Another image: What are they selling

Proust tomorrow, I'm feeling a little burnt out this morning.

Not just an image but a bunch of images by Władysław Czachórski. Czachórski's name is spelled in a number of different ways depending on who you ask. He was a Polish artist from the little discussed but fascinating period between Romanticism and Modernism sometimes called "late romanticism".

Czachórski painted all sorts of stuff but his work divides into two categories:

1. the stuff that the critics loved.
2. the stuff that paid his bills.

Today we are talking about the second category. The good folks at Wikipedia quote an organization devoted to promoting Polish history and culture called The Kosciuszko Foundation in describing the work Czachórski had such great success selling to paying customers:

The hallmark of Czachorski's style, however, and the basis of his fame, are his images of beautiful young women in rich interiors, painted with great realism. He has long been regarded a master of rendering fabrics, jewelry and other details to create the atmosphere of luxury and elegance.

Every word of that is true but there is also a rather important aspect of his art that is being left out. I think you can do your own image analysis on this one. Just scan the following and I think you'll be able to figure it out pretty easily.

He is helped more than a little by women's fashion. Czachórski didn't invent that V-shaped panel on the front of women's dresses. It was a popular style at the time. And it is easy to see why. Depending on what the dressmaker chose to emphasize, it could make the neck seem to open wider (image 1), it could could make it seem like the dress was opening up from the bottom (image 2) or it could point rather bluntly at a woman's "rose" (Image 3).

To see what Czachórski's contribution was, put yourself in the position of a connoisseur  admiring his art and technique. Take, for example, his masterful "rendering of fabrics". Look at image 3 for example and allow your gaze to float over the fabric of her dress and then let it rest at the spot the V-shaped panel points at. Take the time to deeply appreciate the pattern the folds make in the fabric. Remember, you're a man. So here is the question, "Are you getting any payoff for your efforts?" To put it more bluntly, are you getting the sense that the rendering of the fabric is encouraging you to imagine what is underneath?

This third example is called "The Rose" by the way. Roses, like a lot of flowers, smell and are shaped the way they are because their smell and shape fools insects into trying to have sex with the flower thereby accomplishing the plants sexual purposes for it. Okay, but here is an interesting question: Who is trying to entice us in the above picture? Meaning, do you credit the artist or the woman with the seduction. Look at the way she meets your gaze?

Speaking of "gazes", check these ones out.

The classic feminist analysis, and in this case the feminists are absolutely right, is that the woman looks at us inviting our gaze and the other woman, whose sexuality is, at first glance, ambiguous, validates our gaze by also looking at the first woman in a frankly sexual manner. (The classic feminist mistake is to imagine that this is all the male artist's fault; to forget that women don't do all these tricks in real life too.)

Again, follow the V-shaped panel down and take a moment to appreciate the rendering of the fabric. There is a rather lot of texture right at the spot where there would be pubic hair underneath isn't there. Anyone think that is an accident?

(Oh, by the way, the composition of that painting. Does it look familiar?  It should.)

Let's carry on with this homoerotic theme shall we?

I'll grant you that pearls are wonderful things and even that that is a rather long string of pearls but you cannot explain the facial expressions of the women in this picture in terms of their enjoyment of fine jewellery. And, go head, follow these Jewels of the Nile back to their source. How interesting that she would dangle them just there? And notice how the arm of the chair blocks the actual magic spot so we have to connect the pearls in our imagination.

And what exactly is happening here? It's hard not to suspect that this woman is taking advantage of the absence of men to tell her friends about a rather neat trick that a girl can do with pearls and they are staring at the pearls agape because they never guessed pearls had such powers before.

Then again, pearls could be used as distraction. Imagine they aren't there or, more suggestively that they are standing on for something else. Now ask yourself what is happening. Look at the facial expressions. The woman handling the pearls definitively has power over the other two.

Continuing with pearls, do watch a woman put her pearls on if you ever get the chance. She'll lean forward to do it, just as she does when she puts her bra on. And for the same reason: to take advantage of gravity to make sure everything falls into the most advantageous place.

I mention all that just to make it clear that no woman leans back to put her pearls on and she certainly won't do it like this.

