either inner joy nor passion is an isolated inner state which at first occupies a corner of the soul and gradually spreads. At its lowest level it is very like a turning of our states of consciousness towards the future. Then, as if their weight were diminished by this attraction, our ideas and sensations succeed one another with greater rapidity; our movements no longer cost us the same effort. Finally, in cases of extreme joy, our perceptions and memories become tinged with an indefinable quality, as with a kind of heat or light, so novel that now and then, as we stare at our own self, we wonder how it can really exist.

could not weigh myself, myself.  My size felt small to me.

made paintings in which the objects were represented with the appearance they have in reality, in a style sufficiently objective so that the subversive effect, which they would reveal themselves capable of evoking through certain powers, might exist again in the real world from which these objects have been borrowed—by a perfectly natural exchange.

e must never be satisfied with what he does.  It is never as good as it can be done.  Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.  Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors.  Try to be better than yourself.  An artist is a creature driven by demons.  He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why.  He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

f an organism experiences one emergent property (redness) when exposed to one frequency of electromagnetic radiation and a completely different emergent property (greenness) when exposed to a frequency that is physically almost identical, then it is not only discriminating between these signals but also exaggerating the difference between them. Such an organism enjoys the functional benefits of this discrimination, so the retinal and neural organization underlying these emergent properties will continue to be refined over generations. Similarly, an organism that experiences a discrete conscious feeling (sweetness) when presented with a valuable resource (sugars) and a very different feeling (sourness) when faced with a common waste product (acids) will pass on to future generations the neural circuitry that underlies this ability to form discriminating evaluations.  There is no dualism here: The nervous system does all the processing, but its organization is a result of natural selection favoring the functionality arising from that particular organization. By favoring conscious subjective experiences that clearly discriminate between important environmental variables, natural selection, over generations, has continued to improve the neural machinery capable of generating such experiences.

Why We Feel
The Science of Human Emotions
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I had barely shown [Bloch] out, unable to think of any remedy for the mischief that he had done, when the bell rang again and Françoise brought me a summons from the head of the Sureté.  The parents of the little girl whom I had brought into the house for an hour had decided to lodge a complaint against me for corruption of a child under the age of consent.  There are moments in life when a sort of beauty is created by the multiplicity of the troubles that assail us, intertwined like Wagnerian leitmotiv, from the idea also, which then emerges, that events are not situated in the content of the reflections portrayed in the wretched little mirror which the mind holds in front of it and which is called the future, that they are somewhere outside, and spring up as suddenly as a person who comes to accuse us of a crime.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time,
The Sweet Cheat Gone, “Grief and Oblivion”

In this sad little house, except for the flash of the old rage, [my father’s] character softened, to our contentment.  My wife and I were offered a glass of gin and vermouth—he had always set up as a strict teetotaller—and I was sent to a little room to get the bottles.  “They’re on the far side under the bed.”  I came into a room piled with furniture they had not been able to squeeze in with the widow’s in the other rooms: there I saw what his last burst of buying had been.  It had occurred during the war.  He had stored—fearing to starve—hundreds of leaking packets of soup powders, cheeses, biscuits, spaghetti, packets of things now rotting away and enough to keep mice going for years; and, sure enough, under a couple of stacked beds and tables there was a long row of gin, whiskey, vermouth, and port bottles he had bought years before—waiting for a rise in the market.  I crawled in and got a couple out.

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The two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, really show very little relation to each other, never meet and measure each other: one prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise; and, with the progress of life, the two discover no greater disposition to reconcile themselves.
 

Laughter, actually, saved me.  Having experienced all the degrees of hatred and despair, I achieved those heights from which one obtains a bird’s-eye view of the ludicrous.  A roar of hearty mirth cured me, as it did, in a children’s storybook, the gentleman “in whose throat an abscess burst at the sight of a poodle’s hilarious tricks.”  Rereading my chronicle, I see that, in my efforts to make him terrifying, I have only made him ridiculous, thereby destroying him—an old, proven method.
 

COLLECTED STORIES
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After 21 years or more of writing novels steadily with inch-like progress I am about where most of my contemporaries are who wrote one play, one book, of moderate success, and basked in increasing glory, prestige and (in some cases) affluence, ever since.  They took care to nurse what fame came on their one outburst—they cultivated the rich, the publicity spotlight, and discussed their literary and artistic perceptions so avidly that no one ever forgot they were permanent stars.  This perpetual going over the finished deed prevents them ever building new deeds, but this is no handicap to their mounting success.
 

THE DAIRIES
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ANGELS ON TOAST
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   If an intelligent and well-read man can hear a passage several times, and it does not either touch his spirit with a sense of grandeur or leave more food for reflection in his mind than the mere words convey, but with long and careful examination loses more and more of its effectiveness, then it cannot be an example of true sublimity—certainly not unless it can outlive a single hearing.  For a piece is truly great only if it can stand up to repeated examination, and if it is difficult, or, rather, impossible to resist its appeal, and it remains firmly and ineffaceably in the memory.
     (translated by T. S. Dorsch)

    The term “picturesque” . . . had been popularized by, among others, the watercolorist William Gilpin, who defined picturesque views as “those which please the eye . . . from some quality of being illustrated by painting.”  Nineteenth-century theorists and practitioners of the picturesque had been inspired by the pastoral landscapes of the seventeenth-century French master Claude Lorrain.  Composed in both senses of the verb (calm, and consciously designed), a picturesque view was understood to be the opposite and antidote to the sublime, which was associated with such threatening elements as cataracts, stony cliffs, or a glowering sky.
    Andrew Delbanco
    “Sunday in the Park with Fred”
    review of A Clearing in the Distance
        by Witold Rybczynski
    The New York Review of Books, January 20, 2000

THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
VOLUME TWO
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