ŷ������

Let us leave aside for the time being those who, led by the exceptional nature of their inclination to believe themselves superior to women, despise them, who make of homosexuality the privilege of great geniuses and of glorious epochs, and who, when they seek to share their taste with others, do so less with those who seem predisposed to it, as a morphinomaniac does with morphine, than with those who seem to them worthy of it, out of an apostolic zeal, just as others preach Zionism, conscientious objection, Saint-Simonism, vegetarianism, or anarchy.

It often happens that when I am thinking of her I am seized by a wild longing. But these recurrences of desire force us to reflect that, if we wanted to meet these girls again with the same pleasure, we should have also to go back to the year in question, which has since been followed by ten others, in the course of which the girl has faded. We can sometimes find a person again, but not abolish time. All this up until that unforeseen day, sad as a winter’s night, when we are no longer seeking that particular girl, or any other, and when to find one would alarm us even. For we no longer feel we have sufficient attractions to please, or the strength to love.

“Cuando tenga usted mi edad, verá que es muy poca cosa, la alta sociedad, y lamentará haber atribuido tanta importancia a esas naderías.��

“…después de las grandes fatigas carnales, la mujer cuya imagen obsesiona nuestra momentánea senilidad es una a la que casi no haríamos otra cosa que besar en la frente��.

“Aquella nariz del Sr. de Cambremer no era fea, más bien demasiado hermosa, demasiado grande, demasiado orgullosa de su importancia. Aguileña, bruñida, reluciente, nuevecita, estaba del todo dispuesta a compensar la insuficiencia mental de la mirada; por desgracia, sin bien los ojos son a veces el órgano en que se revela la inteligencia, la nariz -sea cual fuere, por lo demás, la solidaridad íntima y la repercusión insospechada de las facciones una en las otras- suele ser el órgano en que se despliega más fácilmente la tontería.��

“Se trata de una raza sobre la que pesa una maldición y que debe vivir con la mentira y el perjurio, puesto que su deseo, lo que representa para toda persona la mayor dulzura de la vida, está considerado, como sabe, punible y vergonzoso, inconfesable.��

چنان دراز زمانی از جستن هدفی آرمانی برای زندگی دست شسته و آن را به خوشی های روز به روز محدود کرده بود که �� بی آن که رسماً به خود بگوید �� می پنداشت زندگی اش دیگر تا دم مرگ دگرگون نخواهد شد. از این هم بالاتر، از آن جا که دیگر هیچ اندیشۀ والایی در ذهن خود سراغ نمی کرد، وجود چنین اندیشه هایی را هم باور نداشت. از این رو عادت کرده بود به اندیشه های بی اهمیتی پناه ببرد که به او امکان می داد به کُنه چیزها [«حقیقت» چیزها] پی نبرد - ص ۳۰۱ جلد اول.

When they are happy, calm, satisfied with their surroundings, we marvel at their precious gifts; it is the truth, literally, that speaks through their lips. A touch of headache, the slightest prick to their self-esteem, is enough to alter everything. The luminous intelligence, become brusque, convulsive and shrunken, no longer reflects anything but an irritable, suspicious, teasing self, doing everything possible to displease.

It was indeed the corrupting effect, as it was also the charm, of this country round Balbec, to have become for me a land of familiar acquaintances; if its territorial distribution, its extensive cultivation, along the entire length of the coast, with different forms of agriculture, gave of necessity to the visits which I paid to these different friends the aspect of a journey, they also reduced that journey to the agreeable proportions of a series of visits.

une franc-maçonnerie bien plus étendue, plus efficace et moins soupçonnée que celle des loges, car elle repose sur une identité de goûts, de besoins, d'habitudes, de dangers, d'apprentissage, de savoir, de trafic, de glossaire […] dans cette vie romanesque, anachronique, l'ambassadeur est ami du forçat, le prince […] s'en va conférer avec l'apache. […] Certes ils forment dans tous les pays une colonie orientale, cultivée, musicienne, médisante, qui a des qualités charmantes et d'insupportables défauts.

a Freemasonry even more widely dispersed, more efficient and less under suspicion than that of the Lodges, for it relies on an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeships, knowledge, traffic, jargon. In this quixotic and anachronistic life, the ambassador is friends with the convict, the prince confers with the outlaw. There's no doubt that in every country they form an oriental colony �� cultivated, musical, bitchy �� which has its charming qualities as well as its insupportable flaws.

As our vision is a deceiving sense, a human body, even when it is loved as Albertine’s was, seems to us to be a few yards�� at a few inches�� distance from us. And similarly with the soul that inhabits it.

No man is an island,
Entire of himself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.

Two or three times it occurred to me, for a moment, that the world in which this room and these bookshelves were situated and in which Albertine counted for so little, was perhaps an intellectual world, which was the sole reality, and my grief something like what feel when we read a novel, of thing of which only a madman would make a lasting and permanent grief that prolonged itself through his life; that a tiny movement of my will would suffice, perhaps, to attain to that real world, to re-enter it, passing through my grief, as one breaks through a paper hoop, and to think no more about what Albertine had done than about the actions of the imaginary heroine of a novel after we have finished reading it.

There are many methods, using personality tests and demographics, of determining whether two people are likely to have a good relationship. But there is this extra quality, what some people call ‘chemistry’—the unexpected ways that two people’s personalities interact with one another. Some people have good chemistry, some people have bad chemistry. There’s no way to tell beforehand what will happen when two people start talking.