觉得她说话明哲有理。阿尔贝蒂娜使我浪费了时间，使我伤心，可她也许比能帮助我整理文稿的小秘书更有助于我，即使是从文学角度考虑。不过，一个人的形体再丑陋（而在常理上，这个人可能是男人），也不可能爱而没有痛苦，也得经受磨难才能得知真理，这种人的生活最后必会变得令人厌烦不堪。幸福的岁月即是虚度的年华，我们等待痛苦，以便进行工作。先决痛苦的概念与工作的概念联在一起，当我们想到要构思一部作品首先得备受痛楚，我们就会害怕每一部新作。而由于我们明白了痛苦是我们在生活中能遇上的最美好的东西，我们就会毫不畏惧地想到死，简直就象想到一种解脱。 -------- ①为作品勾勒轮廓的是我们的激情，把它们撰写出来的是两次激情间的宁息。 ——Author's note.