The tightfisted sea!

The tightfisted sea! in its willful silence
Says: 'I know nothing,
I have not seen any pearls!'

Rumi : Divan 109:1-9

Marcel Proust was born on 10 July 1871

Marcel Proust was born on 10 July 1871 (French novelist and author, 1871-1922)

(on which day, coincidentally, I finished reading "The Fugitive" and moved onto "Finding Time Again", in 2005)

Grief

For in this world where everything wears out, where everything perishes, there is one thing that collapses and is more completely destroyed than anything else, and leaves fewer traces than beauty itself: and that is grief.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Fugitive" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
p. 656, Penguin Classics, 2003

... daily habits existed whose origins we ourselves had forgotten ...

As some need the scent of a forest or the sound of the lapping waters of a lake, I needed to feel her sleeping beside me at night and, during the day, to have her always beside me in the car. For even if we forget a love affair, it may determine the form of the love affair that follows. Already in the very heart of the earlier love affair daily habits existed whose origins we ourselves had forgotten; it was the anguish we first felt one day which made us desperately desire, then systematically repeat like rituals whose original meaning is forgiven, our beloved all the way back to her door, to move her into our home, to attend in person or through the presence of a trusted friend all her comings and goings - all these habits are smooth highways where every day our love follows paths which in former times were scored out by the molten lava of our ardent emotions. But these habits survive the disappearance of the woman concerned, even her memory. They shape, if not all our love affairs, at least certain of our loves, as they recur in turn.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Fugitive" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
pps. 641-2, Penguin Classics, 2003

Everything we believe imperishable tends towards destruction

Everything we believe imperishable tends towards destruction; a social position, like everything else, is not given once and for all but, just like the power of an empire, is reconstituted from moment to moment through a sort of endless renewed process of creation, which explains the apparent anomalies of social or political history over half a century. The creation of the world did not happen 'in the beginning', it happens from day to day.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Fugitive" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
p. 633, Penguin Classics, 2003

.. a creature of no fixed age ...

For man is a creature of no fixed age, a creature who has the ability to become years younger in only a few seconds and who, surrounded by walls formed by the periods of time that he has lived through, floats around in their midst but as in a pool whose level keeps constantly changing, thus putting hiim within reach now of one time period, now of another.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Fugitive" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
p. 578, Penguin Classics, 2003

Happiness

"Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you"
Nathaniel Hawthorne (born July 4, 1804, died 1864)
(American short-story writer and novelist)

Passing days gradually cover over those which went before and are themselves buried by those that come after.

Raising a corner of the heavy veil of habit (habit which stultifies us and which during the whole course of our existence hides more or less the whole universe from us, and under cover of utter darkness, without changing their labels, substitutes for the most dangerous or intoxicating poisons of life something anodyne which procures no delight), these memories returned to me as on their first appearance, with the same sharp, fresh novelty that each new season brings as it returns, changing our routine time-table and providing us, even in the realm of our pleasures - if we climb into a carriage on the first fine day of spring or leave the house at sunrise - with an exultant awareness of our most insignificant actions, which invests this one intense moment with more value than the totality of the days preceding it. As they recede, passing days gradually cover over those which went before and are themselves buried by those that come after. But each past day remains deposited within us as in some vast library where there are copies even of the oldest books, which probably no one will ever ask to consult. And yet if this past day should pass through the translucent layers of the folowing eras, rise to the surface and spread out from within us until it covers our whole surface, then for a moment names will resume their former meanings, people their former faces and we our former souls, and we shall feel with a diffuse but newly tolerable and transient sense of suffering, the problems which remained intractable for so long and which caused us so much anguish at the time. Our selves are composed of successive states, superimposed. But this superimposition is not immutable like the stratification of a mountain. A tremor is liable at any moment to throw older layers back up to the surface.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Fugitive" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
p. 509, Penguin Classics, 2003

... the cloying, degrading morass of real life ...

