There’s a scene in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1922) which gets at this much more elegantly than I can. Little Marcel is on the Meseglise way, a path of so many ‘humble discoveries’, and is overwhelmed by his own enthusiasm for the real – wind-blown grass, a hen’s downy feathers, dappled pink reflections of a tiled roof on a pond’s surface – excited to the point that he cries aloud while swinging his furled umbrella: ‘Gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh!’. He feels that he is ‘duty bound not to content [him]self with those unilluminating words, but to endeavour to see more clearly into the sources of [his] rapture’. It is the first time he’s struck by ‘this discordance between our impressions and their habitual expression’.2 Within a few paragraphs, the narrator describes how it is in this same place that he had another revelation: the sadism haunting pleasure. In the Montjouvain woods, he spies through a cottage window — petit windowlicker — Mlle Vinteuil and her female ‘friend’ enjoying one another in front of a pathetic photograph of her father, recently dead; a triangulated scenario setting up the novel’s architectonics of desire. Proust emphasises the sadism of the scene, how Mlle Vinteuil ‘came at length to see in pleasure itself something diabolical’, since pleasure occurs always due to an indifference to someone’s else’s suffering. The blinkers of habit may alleviate suffering, but Proust again and again shows how they block access to encountering the real. His project throughout the novel is to dehabitualise syntax, metaphor, vocabulary, meaning, vision so that the usually rapidly mediated, dreamed, habitualised real can be approached. Dehabitualisation is crucial to the experience of beauty, its disappointments, and why we fail to recognise it, fail to understand it, fail it; consciousness faced with ‘the insistent challenge of a form of which it possesses no intellectual equivalent’. Needless for Proust to say that this is why his novel takes its sui generis form, combining, bending and dissolving genre as his thought demands. The way Benjamin put it still amazes me. After reminding those who had probably forgotten Cocteau’s observation that the intonation of Proust’s voice obeyed the laws of night and honey, Benjamin concludes that ‘Proust conquered the hopeless sadness within him (what he once called “l’imperfection incurable dans l’essence meme du present”)’, by building “from the honeycombs of memory […] a house for the swarm of his thoughts”’

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