You could easily forget that there even is a string of pearls in that painting. Well, it's easy to do because that is what you are supposed to do. And, once you get them out of the picture, well, what do you think is going on here? What do you think she is thinking?

I like particularly the way Czachórski has exploited the opening of the overskirt here. To get at what he has done, here is a thought experiment: close your eyes for a moment and imagine the image. Do it and then come back and look at the image again and continue reading.

When you opened them and looked at the image again, were her legs as wide apart as you imagined them? The trick is accomplished with the strips of embroidery. Look at the two strips edging the V-shaped panel and then two more edging the opening of the overskirt. Then look how the table is placed so as to break up the pattern made by her actual legs (it's difficult to figure out exactly how she has them placed). Between these two effects we tend to be made unaware of her actual legs and to replace them in our imagination with two that run parallel to the two strips of embroidery that open up along with her overskirt.

Don't sneer at this stuff. Don't think this legs-spread illusion or other effects are easy to achieve because they weren't. Very few of the artists of Czachórski's era and virtually none of the artists of our era could do what he did. And remember that you could not paint a picture of a girl with her legs actually apart in that era or culture. Women didn't ride horses side saddle for exactly that reason. That is, people didn't worry about a woman getting sexually stimulated by pushing herself up against the saddle. No, women rode with their legs together because the image of a woman with her legs apart was so sexually powerful it couldn't be allowed in polite company.

This wasn't because women didn't know what it felt like to spread their legs for someone or that men (and other women) didn't know what it was like to watch a woman spread her legs. No, it should be obvious to us that they cherished such moments much more than we do because they treated them as something special. Compared to them, we are like someone who claims to value dark chocolate while shoveling it into our mouths by the pound. (I've created something of an artificial effect by putting all these Czachórski paintings in one group. At the time, you would have to be lucky enough to visit a different house to see each one.)

And one huge advantage of the implied sexuality was that you didn't have to notice it if you didn't want to or you just weren't in the mood that day. And you can see, looking at the collection above, that some of Czachórski's customers liked the effect to be more obscure while others liked it to be more easily discovered. But no matter which one it was, there would be some days when a young woman or man visiting the house where one of paintings hung would look at it for a while and then decide they might go back to their room and "rest" or "write some letters" or some such thing.

A little light culture: Meaning nonsense

People who do philosophy of language worry about the fact that it is possible to construct a sentence that follows all the grammatical rules and yet makes no sense. Consider, for example,

 The cat flew the window.

I've used that example before. It's not original. A professor of mine used it during a graduate seminar in linguistics.

In linguistics this sort of stuff is sometimes trotted out in relation to what is called the deep grammar debate, that is the debate about whether there is some deep grammar embedded in our brains that makes all languages possible*. But what about right-on-the-surface grammar? The odd thing about sentences like the above is that you see them and you go looking for a way it could make sense. Right-on-the-surface grammar tells us that this is a sentence and we assume that the failure to see what it means lies with us and not the sentence. And it pretty much has to make some kind of sense; as Wittgenstein noted, even nonsense has to make a certain kind of sense.

I've abused John Lennon in the past, largely because he deserves abuse, but one thing he was really good at, perhaps the only thing he was really good at, was nonsense.

Semolina Pilchard, climbing up the Eiffel Tower.
Elementary penguin singing Hari Krishna.
Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe.

Those phrases from "The Walrus" have great mouth feel. And they also seem packed with meaning. You can argue that the whole point is that they don't have meaning and that Lennon was making fun of people who insist on finding meaning but that is a kind of deeper meaning of it's own isn't it? To trot out Wittgenstein again, we might say that it's the "deeper meaning" that is hidden right on the surface; you just have to look at it the right way.

When I was a little boy and my older cousins would play that song I imagined that Semolina Pilchard was a girl. I wanted to know her. She seemed like the heroine of a child's story. But there is no reason at all to assume Semolina is a girl except that "Semolina" felt like a girl's name to me because I didn't know what the word meant. It's a kind of flour, in case you don't know.