As long as things are possible, we defer them, and they can assume their power of attraction and their apparent ease of accomplishment only when, projected into the ideal void of imagination, they are withdrawn from immersion in the cloying, degrading morass of real life. The idea that we shall die is more cruel than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that someone else is dead, than the idea that, when the waters of reality close after having engulfed a person's being, they smoothly, without so much as a ripple, cover the spot from which that being is excluded, where neither will nor knowledge exist any longer, and from which it is as difficult to return to the idea of what that person's being had experienced as it is difficult, even while memories of their life are still fresh, to think that this person is assimilable to the insubstantial images and memories left by the characters of a novel that we have read.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Fugitive" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
pps. 474-5, Penguin Classics, 2003

Marble Coldness

"Much of the marble coldness of Hester's impression was to be attributed to the circumstance that her life had turned, in a great measure, from passion and feeling, to thought. Standing alone, as to any dependent on society, and with little Pearl to be guided and protected- alone, and hopeless of retrieving her position, even as she had not scorned to consider it desirable, she cast away the fragments of a broken chain."

from
Nathaniel Hawthorne
(American short-story writer and novelist, 1804-1864).

Source:
http://en.thinkexist.com/default.asp?url=http%3A//en.thinkexist.com/quotation/much-of-the-marble-coldness-of-hester-s/357397.html

SLUBBERDEGULLION

SLUBBERDEGULLION

A filthy, slobbering person.

English, whatever its other merits, has as many disparaging words as one would possibly desire. The example that follows is from Sir Thomas Urquhart’s translation of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, dated 1653, which draws heavily on vocabulary used in Scotland in his time:

The bun-sellers or cake-makers were in nothing inclinable to their request; but, which was worse, did injure them most outrageously, called them prattling gabblers, lickorous gluttons, freckled bittors, mangy rascals, shite-a-bed scoundrels, drunken roysters, sly knaves, drowsy loiterers, slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubberly louts, cozening foxes, ruffian rogues, paltry customers, sycophant-varlets, drawlatch hoydens, flouting milksops, jeering companions, staring clowns, forlorn snakes, ninny lobcocks, scurvy sneaksbies, fondling fops, base loons, saucy coxcombs, idle lusks, scoffing braggarts, noddy meacocks, blockish grutnols, doddipol-joltheads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish loggerheads, flutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers, lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock slangams, ninny-hammer flycatchers, noddypeak simpletons, turdy gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory epithets; saying further, that it was not for them to eat of these dainty cakes, but might very well content themselves with the coarse unranged bread, or to eat of the great brown household loaf.

You don’t hear invective like that any more, and few of us would understand it if we did. There’s enough material there for a year of Weird Words, but I’ve picked out slabberdegullion (a rare spelling of slubberdegullion), a word which nobody hearing it could possibly consider a compliment. There are examples of it on record from the seventeenth century down to the early twentieth but it appears now only as a deliberate archaism.

The experts disagree about where it came from. The first part is clearly English slobber, but the rest is less certain. It might be cullion, an old word for a testicle (it’s related to French couillon and Spanish cojones), which by the sixteenth century was a term of contempt for a man. It might instead conceivably be linked to the Scots dialect gullion for a quagmire or a pool of mud containing semi-liquid decayed vegetable matter, but that’s only recorded rather later.

Source: World Wide Words. Copyright © Michael Quinion, 1996–2005.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-slu1.htm

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Nice to see that we have been abusing our fellow man linguistically as well as physically for years on end.

Some of these examples would be perfect sprinkled in various texts one has to write on a daily basis (emails to co-workers, business plans (hopefully about the competition and not one's own organisation), novels, letters to loved ones (or at least, family!), etc.
What think you?

Change and Desires

We believe that we may change things around us to suit our desires, we believe this because otherwise we can see no aceptable solution. We do not think of the solution which occurs most frequently and which is also acceptable: when we do not manage to change things to suit our desires, but our desires gradually change. We become indifferent to a situation which we had hoped to change when we found it unbearable. We were not able to overcome the obstacle, althought this was our only desire, yet life led us round or beyond it, and afterwards if we turn back towards the past we can hardly catch sight of it in the distance, so imperceptible has it become.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Fugitive" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
p. 419, Penguin Classics, 2003

The links between persons

The links between another person and ourselves exist only in our minds. Memory weakens them as it fades, and despite the illusions which we hope to deceive us and with which, whether from love, friendship, politeness, human respect or from duty, we hope to deceive others, we exist on our own. Man is a being who cannot move beyond his own boundaries, who knows others only within himself, and if he alleges the contrary, he is lying. And I would have been so afraid that someone might take away my need for her and my love for her, had they been able to do so, that I convinced myself that these were essential for my life.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Fugitive" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
p. 418, Penguin Classics, 2003

Desire Suffering Satisfaction Forgetting

The more desire advances, the more true possession recedes. So that if it is possible to obtain happiness, or at least freedom from suffering, what we should seek is not the satisfaction, but the gradual reduction and final elimination of desire. We try to see those we love, we should try not to see them, for only the process of forgetting leads finally to the extinction of desire.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Fugitive" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
pps. 417-418, Penguin Classics, 2003

... and if in the end she did surrender ...

