In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI_ Time Regained - Marcel Proust [329]
(See also Bach; Beethoven; Chopin; Debussy; Schumann; Wagner under Index of Persons.)
NAMES. By pronouncing a name one secures a sort of power over it (Guermantes): I 178. The name “Gilberte” heard for the first time by M at Tansonville: 199–200; and later in the Champs-Elysées: 560–62. Poetry of place-names: 545–60. Imaginative difference between words and proper names: 551–52. Images evoked by names of Italian, Norman and Breton towns: 552–53; (see also II 326). Effect on M of Gilberte calling him by his Christian name for the first time: 573–74. “Names are whimsical draughtsmen”: II 166. Names of the cathedral towns: 321. Place-names on the way to Balbec; contrast between place-names with and without personal associations: 326. Pleasures of collecting old names: 448–49. The name Simonet: 520–21, 528; importance of the single “n”: 579–80 (cf. III 504). “The names which designate things correspond invariably to an intellectual notion, alien to our true impressions;” Elstir re-creates things by renaming them: 566. Affective content of names and how it decays; changing connotations of the name Guermantes: III 4–9. M incapable of integrating the name Guermantes into the living figure of the Duchess: 28–29. Poetic German landscape evoked by the name Faffenheim-Munsterburg-Weinigen: 346–47. We hate our namesakes: 504. Nicknames in society: 591–93. Poetry of the name Isabella d’Este: 719. Names change their meaning for us more in a few years than words do in centuries: 728–29. The nobility are the etymologists of the language of names, but are oblivious of its poetry: 730. M’s aesthetic pleasure in historic names: 743–44. The name Surgis-le-Duc stripped of its poetry: IV 143–44. Noble names of Normandy: 251–52. Depoeticisation of place-names in the region of Balbec: 693–98. Bitter-sweet charm in the possessive use of a Christian name: V 124–25. Albertine after her departure scarcely exists for M save under the form of her name, which he repeats to himself incessantly: 581. Place-names near Balbec become impregnated with baleful mystery: 699. Habit strips names of their charm and significance:722–23. Venomous overtones of the name of Tours: 729. Succession to a name is a melancholy thing: VI 357. “A name: that very often is all that remains for us of a human being … even in his lifetime”: 406.
OLD AGE. The “great renunciation” of old age as it prepares for death: I 201–2. Disillusionment of old age; the futility of writing letters: II 82. The day when one feels that love is too big an undertaking for the little strength one has left: IV 382. “Old age makes us incapable of doing but not, at first, of desiring”: V 860–61. Charlus in old age: VI 358. Metamorphoses due to old age seen at the Guermantes reception: 336–81. We see our age in a mirror: 350. Old age is of all the realities of life “the one of which we preserve for longest a purely abstract conception”: 354–55. The phenomenon of old age seems, in its different modes, to take into account certain social habits: 372. The Duc de Guermantes in old age: 480–87. Norpois and Mme de Villeparisis in old age: V 947–50 (cf. 854–55).
PAINTING. Swann’s penchant for finding likenesses to real people in the old masters: I 314–16, 459–61; II 147–48. Elstir at work: 565–89; metaphors in his works: 567; description of his Carquethuit Harbour: 567–72; painting and photography: 570–71. Reflexions on portrait-painting: 601–4. Profundities of “still life”: 613 (cf. III