Marcel Proust

foreign [Music] dead at 51 the eyes that had looked so penetratingly at life were closed forever [Music] only hours before fighting off pain iron willed he'd been correcting those manuscripts which cocto had predicted would live on after him like a ticking watch on the wrist of a Dead Soldier they were the concluding sections of his seven-volume novel remembrance of things past whose influence on world literature would be incalculable Marcel proust was born in Paris on July 10 1871 the year the disastrous franco-prussian War ended his mother was Jewish a woman devoted to the Arts his father a Catholic was a man of science a distinguished professor of medicine and epidemiology his was an old family dating back to the 15th century to the town of illiere which Bruce in his novel was to call hombre [Music] [Applause] there is a child he would return every year to spend his Easter vacations with his grandparents his maternal grandparents lived in another town and he was as deeply attached to them hombre was in fact a composite how could any of them have guessed that their dreaming little grandson would immortalize them all by translating his childhood memories into fiction for all memory priests believed however deeply buried in the subconscious was subject to involuntary recall by some random sensory perception a dramatic example is this celebrated passage from his novel when I returned home on Winter's day my mother seeing that I was cold offered me a cup of tea something I don't ordinarily drink she'd send out for some of those plump Little Cakes called Madeline which are molded in the shape of scallop shells at first I declined and then for no reason at all changed my mind and when mechanically weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing tomorrow I brought to my lips a spoonful of tea in which I'd soaked a morsel of that cake and a mixture of warm liquid and crumbs reached my palate a shatter ran through my whole body I was aware that an extraordinary change had taken place within me an Exquisite pleasure had overpowered my senses the origin of which was a mystery to me and I ceased to feel mediocre irrelevant mortal [Music] from whence could have come to me this overpowering Joy [Music] I knew it was somehow related to The Taste of the tea and cake but also that it infinitely transcended taste it different nature altogether [Music] [Music] and suddenly the memory came back to me of the Madeleine soaked in Lime Blossom tea which my aunt Laney used to give me when I went upstairs to see her on Sunday mornings in Cumbre [Music] and just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water steeping it Little Bits of Paper which at first or without character or form and observe how the moment they become wet they stretch and bend take on color and distinctive shapes become flowers houses or people so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in Messiah swans Park the water lilies on the Vivan the good folk of the village and the little dwellings the Parish church and the whole of Cumbre and its surroundings sprang into being pounds and Gardens alike from my cup of tea the age of 11 priest was enrolled in the lisaicon de se an elite literary secondary school he was even then dreaming of becoming a great writer [Music] though suffering from asthma he joined the army at the age of 18. then after briefly studying law he obtained a degree in literature during the Dreyfus Affair proust as a half-true and liberal passionately supported The Condemned officer social success Kingdom early in life he became acquainted with anatol France that then with the beautiful counties great fuel a collateral model for his princess to germont with the powered SD Camp Montesquieu a partial model for his memorable Darren deshalus and with Ronaldo Han a minor composer who was to remain his friend for life despite his father's wish that he pursued a solid profession his his supported him in his ambition to become a writer and on the completion of his formal education he toured Normandy and Brittany also Bruges and Venice [Music] he had fallen under the spell of medieval architecture and under the influence of John Ruskin the English art critic several of whose Works he translated [Music] Summers he would spend in fashionable summer Resorts balbec being the name he gave them in his novel and he would tour the surrounding Countryside by the newly invented automobile [Music] Cruz shared with his impressionist and symbolist contemporaries an original way of looking at the world a world he said which at First Sight might not be pleasing but when the artist says look and look hard lo and behold we see a world different from the old one we knew before yet one which is perfectly clear a world which was not created once and for all that which is created as often as an original artist turns up such is the new and perishable Universe which has just been created it will last till the next geological catastrophe is precipitated by a new painter or a writer of original Talent [Music] proposed memory and time were obsessive themes relating him to his great contemporaries Einstein bergson Freud Kafka M Joyce but perhaps the most aptamilergy to his work with its flashes back and forward in time is to a theme and variations in music almost certainly this is the voice of proust himself we hear speaking through one of his characters as before a rising mist I perceived a phrase from a Sonata so distant I barely recognized it hesitantly it approached then disappeared as it brightened away then it returned and draped in silver brimming over with brilliant sonorities [Music] yet his characters priest maintained were not based on real people though there might be as many as eight or ten of them in one character alone one of these is the composer valentia whose haunting little phrase appears again and again throughout his novel like a light motif my memories of the Sonata he wrote are of a musical phrase I heard one evening certain Charming though mediocre measures from a Sonata base and souls and when the piano and violin crooned like two birds in conversation I thought of the Sonata by Frank [Music] when I created the characters [Music] I was in the great love of my life without her ever knowing it in fact it was his mother who was at the center of his life a woman of beauty intellect and sensitivity whom he worshiped in a state of utter dependence most certainly it was of her and his own childhood that he was thinking when he wrote my one consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that Mama would come up to kiss me after I went to bed [Music] but this good night was so hurried and she left so quickly that the moment I heard her redescending the stairs and heard the rustling of a blue muslin frock along the corridor I felt bangs of the deepest sorrow he told me that she had left me for the night [Music] oh [Music] so much did I long for that good night kiss that I hoped it would come as late as possible so as to prolong the joy of anticipation Cruz told life in a sense was a prolonged childhood reflecting The Need to Be Loved praised and desired and he was one of the first to write openly of homosexuals being one himself from his student days and even before he had been Afflicted with asthma and rheumatism which contributed to making him more an observer of life than a participant [Music] it prevented him from running than jumping and giving them to his free impulses like other boys yet he had never given way to bitterness or Envy the child he might have been but could never be was to find himself through introspection and literature [Music] [Applause] and to literature he brought the ability to retrieve from his prodigious memory a fictional quasi-autobiographical world of which he said I invented and recorded nothing only discovered and translated low and young he played The Dandy and ardently quoted the aristocracy in the end it was its sterility he exposed with a mixture of Comedy irony and pathos of which he was so subtle a master here is his description of how the princess together Mount achieved her reputation for intellectual superiority [Music] the chairs were arranged in such a ways to form little groups in which people had to turn their backs to one another the princess displayed a social sense by sitting down with one group and then by turning a chair around engage the next group in conversation in this way she was able to visit all of them as if by predilection though her object was to show how naturally a great lady entertains Swan's way the first volume of proust's monumental novel one of the longest ever written was published at his own expense in 1913 for it was judged to be too discursive too frivolous it syntax too convoluted besides which it had no discernible plot whatever but intonations of approaching death spurred him on to complete his novel and so he withdrew from society and in his corkline room began a Race Against Time and death in 1921 he visited an exhibition of Dutch Masters and was particularly moved by their mirrors a view of delft which he prized above all the others for the first time he noticed the small blue characters in The foreground the pink sand and above all a yellow patch of wall [Music] speaking through the voice of his character the novelist bear got he wrote yes that is how I should have written I should have gone over my last words with layers of color making each sentence a jewel in its own right like that bare little yellow wall when suddenly he grew dizzy he felt adrift on a stormy sea the universe tossing and pitching under him desperately he tried to maintain his balance just as in his novel he had sought to strike a balance between life and art but then everyone proofs believe lives the novel of his own life his was of a man attempting to recapture his past he called his novel Alaris in search of time lost we know it as remembrance of things past [Music] thank you foreign foreign