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Marcel Proust - The Victims of Life and Art

by Leo Bersani - Oxford - 1965

(untranslated passage from Albertine disparue) p. 62-62

As she was being caressed, one of the girls suddenly began to make a sound which I at first was unable to identify, for we can never understand exactly the meaning of a sound we have not heard before, one which expresses a sensation we have not experienced. If we are in the next room and cannot see anything, we may take for uncontrollable laughter the noise caused by the suffering of a patient who is being operated on without having been put to sleep; and as for the sounds made by a mother who has just been told that her child is dead, if we do not know the facts, it may be difficult for us to provide a human translation for these sounds as when we hear the noise that comes from an animal, or a harp. We need some time to understand that the sounds made by the patient and the mother express something which by analogy with what we ourselves may have felt (and which is, however, quite different), we call suffering, and it also took me a certain amount of time to realize that the noise I was

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hearing expressed something which, once again by analogy with every different sensations I had experienced myself, I called pleasure. And this pleasure must have been very strong indeed to have had such an overwhelming effect on the person who was experiencing it, strong enough to make her speak this unknown language which seemed to express and comment upon all the phases of the exquisite drama being lived by the little woman, of this drama which was hidden form my eyes by the curtain which always prevents everyone else from seeing what goes on in the most intimate and mysterious parts of each person's life.

2.19.81

The association of family life with personal happiness dates only from the eighteenth century. Family happiness - vision or ideal - is the soft side of the Enlightenment, arriving with sentimental comedy and the diffusion of upholstered furniture. In the eighteen century, everybody begins to sit comfortably in the parlor instead of standing or perching uncomfortably on stools before Father in the great hall. - New Yorker - March 9. 81 - p.132 - Naomi Bliven