Of course, if you were listening to someone read this text, you might well hear "It's a kind of flower," instead and think, "That's why he thought Semolina was a girl".

There is an old anecdote that racists used to tell about a young woman who wanted to name her child a beautiful word she had heard during labour. The beautiful word? "Placenta". But you can see her point can't you?"Chlamydia" would also make a beautiful name for a girl if it didn't mean what it means. I get it entirely, "Placenta" is a beautiful word and if you don't know the thing that it means, the associations you get from hearing it are beautiful. Far from proving something racists wanted to believe about black people, the anecdote only seemed to make sense to the people who told the story because were already racists to begin with.

"Semolina" felt like a girl's name to me because it felt soft and pretty but "semolina" is actually from durum wheat. "Durum" from the same root as "durable" meaning "hard"!

"Pilchard", by the way, was the last name of a police officer who arrested a number of rock musicians on drug charges back in the 1960s. That may be where Lennon got it, in which case he was thinking of a man. When I was 20, a boy named Matthew Pritchard, which sounds almost like "Pilchard", stuck an automatic pistol in my face and robbed me. All he got for his trouble was a canvas bag with a Frank Sinatra pin on the outside and several books by Karl Marx inside. I eventually got everything back except the pin and I've always missed that pin. It wouldn't have bothered me at all to have lost the bag or the books.

Later, when I went to court intending to give the testimony that would send Matthew Pritchard to jail, I found myself singing "The Walrus" and wondered how the song got in my head. When I got to court, I learned that although Pritchard had robbed a number of people the same night he'd robbed me, I was the only one who wasn't too scared to testify. The police officer who met me at the court told me that right before the case was to begin. It hadn't occurred to me to be frightened until then. As it happened, I didn't have to because as soon as Matthew Pritchard's lawyer told him that I had, in fact, showed up, he changed his plea to guilty.

Years later, I saw Pritchard again in a bar and I told him who I was largely to prove to myself that I really wasn't scared, that I would have passed the test if I had had to. But when I told him who I was and how I knew him he started to shake. In his world people tell you stuff like that just before they hurt you really bad. He was tiny little guy without a gun. That hadn't been my intention and I was shocked to see his reaction. He was really, really scared.

It never occurred to me he might be scared because it never occurred to me to wonder what it would feel like to be him. It did occur to him what it would feel like to be me when he pushed the gun in my face. I know that because he talked a lot when he robbed me and everything he said was about how scared I should be.

The other thing that never occurred to me was how it was that I was absolutely certain it was him. I'd only seen him twice before in my life and that several years previous. And yet I recognized his face instantly. I'd walked over and said, "are you Matthew Pritchard?" but I'd never doubted for a second that he was.

Thinking about it afterwards, I laughed because I remembered singing "The Walrus" that morning and I realized that the song had popped into my head because "Pritchard" rhymes with "Pilchard".



Now consider this sentence from one of the Psalms** in this morning's Divine Office:

I go mourning all the day long.

It's not just that if you heard it you might think "morning all the day long" and think of how that might makes sense. And it might make sense in a certain context—"all day breakfast" makes sense even though "breakfast" means a meal we eat in the morning. When you read the Psalm aloud, and it's always read aloud during the Office, you feel that other meaning at some level. Particularly as this is a morning prayer. And it's Friday morning which, for Catholics like me, is a special morning of mourning; mourning both for Christ, who died on a Friday, but also for me who dies by my sins.

Yeah, we're odd that way. The rest of the world wakes up Friday morning and thinks, "Yay, Friday!" while we Catholics mourn Christ's death and our sin.

Here is a last sentence for your consideration:

The vast majority of our dogs have been lemon. 

Sounds like a nonsense example someone made up just like "The cat flew the window" or "Elementary Penguin singing Hare Krishna" doesn't it?  It isn't. It's meaningful sentence that made perfect sense to the readers for whom it was intended.


It was written by a woman who breeds Clumber Spaniels. Clumbers are mostly white with markings that can be dark or light. The darker markings are called "orange" and the lighter ones are called "lemon" and she is saying that most of the dogs they have bred have had lighter markings. Now you know. But even before you knew, that sentence seemed to have meaning didn't it.

