On my return from Rome 🏛️, I began re-reading “Journées de lecture”, a piece published in 1905 in “La Renaissance”…
Translated from French.
On my return from Rome 🏛️, I began re-reading “Journées de lecture”, a text first published in 1905 in “La Renaissance latine”, then in 1906 (as a preface to John Ruskin’s “Sésame et les lys”) under the title “Sur la lecture”. Proust finally included it in “Pastiches et Mélanges” in 1919, under the title “Journées de lecture” 📚, borrowed from one of his articles published in @lefigaro in 1907.
What interests me about the following extract is that Proust expresses an idea in it that is markedly different from that of the narrator of “the Search” regarding exoticism and the sense of strangeness one might experience whilst travelling:
🖋️ “I leave it to people of taste to adorn their homes with reproductions of the masterpieces they admire, and to relieve their minds of the burden of preserving a precious image by entrusting it to a carved wooden frame. I leave it to people of taste to make their room the very embodiment of their taste and to fill it only with things they can approve of. As for me, I feel I can only truly live and think in a room where everything is the creation and expression of lives profoundly different from my own, of a taste opposed to my own, where I find nothing of my conscious thought, where my imagination soars as it feels immersed in the ‘non-self’; I feel happy only when I set foot — on Avenue de la Gare, at the harbour or on Place de l’Eglise — in one of those provincial hotels with their long, cold corridors where the wind from outside successfully battles against the efforts of the radiator, where the detailed map of the district is still the only decoration on the walls, where every sound serves only to bring out the silence by displacing it, where the rooms retain a musty odour that the fresh air washes away, but does not erase, and which the nostrils inhale a hundred times to carry it to the imagination, which is enchanted by it, which sets it up as a model to try to recreate it within itself, with all the thoughts and memories it contains (…)”
🗳️ Have you ever experienced that feeling of pleasant strangeness?
#ÀlaRechercheduTempsperdu #proustagram #Journéesdelecture #MarcelProust #Chambredhôtel
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