In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [23]
Standing aloof from the world of current experience, they existed by themselves, I must go out to meet them, I would penetrate what I could of them, and if I opened my eyes and my soul to their fullest extent I would still absorb only too little of them. But how pleasant life seemed to me! The insignificance of the form of it that I myself was leading mattered nothing, no more than the time we spend on dressing, on getting ready to go out, since beyond it there existed in an absolute form, difficult to approach, impossible to possess in their entirety, those more solid realities, Phèdre and the way in which Berma spoke her lines. Steeped in these dreams of perfection in the dramatic art (a strong dose of which anyone who had at that time subjected my mind to analysis at any moment of the day or even the night would have been able to extract from it), I was like a battery that accumulates and stores up electricity. And a time had come when, ill as I was, even if I had believed that I should die of it, I should still have been compelled to go and hear Berma. But now, like a hill which from a distance seems azure-clad but as we draw nearer returns to its place in our commonplace vision of things, all this had left the world of the absolute and was no more than a thing like other things, of which I took cognisance because I was there; the actors were people of the same substance as the people I knew, trying to declaim as well as possible these lines of Phèdre which themselves no longer formed a sublime and individual essence, distinct from everything else, but were simply more or less effective lines ready to slip back into the vast corpus of French poetry, of which they were merely a part. I felt a despondency that was all the more profound in that, if the object of my headstrong and active desire no longer existed, on the other hand the same tendency to indulge in an obsessional day-dream, which varied from year to year but led me always to sudden impulses, regardless of danger, still persisted. The evening on which I rose from my bed of sickness and set out to see a picture by Elstir or a mediaeval tapestry in some country house or other was so like the day on which I ought to have set out for Venice, or that on which I had gone to see Berma or left for Balbec, that I felt in advance that the immediate object of my sacrifice would leave me cold after a very short while, that then I might pass close by the place without stopping even to look at that picture or those tapestries for which I would at this moment risk so many sleepless nights, so many hours of pain. I discerned in the instability of its object the vanity of my effort, and at the same time its immensity, which I had not noticed before, like one of those neurasthenics whose exhaustion is doubled when it is pointed out to them that they are exhausted. In the meantime my musings gave a certain glamour to anything that might be related to them. And even in my most carnal desires, orientated always in a particular direction, concentrated round a single dream, I might have recognised as their primary motive an idea, an idea for which I would have laid down my life, at the innermost core of which, as in my day-dreams while I sat reading all afternoon in the garden at Combray, lay the notion of perfection.
I no longer felt the same indulgence as on the former occasion for the scrupulous efforts to express tenderness or anger which I had then remarked in the delivery and gestures of Aricie, Ismène and Hippolyte. It was not that the players—they were the same—did not still seek, with the same intelligent application, to impart now a caressing inflexion or a calculated ambiguity to their voices, now a tragic amplitude or a suppliant gentleness to their movements. Their tones bade the voice: “Be gentle, sing like a nightingale, caress,” or on the contrary: “Make yourself furious,” and then hurled themselves upon it, trying to carry it along with them in their frenzy. But it, mutinous, independent of their diction, remained unalterably their natural voice with its material