Sort of like the way the world can be full of God's wisdom because he created it even though we can't understand that wisdom. Some people will read that and hate it and maybe even hate me.



* My best guess, for what it is worth, is "probably not".
** Psalm 38

Manly Thor's Day special: Katie Moss got married

Here is the set up quote:

Even on her wedding day to rock musician Jamie Hince, in 2011, Moss looked to her old friend John Galliano to tell her who to be. As Moss recalls, “On my wedding day, I’m like freaking out, obviously. ‘You’ve got to give me a character.’ And [Galliano] said, ‘You have a secret—you are the last of the English roses. Hide under that veil. When he lifts it, he’s going to see your wanton past!’”

Can I confess that that all makes perfect sense to me. I get her reaction and I get her needing a role to play. And it is a sexual role to be a bride, to be a model and, some days, just to be a woman. Role playing is not only a sane and healthy thing to do, it's an important part of learning how to be human, learning how to be a man or woman and learning how to be sexual.

None of those things can be done any other way and anyone who tells you different is an immoral liar. (Which is another reason to deplore those who condemn sexual fantasies.)

 What I don't get is revealing this to the whole world. What the blankety blank is she doing telling this story about her wedding day!!! to Vanity Fair?

Think of this, she is still married to Jamie Hince so why is she saying the following to anyone at all, never mind the whole bleepin' world:

There’s nobody that’s ever really been able to take care of me. Johnny did for a bit. I believed what he said ...

Your married to a woman and you read her quoted talking that way about another man in Vanity Fair. How does it make you feel?

I was thinking about this yesterday when an article that Lena Dunham wrote for The New Yorker came up in the comments. I haven't read it yet but it was apparently inspired by her ex-boyfriend's parents blocking her on Facebook. This led her to spill her guts about the whole relationship in print. Think about that, you're offended because someone blocked you on Facebook so you tell the whole world about it? The being-offended part makes perfect sense. It's the complete lack of any sense of privacy and intimacy that is utterly insane.

People who, like Kate Moss and Lena Dunham, aren't good at deciding when to keep, reveal or discard roles—who don't see that there are some very intimate roles that should stay intimate–are high risk to be found having choked to death on their own vomit.

Roles are comforting and safe. They operate a lot like clothes. You should be as careful about discarding the former as the latter.

Although, come to think of it, neither Moss nor Dunham are exactly prudent in their choice of clothing or lack of it either.

Relevant disclosure, I find Kate Moss hauntingly beautiful and always have. I'm glad not to know her though.

Sorta Political: Occupy anarchsim revisted

A year ago now, I did a post explaining how the Occupy Wall Street movement was essentially anarchist in spirit. I said that one of the markers of this would be their belief that a giant crisis in society could only bring good:

Why do they think this would be a good thing? Well, think of what happens when systems fail. A few years ago we had giant ice storm up here that closed roads, shut power off (sometimes for days) and generally brought everything to a stop. In the aftermath, people helped one another. They shared food and comfort, they formed little groups to help dig out the little old ladies, they made sure that anyone who needed to get to the hospital did. Anarchists imagine that widespread social collapse will produce the same sort of cooperation on a much larger scale. 

Well, told you so, look how they have responded to tropical storm Sandy (courtesy of Twitchy):

Now the folks at Twitchy think that the occupiers are celebrating the destruction but it's important to see that that is not the case. They are celebrating something that most of us would also celebrate—the way people tend to pull together in a  crisis like this and help one another out.

The difference is, though, that they think that is real community. They think everything else, the way we live when the power isn't out, is a perverted distortion of community. A guy I knew in college once inspired his girlfriend to dump him by saying that FROSH week was the only part of college he really liked and that he wished it could be like that all the time. He owned a Shark class sailboat, worked in a bar and dreamed of combining his love of sailing and drugs to make a living running dope across Lake Ontario. The Occupy people think a lot like that, they are essentially college party boys.

In the past, anarchism has always descended into acts of terror such as the Wall Street bombing. It's hard to imagine the Frat-boy anarchism of the Occupy movement descending into such a thing but I wouldn't discount the possibility.

