The two things I find: the first in myself, the second in othersRetentiveness in the form of a reflex of being able to replicate an intonation of mouthing a prayer, its personal hymn, even after many years…
Living down or being able to live oneself down through the course of time, after the initial period of infatuation, alacrity, alertness....
A piece of verbiage
Inuring to, getting oneself inured to a situation like letting an adventitious element interpolate into one’s illusion of eternal coziness, the things dear as the prime props of one’s life to be swapped by something extrinsic. Or a love gone awry through our commoner’s caprice, narcissism, ego, self-absorption, want of self-command at the nick of time, and then on to this desperation called forming a habit, namely indifference that Marcel Proust qualified with the epithet ‘cruel’ but a means of survival after all. But can habit in general be more or less affected by the same process of causation, given its strong element of ‘cognitive inertia’? Here, the most beautiful thing called empathy should be invoked into defining if the same habit, like getting up early in the morning, is tinted with its splendor or not. If yes, then it can no longer be labelled as a state of such desperation, I think.
As Proust’s fundamental belief or as the prop of his own life, it’s something like lacking the prime backup, the exigency, to deal with the changing, deceptive external world--to do without the means called art. That counts, really, as unconventional in the true sense of the word but just above the common run of sentient, language-oriented beings. He could be feeling sometimes how someone without such a means could be living, how his or her life could be barren--’chiaroscuro devoid of poetry’.
And for me, despite myself being a fledgling aficionado, I wonder how one could deal with such flurries within and without--such colossal needs, with such a tiny heart--without a firm footing acquired through long, long labor that delivers oneself into a face-to-face encounter with the awareness of the reality universal rather than just palliative.
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The proximity in space and time does matter so much, given the facts that a painter does know much more about a flower than someone like you and me, someone who peruses it superficially, that having a consistent mindfulness does make a huge difference in connecting to the reality, that a chain of scurrying ants as viewed from a distance isn't of such an order and discipline as observed from a close quarter rather errant--the one before, who misses a single step, being trampled on by the following one; no place for thinking for the one before but to keep oneself going on to the end, up to the extremity of this uncertainty, life.
