JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
“None of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are
destined for. This is what ages us – this and nothing else. The wrinkles
and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions,
vices, insights that called on us; but we, the masters, were not at
home”.–Walter Benjamin on experiencing M. Proust
In sliding my way through found pieces of Proust this morning I bumped quite a bit into aging in general and mothers and the “very painful sense of things” [“une impression fort pénible1“] . And then in Marcel Proust on Art and Literature 1896-1919 I found Proust quoting Hugo, “I fancy that old age invades us trough the eyes, and that they age too soon who dwell among grey heads”2. This can go on for quite a while, and it is a little too much before the first coffee. I did want to post this picture of Jeanne Proust with her two boys because of her hands: not only because their attitude is very very uncommon for late-19th/early-2oth century portraits, but because they see strong and assured, which is I think just what his mother was, not creaking off to the grave covered in moss and age.
A detail from:
[Source: the Morgan Library http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/exhibition.asp?id=71]
Notes:
1. Mme Proust in a letter to her son Marcel, from Michael Wood, “Proust and his Mother”, in the London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n06/michael-wood/proust-and-his-mother 22 March 2012
2. Sylvia Townsend Warner (translator), Marcel Proust on Art and Literature, 1896-1919, Carroll & Graff, 1954, page 105.