Another image: What is Lena Dunham selling?

I don't know if anyone else found it odd that no one else found it odd that only weeks after Hanna Rosin's book suggesting that men were struggling, washed up, basically over, we had a whole lot of hand wringing over a study that men supposedly still get paid more than women do for equal work. Rosin is going to hate us for being feeble and the authors of the study on income inequality want to hate us for using our seemingly unvanquished power to rig the game in our favour.

You see things like that and the temptation is to quote Fitzgerald:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

But notice the next, rarely quoted line from Fitzgerald:

One should, for example, be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

And this is the opposite of the feminist enterprise these days which seems determined to maintain hopelessness so that women will forever need help from feminists and the government.

Which brings me to Lena Dunham. Yes, I know, everyone else has had a shot at this. But I want to call your attention not to the larger political issues but to some odd contradictions within the video and within everything Dunham does. Look at this image and think of the words she says at this moment in her infamous video:

She starts off,

"It should be a guy with beautiful..."

And then there is a pause as she tries to think of what to say next. She fails but then suddenly starts anew with,

"Someone who really cares about and understands women."

That's bad enough to be from a Harlequin Romance novel. The whole thing is constructed to convey uncertainty and even helplessness.

This is contradictory on so many levels it's just weird. Just a couple of examples here:

1. Dunham is  famous (well in some circles anyway) as the creator of a show that portrays girls like her as very experienced sexually and yet the ad encourages young women to think of themselves as hesitant virgins. You may say, "It's tongue in cheek," but it isn't tongue in cheek about sex. You'd have to be insecure about yourself sexually for this ad to speak to you.
2. The ad is supposedly feminist in tone and yet treats women as tender little flowers who need a male hero to lead and protect them.

And why can't she meet our eyes? Over and over again in the video, she says something meant to be forceful and then immediately looks away. People typically look down and away like that when they are uncertain about how you'll respond to what they are saying. For example, when they are lying or when they think you're going to reject what they are about to ask or propose.

Remember, the viewer is the virgin that Lena is pandering Obama to and yet she is acting as if she is the victim!

If you went to college, you know the Lena Dunham type. Good looking, upper middle class, always had it good and yet deeply insecure. She is deeply inconsistent in her moral reactions: you will see her put up with disrespectful and even debasing treatment from her lover only to turn around and rip into her best girlfriend for what should have been an easily overlooked trifle. She is both passive and aggressive. She doesn't think of herself as a liar because the person she lies to most often is herself but her every expression suggests shy dupicity:

The tattoos are a big problem. One you could write off as a momentary indiscretion, a bad judgment she could grow out of, but she has almost a full shoulder of them showing and I believe there are more when she takes off her shirt. She is a train wreck waiting to happen.

Joe Frazier told an interesting story about when Ali worked his famous rope-a-dope strategy on him. It was late in the fight and Frazier was way ahead on points but had worn himself out scoring them. He landed one punch fairly squarely on Ali and Ali said, "Is that all of you got Joe?"

Frazier, telling the story, said, "And I thought, well yes, that is all I've got."

A woman like Dunham has used all her strength scoring points against an opponent entirely of her own imagining. When Dunham finishes talking, no matter what she is talking about, Ali's question hangs in the air: "Is that all you've got Lena?" Only there is no one there to ask it.

It hardly needs to be asked though. Look at her face, she knows that is all she has. Twenty-six years old, pretty, born into a life of privilege and this is all she has got.

And that is what she is selling. You wanna buy?

My day with Proust

It's Monday, so back to the novel and our question today is "Did Proust believe in love?"

I've mentioned before the brilliant way Proust uses his own experience as a little boy craving his mother's kiss to write about Swann's craving as an adult man for Odette's attention. It was a large part of Proust's object to show that a person need not have lived an experience to write about it and that, therefore, Saint-Beuve's contention that we need to study the artist's autobiography to understand the art was misleading.

