The Infallible Ineffable

Proust quotation (found in red ink on an index filing card):

[...] and bodily desire has the marvellous faculty of restoring its value to intelligence and a solid base to the moral life.

Beckett on Proust:

So that no amount of voluntary manipulation can reconstitute in its integrity an impression that the will has — so to speak — buckled into incoherence. But if, by accident, and given favourable circumstances (a relaxation of the subject's habit of thought and a reduction of the radius of his memory, a generally diminished tension of consciousness following upon a phase of extreme discouragement), if by some miracle of analogy the central impression of a past sensation recurs as an immediate stimulus which can be instinctively identified by the subject with the model of duplication (whose integral purity has been retained because it has been forgotten), then the total past sensation, not its echo nor its copy, but the sensation itself, annihilating every spatial and temporal restriction, comes in a rush to engulf the subject in all the beauty of its infallible proportion.

A little ways on, Beckett provides us with the image of the mechanism via the work of vases:

The most trivial experience — he [Proust] says in effect — is encrusted with elements that logically are not related to it and have consequently been rejected by our intelligence: it is imprisoned in a vase filled with a certain perfume and a certain colour and raised to a certain temperature. These vases are suspended along the height of our years, and, not being accessible to our intelligent memory, are in a sense immune, the purity of their climatic content is guaranteed by forgetfulness, each one is kept at its distance, at its date. So that when the imprisoned microcosm is besieged in the manner described, we are flooded by a new air and a new perfume (new precisely because already experienced), and we breathe the true air of Paradise, of the only Paradise that is not the dream of a madman, the Paradise that has been lost.

And so a return to transcribing that index card:

Proust
... and bodily desire has the marvellous
   faculty of restoring its value to
   intelligence and a solid base to the
   moral life.

Nice how the marvellous balances out there on the edge.

And so for day 1341
15.08.2010