"...le velours violet de l'air du soir..." "the violet velvet of the evening air..." How does he come up with these descriptions? According to his biographies, he wrote and rewrote and edited over and over to achieve this kind of writing; but the result is so magnificent, so revelatory... I am fully in thrall of this man's gift.
Proust was apparently pained by people who could not come up with expressions any better than common clichés, like "it's raining cats and dogs," and "deaf as a doorknob;" and from his writing it is more than evident the pains he took to depart from this practice which he so decried.
In his chapter entitled, "How to Express Your Emotions," Alain de Botton goes into great depth on the subject, saying that clichés "are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface." (p88) While this may be true, not everyone possesses the ability to describe one's experiences with such singular eloquence as could Proust.
For me, this is one of the main reasons I read literature: to taken away by how someone else sees the world and the way in which they are able to describe it, which is so superior to my own. The ability to put into words one's experiences in a way that creates a door to a new way of seeing - that is what captures me; the extent to which Proust is able to do this astonishes me page, after page, after page.
I hope you are all as in thrall as am I.
À bientôt,
Michel
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