Reading Time: 2 minutes
What Proust says in part 2 of part 2
of In Search of Lost Time:
(“Place-names: the Place” from
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower)
about finding and confronting – after so much fantasizing
in front of early photographs and various paintings
and drawings -
the statue of the Virgin of Balbec,
almost shocked at her presence in the stone;
this source of so much thinking and dreaming
on his part,
equipping her with a kind of general, metaphysical existence
way beyond her rough, heavy material reality,
- has in itself a general truth
about how we live our human lives on a magic note;
how we perceive, measure, adjust and divine;
allott qualities to people and things
that aren't any more real
than the colour of thoughts
or the sounds of silence,
and Proust's revealing rendezvous
with the Virgin of Balbec
can well compare
to a present-day audience with Bob Dylan,
forcing one to become aware
of something disturbingly human
about this corporeal center, the origin
of all these decades of magic apotheosis;
something quite apart from this little man,
now 81, with an oversize name attached
to his wrinkled, thin appearance,
like a great sail,
about to blow him into an oceanic oblivion
called history
by the winds of change
that topple us all,
leaving an image behind
in a worldly concept
similar to the one Proust harboured,
up to the moment he stood face to face
with the bare rock of his expectations
...and as I pick out another book
from the revolving bookcase by my desk:
“Introduction to Emptiness as taught in Tsong-kha-pa's
Great Treatise of The Stages of the Path”
I realize, in the glaring light
of Marcel Proust's face-off
with the Virgin of Balbec,
that emptiness is the real thing,
while we wrestle to make life more palpable,
only to see it dissolve into quite something else.



© Ingvar Loco Nordin 2023