Proustian Diversion 1 (Colour/Memory)

 

All Images: March 2022

"But if these names absorbed for ever the image I had of these towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subjecting its reappearance in me to their own laws; in consequence of this they made it more beautiful, but also more different from what the towns of Normandy or Tuscany could be in reality, and, by increasing the arbitrary joys of my imagination, aggravated the future disappointment of my travels. They exalted the idea I was forming of certain places on the earth, by making them more particular, consequently more real. 

"I did not at the time represent to myself cities, landscapes, monuments as more or less pleasant pictures, cut out here and there from the same material, but each of them as an unknown thing, different in essence from the others, a thing for which my soul thirsted and which it would profit from knowing. How much more individuality still did they assume from being designated by names, names that were theirs alone, proper names like the names people have.

"Words present us with clear and familiar little pictures of things like the pictures hung on the walls of schools to give children an example of what a workbench is, a bird, an anthill, things conceived of as similar to all others of the same sort.

"But names present a confused image of people - and of towns, which they accustom us to believe are individual, unique like people - an image which derives from them, from the brightness or darkness of their tone, the colour with which it is painted uniformly, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, because of the limitations of the process used or by a whim of the designer, not only the sky and the sea are blue or red, but the boats, the church, the people in the streets." [1.]

[1.]:  Marcel Proust, 'In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1: The Way By Swann's' (Part III: 'Place Names: The Name'), (Trans. Lydia Davis), London, Penguin, 1913/2002