Finding Beauty Again (Merci Proust)

As I was reading Proust, the part when he is on a train on his way to a thermal station where he discovers during a halt a beautiful young farm girl. Just the sight of this beautiful woman gave him back the taste of Beauty, some kind of meaning in his life, I was about to experience first hand that experience a few hours after having read his words.

I was taking a break from playing a video-game, smoking on my balcony and watching peoples passing by. I love watching people. It’s sound creepy, maybe it is, but after staying for years, more than a decade in fact, in a little village with almost nobody walking by, (or if you saw someone, you’ll definitely know that person), after that dryness human experience of seeing little to nobody new, living in a city full of people that you don’t know and don’t know you is an exhilarating experience. It’s almost like you’re living again, reborn, back in society.

So, there I was, smoking my cigarette, observing life and society going about their life when I spot a beautiful woman. Not the first one that I’ve spotted, high up in my balcony, but after reading Proust, that sight was powerful and full of meaning.

There I was, experiencing what a man who died one century ago wrote about.

This is the magic of literature. Well, one of the many perks of reading a book.

That lady was walking her littler black dog, making me think of a Bob Dylan song, «A Hard Rain A-Gonna Fall» when he sings: I met white men who walked a black dog.

No, the simple sight of an attractive woman leads me to music. Life is strange, but art found a way to make it magic. Does art have a defined function? I don’t know, and I wish not, because it would put art in a shackle. We, human, have to categorize everything, it’s in our nature, everything has to be in a box.

Art isn’t in a box, well, it is in every box and a box itself.

And art was what I was seeing. I was looking at Beauty.

And that thought came out of my brain: go, talk to this lady, tell her something!

Hell no! Hell no! The time have changed, and for good, I think. We are living in a time where yelling at a lady passing by is not ok.

What if I was in the lady’s situation and someone I don’t know yell for me to give him or her my phone number? I would keep my head down and go away. We never know with people nowadays.

I kept watching her, I wasn’t hiding myself, it was already weird enough for me to look at her, if she ever rises her head toward me, I didn’t wanted to scare her.

And then, I started imagining her life. She was probably in her early twenty’s, probably a student, walking her family dog, taking a walk in the sun. Did she have a boyfriend? A girlfriend? How happy was she in her life? What was the cross she had to carry?

And then, she left, took a nearby street, disappearing from my eyes.

I rediscovered Beauty, at least for a little while.

Thanks to Marcel Proust, whenever I see Beauty, I feel grateful and alive. I’ve found an answer to a question I wasn’t asking myself before reading him.

Extract (in French) from Proust book; A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs :

«Était-ce parce que je ne l’avais qu’entr’apercue que je l’avais si belle ? Peut-être. D’abord, l’impossibilité de s’arrêter auprès d’une femme, le risque de ne pas la retrouver un autre jour lui donnent brusquement le même charme qu’à un pays la maladie ou la pauvreté qui nous empêchent de le visiter, ou qu’aux jours si ternes qui nous restaient à vivre, le combat où nous succomberons sans doute. De sorte que, s’il n’y avait pas l’habitude, la vie devrait paraître délicieuse à des êtres qui seraient à chaque heure menacés de mourir, – c’est-à-dire à tous les hommes. Puis, si l’imagination est entraînée par le désir de ce que nous pouvons posséder, son essor n’est pas limité par une réalité complètement perçue dans ces rencontres où les charmes de la passante sont en relation directe avec la rapidité du passage. Pour peu que la nuit tombe et que la voiture aille vite, à la campagne, dans une ville, il n’y a pas un torse féminin, mutilé comme un marbre antique par la vitesse qui nous entraîne et le crépuscule qui le noie, qui ne tire sur notre cœur, à chaque coin de route, du fond de chaque boutique, les flèches de la Beauté, de la Beauté dont on serait parfois tenté de se demander si elle est en ce monde autre chose que la partie de complément qu’ajoute à une passante fragmentaire et fugitive notre imagination surexcitée par le regret.»

Jaskiers

Publicité

Just Another Haunted Hotel Room Story – Part 2

FYI: I am not fluent in English, I’m trying to be at least. Sorry for the potentials mistakes. Feel free to correct me in the comment section.

—

A childish fear, he thought to himself.

He opened the door of his room. A smell of cigarette hit him directly. He stopped smoking two months ago and this smell will not help him forget his longing for a good smoke after the stress of the traveling. Thankfully, he had no cigarette in his pockets to taunt him even more.

The room had that uniform pale brown color, a two persons wide bed, a night stand with a phone, a lamp and an ashtrey. Facing the front bed, a TV stand with a top notch television and multiple drawers. A wardrobe next to the bed et next to it, a bathroom with a toilet. A picture perfect basic motel room.

He let down his luggage on to the floor and laid in bed, looking at the roof stained by years of smoking.

One of these spots looked like a rabbit.

Smoke stains are likes clouds, perfect pareidolia materials. He took out his notebook to write that thought down. The writer learned to write down every thing that inspired him directly as to not forget a good idea that could help him in his futur writing. He never really used the notes he putted down in his journal, it was more of a little obsession, just in case the inspiration decided to take a leave from him creative mind.

Curiosity pushed Jack to open the bed side drawer, see if there was a bible. It’s a curious thing to put a bible in hotel rooms he thought to himself. It was not the case in Europe, it was something typically American. Forcing God into your life, guiding the lost sheep back to the Lord’s herd. He wrote those lines down on his notebook before opening the drawer and discovering a tiny black leathered bible and a full pack of Camel cigarettes along with a lighter.

Torrence heartbeat increased for a bit. There were, in this drawer, God wisdom and the Devil sweet temptation.

He took the bible and opened it where the little strip of tissue served as a bookmark.

He read the first line that caught his eyes :

(Luke 22:40)
When He arrived at the place, He said to them, “Pray that you may not enter into temptation.”

He sighted, looked at the pack of cigarettes, took it, turned and smelled the odor of tobacco before putting it down like it was burning his finger.

Sometime, life work in mysterious ways, like God, but it also have frightening coincidences that make you question existence in its whole. Jack was in deep meditating state, wondering if life was nothing but a simulation, a cruel game, lead by a disturbed man.

He got back looking at the roof to discover that the rabbit looked like a bird now. He moved his head to see if it was a change in his position that made this metamorphosis but it wasn’t.

How strange is the thing controlling us. Why does it seem that sometime, he takes a particular interest in you for a moment and giving you the hardest, cruelest and strangest time of your life ?

Sleep started to ask for its due. Jack took off his trouser and his old leather jacket, rested his head on a pillow and started to dose off.

He started having one of those strange and scary dreams where you wake because you felt like falling off a cliff.

Jack raised up from his bed immediately. He remembered reading something about those kinds of terrific dreams. The brain dropped some kind of adrenaline’s type chemical in the body, because for a moment, he was thinking that the body was about to die, or something along those lines.

It marked, once more, that room with a dreadful feeling. Something was wrong here. After what happened back at the Monclar hotel back in Colorado, the writer knew that there was some strange and powerful power out off our understanding lingering in there. Only peoples who face those strange power know that you shouldn’t mess with those entities.

Jaskiers