Word: proust
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...born of rich bourgeois parents with a passion for the arts, at 20 published his first volume of poetry, La Lampe d'Aladin. Its success plunged the reedy young poet into the world of Proust, Picasso, Diaghilev and Stravinsky. Many give him credit for scattering ideas in a dozen surrealistic arts, but it will never be clear precisely who inspired (or copied) whom. Of Cocteau's ballet, Parade, Andre Gide wrote: "Cocteau knows the sets and costumes are by Picasso and the score by Satie, but he wonders if Picasso and Satie...
However professionally exciting it may be to hunt down water symbols in Poe, or Proust, or Pope, the humanist cannot forget that his primary responsibility is to the national culture, not to the Modern Language Association, and that oncoming generations, through they should be generously encouraged to believe that beauty is its own excuse for being, must also be strictly taught the changeless meaning of the three most powerful words in any dialect--justice, virtue, and love; concepts that arise out of history in spite of the fact that, or because, history too frequently denies them. The imperative task...
There are the numberless artists who lived to express their visions, or merely to earn applause, or both: Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Raphael and Mozart, who aimed to please; El Greco, Goya, Picasso, Beethoven, Proust and Yeats, who mostly aimed to please themselves. And there are those who found in art a refuge from reality, either through true talent, like the runaway Gauguin, or through some talent mixed with posing, like Byron, Hemingway and Dali, or no talent at all, like the hundreds of pseudo artists who succeed on borrowed ideas and hand-me-down rebellion. There are the great artistic eccentrics...
...never read Ulysses," groans Fellini. "I've never seen Last Year at Marienbad, I don't know anything about Proust, and I have only seen one film by Bergman." His director-hero, he explains, is just a man who finally accepts his own confusion and doubts and sees "that this chaos is the real force out of which his creativity comes...
...odds. People in one southern town nearly beat up the theater manager because they found "8½" so frustratingly incomprehensible. But so-called intellectual reviewers began chiseling out deathless lines of praise ("chief work of a magician of genius") and tracing the influences on Fellini of Resnais and Bergman, Proust and Joyce...