Impermanence

It is worth sometimes to revisit the passages copied out for placement in a gathering of commonplaces. For example this snippet from the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation of Cities of the Plain "The Heart's Intermissions" seems a tad melancholic:

The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as intangible as those which imagination had formed and reality has destroyed.

I wonder why I had selected the quotation with that terminus in mind, why I had dwelt upon the link between arbitrariness and destruction, as if necessity were otherwise.

The paragraph continues:

There is no reason why, exisitng outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures of our memory rather than to those in our dreams. And besides, a fresh reality will perhaps make us forget, detest even, the desires that led us forth upon our journey.

Proust’s narrator is refecting upon a second arrival at Balbec; I as a reader am stationary, a point vis-a-vis the panorama of the narration. The journey is not mine and hence easy to see afresh and remember the difference between destruction and annihilation. Those destroyed memories are still there however much their valence shifted, however much their correspondence is belied. Their destruction is out of time just as the after-image is through time.

And so for day 148
11.05.2007