Q: Did he think that love could last for ever?
A: Well, no, but the limits to eternity didn't lie specifically with love. They lay in the general difficulty of maintaining an appreciative relationship with anything or anyone that was always around. (查看原文)
The smile on Gilberte's face, the luxury of her tea and the warmth of her manners will eventually become such as familiar part of his life that there will be as much incentive to notice them as there is to notice ubiquitous elements like trees, clouds or telephones.
The reason for this neglect is that like all of us in the Proustian conception, the narrator is a creature of habit, and therefore always liable to grow contemptuous of what is familiar. (查看原文)
And herein lay Proust's problem, because in his view, books could not make us aware of enough of the things we felt They might open our eyes, sensitize us, enhance our powersof perception, but at a certain point they would stop, notby coincidence, not occasionally, not out of bad luck, butinevitably, by definition, for the stark and simple reason
that the astor wasn' t us.
There would come a moment with every book when we would feel that something wasincongruous, misunderstood or constraining, and it wouldgive us a responsibility to leave our guide behind andcontinue our thoughts alone. Proust's respect for Ruskinwas enormous, but having worked intensely on his texts forsix years, having lived with bits of paper scattered acrosshis bed and his bamboo table piled high with books, in a... (查看原文)
