69
" Ever since I had ceased to see actors solely as the depositories, in their diction and acting ability, of an artistic truth, they had begun to interest me in their own right; with the feeling that I was watching the characters from some old comic novel, I was amused to see the naïve heroine of a play, her attention drawn to the new face of some young duke who had just taken his seat in the theatre, listen abstractedly to the declaration of love the juvenile lead was addressing to her, while he, through the rolling passion of this declaration, was in turn directing an enamoured eye at an old lady seated in a stage box, whose magnificent pearls had caught his interest; and in this way, largely owing to what Saint-Loup had told me about the private lives of actors, I saw another drama, silent but telling, being played out beneath the words of the play that was being performed, yet the play itself, however uninspired, was still something that interested me too; for within it I could feel germinating and blossoming for an hour in the glare of the footlights, created out of the agglutination on the face of an actor of another face of grease-paint and pasteboard, and on his individual soul the words of a part, the ephemeral and spirited personalities, captivating too, who form the cast of a play, whom one loves, admires, pities, whom one would like to meet again after the play is over, but who by that time have already disintegrated into the actors who are no longer what they were in their roles, into a script which no longer shows the actors’ faces, into a coloured powder that can be wiped off by a handkerchief, who have reverted, in a word, to elements that contain nothing of them, because their dissolution is complete as soon as the play has ended, and this, like the dissolution of a loved one, causes one to doubt the reality of the self and to meditate on the mystery of death. "
― Marcel Proust , The Guermantes Way
70
" And thus it was she who first gave me the idea that a person does not, as I had imagined, stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourselves (like a garden at which we gaze through a railing with all its borders spread out before us), but is a shadow which we can never penetrate, of which there can be no such thing as direct knowledge, with respect to which we form countless beliefs, based upon words and sometimes actions, neither of which can give us anything but inadequate and as it proves contradictory information—a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love. "
― Marcel Proust , The Guermantes Way
78
" A Balbec, ero arrivato al punto di trovare il piacere d'intrattenermi in svaghi con fanciulle meno funesto alla vita intellettuale – cui, d'altronde, rimane estraneo – che non l'amicizia, il cui sforzo consiste esclusivamente nel farci sacrificare l'unica parte reale e incomunicabile (se non per mezzo dell'arte) di noi stessi a un io superficiale, che anziché trovare, come l'altro, gioia dentro di sé, prova una confusa commozione nel sentirsi sostenuto da puntelli esterni, ospitato in un'individualità estranea dove, felice della protezione accordatagli, fa rifulgere in approvazione il proprio benessere, e va in estasi di fronte a qualità che chiamerebbe difetti, e cercherebbe di correggere, in se stesso. D'altra parte, coloro che disprezzano l'amicizia possono essere, senza illusioni e non senza rimorsi, i migliori amici del mondo, così come un artista che porta in sé un capolavoro e sente che sarebbe suo dovere vivere per lavorare, ciononostante, per non apparire o rischiare d'essere egoista, dà la sua vita per una causa inutile, e con tanto maggiore ardimento quanto più disinteressate erano le ragioni per cui avrebbe preferito non darla. "
― Marcel Proust , The Guermantes Way
