The Person We Know
"But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part. In the end they swell his cheeks so perfectly, follow the line of his nose in an adherence so exact, they do so well as nuancing the sonority of his voice as though the latter were only a transparent envelope that each time we see this face and hear this voice, it is these notions that we encounter again, that we hear."
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, trans. by Lydia Davis. Penguin Books, New York, 2003 (1913), p 19.
3 comments:
great quote... and a giant step toward "wu", the Zen idea of nothingness...
I have begun Swann's Way and will have to chew on these thoughts further. I've often given thought to how much our grasp on reality depends on how our senses process the information they receive.
@mudpuddle,
Interesting . . . I detected a connection to Wittgenstein's thoughts. Perhaps both connections are possible.
@Sharon,
I'm currently rereading Swann's Way - his ability to describe his sometimes fleeting thoughts is amazing.
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