Word: proust
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...great climaxes in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past occurs when Charles Swann confides to the Due de Guermantes that he is dying. Instead of sympathizing, the Due turns to his wife, who has dressed for a party, and demands that she wear red shoes, not black, to go with her red dress. He tells Swann jovially to calm down; they will be meeting for lunch soon...
That sort of callousness is about what people with cancer can expect, according to Hildegard Knef. She has it and lives Proust's horrid little scene. She is in a consulting room when fear engulfs her. "I'll see you at the gala," the doctor assures her. "I'm afraid you won't," she says. "Now, now, now, fresh air, enjoy life and love" is the advice...
...turn of the century, when the camera was still a relatively novel instrument, and its products seemed to have done what no painter, sculptor, writer, or dramatist could do before--capture reality without distortion--Marcel Proust wrote about the objectivity of a picture...
...never be sure if Proust thought photography was objective, if the various interpretations of the Academician are related to a spectrum of possible actions and those are depicted absolutely realistically, or to a number of possible conclusions drawn from the same picture. Proust was wordy anyway, but he might have meant that people looking at a photograph are also caught up in a kind of drama, and each person has a different idea of what will assist the action of his or her own life, and they latch onto the details in a picture accordingly...
...photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist." This is what an arrogant leech-upon-artists-type says in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. And it's a measure of his pretension that he thinks a picture of the corner drugstore down the street, a store you might pass every day, couldn't have any "dignity." But in the novel, his contemporaries nod in assent, and Proust himself might accept this sentimental notion...