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By Root 1941 0

creature I was endeavouring to be should combine all the opposites that might be most favourable to me, if I read as an author I judged myself as a reader, without any of the qualms that may be felt about a written text by him who compares it with the ideal which he has sought to express in it. Those passages which, when I wrote them, were so colourless in comparison with my thought, so complicated and opaque in comparison with my harmonious and transparent vision, so full of gaps which I had not managed to fill, that the reading of them was a torture to me, had only accentuated in me the sense of my own impotence and of my incurable lack of talent. But now, in forcing myself to be a reader, I transferred to others the painful duty of judging me, and I succeeded at least in making a clean sweep of what I had attempted to do in reading what I had written. I read the article while forcing myself to imagine that it had been written by someone else. Then all my images, all my reflexions, all my epithets taken in themselves, untarnished by the memory of the failure which they represented in relation to my aims, charmed me by their brilliance, their unexpectedness, their profundity. And when I became aware of too blatant a weakness, taking refuge in the spirit of the ordinary and astonished reader, I said to myself: “Bah! how could a reader possibly notice that? There may well be something lacking there, but good heavens, they ought to be pleased! There are enough good things in it to be getting on with, more than they usually get.”

And thus, no sooner had I finished this comforting perusal than I who had not had the courage to re-read my manuscript wanted to start again immediately, for there is nothing of which one can say more aptly than of an old article by oneself that “it bears re-reading.” I made up my mind to send Françoise out to buy more copies—in order to give them to my friends, I would tell her, but in reality to feel at first hand the miracle of the multiplication of my thought and to read, as though I were another person who had just opened the Figaro, the same sentences in another copy. It was, as it happened, a very long time since I had seen the Guermantes: I would go and pay them a visit in order to find out what people thought of my article.

I thought of some female reader into whose room I would have loved to penetrate and to whom the newspaper would convey, if not my thought, which she would be incapable of understanding, at least my name, like a eulogy of me. But eulogies awarded to somebody one doesn’t love do not captivate the heart any more than the thoughts of a mind one is unable to penetrate attract the mind. With regard to other friends, however, I told myself that if the state of my health continued to grow worse and I could no longer see them, it would be pleasant to continue to write, in order thus to have access to them still, to speak to them between the lines, to make them share my thoughts, to please them, to be received into their hearts. I told myself this because, social relations having hitherto had a place in my daily life, a future in which they would no longer figure alarmed me, and because this expedient which would enable me to remain in the thoughts of my friends, perhaps to arouse their admiration, until the day when I should be well enough to begin to see them again, was a solace to me; I told myself this, but I was well aware that it was not true, that although I chose to imagine their attention as the object of my pleasure, that pleasure was an internal, spiritual, self-generated pleasure which they could not give me and which I could find not in conversing with them, but in writing far away from them, and that if I began to write in the hope of seeing them indirectly, in the hope they might have a better idea of me, in the hope of preparing for myself a better position in society, perhaps writing would relieve me of the wish to see them, and I should no longer have any desire to enjoy the position in society which literature might have given me, because my pleasure would be