... and if in the end she did surrender, I would never be able to forget the time when she had been alone, and even if finally victorious, I would have suffered defeat in the past, that is to say irrevocably.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Fugitive" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
p. 401, Penguin Classics, 2003

Habit the fearsome goddess

I had thought that I no longer loved Albertine, believing that I had taken everything into account, that I was completely lucid and that I had plumbed the depths of my heart. But however great our intelligence, it cannot conceive all the elements that constitute it and which remain undetected as long as no event capable of isolating them makes them start to solidify out of the volatile state in which they exist for most of the time. I was mistakened when I thought that I saw clearly into my heart. But this knowledge, which the finest insights of my intellect had not given to me, had just been brought home to me, as hard, dazzling and strange as crystals of salt, through the sudden stimulus of pain. I had become so accustomed to having Albertine beside me, and now I suddenly saw Habit in a completely new perspective. Until now I had considered it above all a negative force suppressing the originality and even our awareness of our perceptions; now I saw it as a fearsome goddess, so attached to us, with her inscrutable face so grafted on to our hearts that if she detaches herself and turns away from us, this deity, whose presence we were barely able to discern, inflicts upon us the most terrible suffering, and then she is as cruel as death.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Fugitive" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
p. 388, Penguin Classics, 2003

... The world of real differences ...

The world of real differences does not exist on the surface of the earth, among all the countries levelled by our perceptions; how much less, therefore, does it exist among the 'worldly'. Does it in fact exist anywhere? The Vinteuil septet had seemed to tell me that it did. But where?

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Prisoner" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
p. 254, Penguin Classics, 2003

I went crazy last night

I went crazy last night, love ran into me and said:
'I am coming, do not shout, do not tear your clothes, speak no more.'
'O love!' I said: 'I am afraid of other things.'
'There is nothing else' it said: 'speak no more.
I shall whisper hidden words into your ear;
You just nod in approval! except in secret speak no more!'

(Divan 2219:1-5)

Rumi

... The only real journey, the only Fountain of Youth, would be to travel not towards new landscapes, but with new eyes ...

But is it not the case that these elements, this final residue which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which speech cannot convey even from friend to friend, from master to pupil, from lover to mistress, that this inexpressible thing which reveals the qualitative difference between what each of us has felt and has had to leave on the threshold of the phrases which he uses to communicate with others, something which he can do only by dwelling on points of experience common to all and consequently of no interest to any, can be expressed through art, the art of a Vinteuil or an Elstir, which makes manifest in the colours of the spectrum the intimate make-up of those worlds we call individuals, and which without art we should never know? Wings, another respiratory system which allowed us to cross the immensity of space, would not help us. For if we went to Mars or Venus while keeping the same sense, everything we might see there would take on the same aspect as the things we know on Earth. The only real journey, the only Fountain of Youth, would be to travel not towards new landscapes, but with new eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them can see, or can be; and we can do that with the help of an Elstir, a Vinteuil; with them and their like we can truly fly from star to star.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Prisoner" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
pps. 236-7, Penguin Classics, 2003

Information as Active Authoring on an Interpersonal Basis

"Several years ago I was talking with Tim O'Reilly about the discomfort we both felt about treating information as a commodity. It seemed to us that information was something more, and quite different, than the communicable form of knowledge. It was not a commodity, exactly, and was insulted by the generality we call "content".

Information, we observed, is derived from the verb *inform,* which is related to the verb *form*. To *inform* is not to "deliver information", but rather to *form* the other party. If you tell me something I didn't know before, I am changed by that. If I believe you, and value what you say, I have granted you authority. Meaning, I have given you the right to *author* what I know. Therefore, *we are all authors of each other*. This is a profoundly human condition in any case, but it is an especially important aspect of the open source value system. By forming each other, as we also form useful software, we are making the world. Not merely changing it."

Not sure that I have come across such a concept of "Active" information before, especially in relation to "information" "authoring" or "forming" something within a person - the very act of communicating information becomes an active involvement in creating something new in another.

Surely there must be some philosophical or psychological precursor to this notion? Who else wrote about such concepts?