A while ago, a cousin of mine read something critical I had written of Woody Allen and said, "You can't criticize him because you have no idea what it feels like to be him and to experience what he has experienced". That's nonsense of course but it's a common form of nonsense. It's solipsistic. And Proust, like his contemporary Wittgenstein, saw that solipsism is a huge problem for modern moral psychology. Thus his insistence that, contrary to Saint-Beuve, we can put ourselves in the place of others and share their experience of the world even if we know nothing of their lives. And the fact that we cannot do this with the same certainty that we do mathematical calculations does not mean that we cannot do it all.

But, we might stop and ask ourselves questions. For example, is the feeling that a child has for its mother love? Well, stupid question, of course it is. Then again, we might say, "Well, that depends on what you mean by love." No woman, for example, wants the man she loves to crave her in that terribly one-sided way that a boy child feels love for his mother. That sort of love might be flattering for a while but it would very quickly become tiresome to always be the mother figure, which is a large part of why Odette tires of and begins cheating on Swann. Any man who offers a woman the sort of clinging, needy love that Marcel has for his mother and Swann has for Odette is going to be cheated on and damn well deserves to be.

And here the temptation to grant Saint-Beuve his revenge and go all auto-biographical on Proust is very strong. The temptation is to say that, in an era when homosexuality was so suppressed, Proust never had the opportunity to learn what love based on mutual giving was. Without this crucial experience, we might continue, he was unable to write convincingly about any of his characters being in love and, especially, he was unable to give Marcel, his narrator, such an experience.

[Note: as far as possible, "Marcel" means the narrator of and character in the novel and "Proust" means the author.]

And we must give full weight to the evidence here. Really convincing portraits of mutually giving love are, at the very least, rare in Proust. It's not that such a thing is absent. We might well argue that such a relationship must exist between by Marcel's parents but, to so, we would have to argue that it is there by implication. Proust spends literally hundreds of pages describing an odd narcissistic kind of love that is spurred by jealousy; that is to say, a love where the intensity of the love is a product of feelings that are inside the lover. This is not a love that grows through mutual efforts as two people go through a courtship ritual. Quite the contrary, Proust denigrates habit and writes as if habitual love and willed love are only illusions.

Cruising by

The large division of À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs* called "Place-Names: The Place" begins with some absolutely brilliant observations about social distinctions and interactions at a seaside "Grand Hotel". Also running through it, as if preparing us for the theme that will dominate in the final movement, Proust has his narrator see beautiful young women (and, with less emphasis, some boys). But he sees them only in passing: from the train, from a carriage and on a bridge he walks by on his way to see an historic church. He never has a chance to connect with these girls.

Along the way, our narrator makes some telling observations not about love but about the psychology of love. And these observations are quite frankly solipsistic. The only reactions from the girls that interests him are those reactions that would confirm his impact on them. And, as we will see later this week, the impact he seeks is bluntly sexual. I'm going to cite him at some length here, interrupting to make comments as I go along.

1. These glimpses, and the loss of every girl glimpsed, aggravated the state of agitation in which I spent my days; and I wished for the wisdom of the philosophers who counsel the curbing of desires (assuming they mean one's desire for another person, as that is the only mode of desiring which can lead to anxiety, focusing as it does on a world beyond our ken but within our awareness—to assume they mean desire for wealth would be too absurd).

 Note that on one level this simply is not true. As I write this, we are one week from an American presidential election. There are lots of people who desire an outcome and that desire is causing them lots of anxiety. That said, we can still see Marcel's point but we can see this if and only if the thing we are talking about is a desire to possess another sexually. Okay, moving on:

2. At the same time I was inclined to find something lacking in this wisdom, sensing well enough that these glimpsed encounters made for greater beauty in a world which sows such flowers, rare though common along every country roadside, a new spice being added to life by the untried treasures of each day, by every outing with its unkept promises, my enjoyment of which had hitherto been prevented only by contingent circumstances which might not always be present.

Okay, note the expression "unkept promises" which has a delightful ambiguity here. Who is promising and not keeping? Is that the "flowering girls" he sees are not available to him or is it that he, by moving so quickly from each glimpsed wonder top the later one who replaces her. Well, keep that thought in mind and read the next sentence:

3. Of course, it may be that, in looking forward to a freer day when I meet similar girls along different roads, I had already begun to adulterate the exclusive desire to share one's life with an individual woman whom one has seen as pretty; and the mere act of entertaining the possibility artificially fostering it was an implicit acknowledgment that it was an illusion.

