Thursday, December 24, 2020

A doozy of a sentence, or three

A doozy of a sentence from Proust, posted by Micheal who is sharing such goodies on Orange Crate Art:

 "Mme. Verdurin, seeing that Swann was two steps away, now wore that expression in which the desire to make the person who is talking be quiet and the desire to maintain a look of innocence in the eyes of the person who is hearing neutralize each other in an intense nullity of gaze, in which the motionless sign of intelligence and complicity is concealed beneath an innocent smile, and which in the end, being common to all those who find themselves making a social blunder, reveals it instantly, if not to those making it, at least to the one who is its victim."

--Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002).
I had to read that several times before I fully got it and thought:
I DO THAT! (For politeness, try to muffle my look of I wish you would shut up.)

But–– am I understanding that right?––Proust says that the expression, masked by a "nullity of gaze" is instantly revealed to its victim?

If so, I can't agree:
Whenever I glaze over my expression of "desire to make the person who is talking be quiet ", the person I desire to be quiet never gets it.

Mostly, they don't register it even when I don't try to cover it.

Anyway, the sentence is a fun brain-twister.

2. A different kind of a doozy (minor)––a bit of public communication at the McDonald's walk-up take-out window, right next to a bus stop:

PLEASE SMOKE BY THE BUS STOP
THANKS

(How could that be rephrased?)

3. Which, while I'm leapfrogging about, reminds me of a favorite line in a favorite Movie Moment––from Some Like It Hot.
Jack Lemmon in disguise as "Daphne" has just gotten engaged to Joe E Brown's character, whose mother disapproves of smoking...

"But I'm not worried," Lemmon says (to Tony Curtis), "because I. don't. smoke."
[
shakes maracas*]

Why is Blogger not embedding a youTube for me?
Here's the link:
youtu.be/BgCSXZbf4SU?t=60

*Director Billy Wilder on the use of maracas for comic timing:
"Conversations with Wilder, Part 12"

1 comment:

  1. Such A great movie!

    :-( I forgot to send you my minimalist manger...but I will.

    ReplyDelete