Okay, lots of parsing needed here. At first glance we can see Proust's intention easily enough. Although Marcel is in the North, he thinks like a southerner and he shares the belief held by Dante and the troubadours that love that is sought after is not real. The superior love is the one that is not sought and that reflects something greater than the person who pursues it.

The joys of translation

Fair enough, but we are also losing something here.

First, note that the similar sound and root shared by "adulterate" and "adultery" does not exist in French. Our translator has put it here in the hope of capturing something Proust does in French in a  different way more suitable to the inherent poetry of the English language. And it sort of works with the notion of "unkept promises" in the previous sentence.

But none of that is in the original! There it is in another word "croître", translated here by the humble English word "to sow", where the wonderful ambiguity lurks.

If we go back to the second sentence, we can already see the thing going astray. Consider the clause:

"... sensing well enough that these glimpsed encounters made for greater beauty in a world which sows such flowers ..."

The French reads:

"... car je me disais que ces rencontres me fassaient trouver encore plus beau un monde qui fait ainsi croître sur toutes toutes les routes campagnardes des fleurs ..."

Here is fairly literal rendering of that:

"... for I told myself that these encounters made me find more beautiful a world that so made to grow on every country road these flowers ..."

Notice how much more active the intelligence of young Marcel is here in the French than it is in the first translation. He tells himself that he is finding the world more beautiful. The English translation I am reading makes a completely different sense with its "sensing well enough" and "made for a greater beauty". These are passive expressions that describe something happening to young Marcel and not something that he is doing.

And the world around Marcel is also different in the original. The word "croître" shares both the sound and the and the root of the French word for faith. It doesn't mean "faith" but we will feel that. What "croître" does mean is to grow but it also means to develop slowly towards an end. These girls are flowering, meaning they are coming to the most magnificent phase of a natural development.

If we go on to sentence three, the word Proust uses is not the French of "adulterate" but he uses "fausser" which means to distort or pervert. Now, if we combine that with the more active role that Marcel is playing in the way his thoughts are shaping his world, we can see that something more intentional is happening here.

Conclusion

So, does Proust believe in love? We can't say just yet.








* Literally, that translates as "in the shadow of young girls in flower" and recent versions have been published under that title. This "accurate" translation, however, loses all the poetry of the French. C.K. Scott Montcrieff's "Within A Budding Grove", on the other hand, has lots of poetry but, unfortunately, the wrong poetry. The point that the French conveys and the English does not is that the girls in question are sexually powerful. Think, "they are in flower but you are not". Young Marcel is still at that age where boys are behind girls and clumsily struggling to gain sexual maturity.

A little light culture: A statistical analysis of Silvio Berlusconi's lovers

The Telegraph has as a slide show of the women in Berlusconi's life. Deep thinker that I am, I made a detailed study and can report the following statistics.

Brunettes: 19
Blondes who are obviously dying their hair: 6
Blondes who are probably dying their hair but with restraint and taste: 1
Blondes who may well actually be blonde: 1
Red heads, obviously dyed: 1

Women with breasts that might be real : 12
Women with breasts that are most probably not real: 16

Women I wouldn't be ashamed to be seen with: 2

Other interesting details.

• One of the women was formerly a dental hygienist and has huge breasts, a very rare thing for reasons dental hygienists probably hate discussing. (It is possible that her breasts might have gained size suddenly after she left what might have been a promising career in dental hygiene.)
• One of the women spent Mr. Berlusconi's money buying twenty-five pairs of shoes in just one week, suggesting that prudence and sound financial management are not qualities these women have.
• Most of the women were not attractive. Two look like they have sophistication and taste (one brunette and one tastefully dyed blonde in case you are wondering). Maybe five others looked like they could be "high class" call girls, if you like that sort of look (I don't). But the majority are, sorry to be so vulgar, total skanks. I would have thought a man with power and large amounts of money could have done better. Sad to think he threw away his freedom, career and status for this.