S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
Before June ends, I must spill confetti in honor of the 110th anniversary of Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Imagine Jules Laforgue’s ghost in the margins, noticing his own influence on the poems of the young T.S. Or don’t imagine him at all. Imagine, instead, a yellow notebook — and a bench near a lake where a person took notes in the month of June 2024, at the beginning of her Proustian summer.
Let us go, then — into juxtapositions.
. . . In 1902, while visiting the Hague, Marcel Proust saw Vermeer's View of Delft. It remained, to him, “the most beautiful painting in the world,” as he expressed in a letter to his friend Jean-Louis Vaudoyer twenty years later. Proust carried this painting into his novel, In Search of Lost Time, as a “petit pan de mur jaune” that haunts the final days of the writer, Bergotte.
. . . After his physicians condemned him to bed rest, Bergotte chanced upon a critical review celebrating the magnificent yellow in Vermeer's View of Delft. Was there a yellow wall? Bergotte can't remember seeing it, despite knowing that painting by heart. In a fit of excitement, he decides to go to the museum and glimpse this yellow for himself. Proust's narrator provides an account of Bergotte's adventure— the blue figures appearing, the pink sand swirling, the astonishment of discerning “the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall.” The muttering retreats.
A dizzied Bergotte fixes his gaze on that color “like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch,” and tells Proust: “That’s how I ought to have written.”
. . . Bergotte condemns his recent books as “too dry” and brittle. He should “have gone over them with a few layers of color” and made his “language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.” The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle along the horizon. The cosmic nature of the ensuing judgement:
In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter.
Suddenly, Bergotte collapses in front of Vermeer's painting.
“He was dead,” Proust wrote of Bergotte. But what does it mean for Bergotte, the writer, to be dead? Neither spiritualism nor religion can prove an afterlife. The soul's continuance cannot be ascertained . . .
Launching into one of his formidable, circuitous sentences, Proust writes: “All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a pieces of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer.”
There will be time, there will be time. “These obligations” don't apply to the life we are living. If anything, the obligations “belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there—those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only—if then!—to fools.” Beneath the music from a farther room.
“The idea that Bergotte was not dead forever is by no means improbable,” Proust concludes. Even at the end of his physical rope, Bergotte's imagination wants to keep writing. I should have been a pair of ragged claws, thinks a ghost. As for Bergotte, he only wished that he had made the language “precious in itself.” Had risked that particular sort of making.
The magic lantern of the Proustian glimmers against the wall. The disenchantment of the world haunts Eliot’s speaker in a way that zombifies living. Those who live are already dead somehow. It is impossible to say just what I mean!
“A revolutionary thought must reject with indignation any attempt to be closed in a certainty, no matter how fascinating,” said Gherasim Luca. But certainty is the drug of the bourgeoisie, the intoxicant of home-owners and settled persons who have invested their labor in preserving the present, if only to admire their own status in it. Status is the thing so many of us believe we have “earned” —
“The master of light,” Johannes Vermeer, painted this view of the bustling harbor in his hometown, Delft. The angles of light tell us it is morning, a summer morning, sun sifting through clouds. Six figures stand near the water where a boat is moored; a barge, the means of public transportation. The figures bide their wait by talking; baskets hang from their arms. The stillness feels lifeless; the water's surface is placid, protected from winds, it reflects the shape of the buildings with few ripples.
It is perfectly balanced, Vermeer's composition, structured horizontally as three bands: the sand quay and the water of the Kolk at the bottom, the city in the center, and the top devoted to the sky, which occupies half the space of the piece. The sky is what creates the shadows, and a few of the clouds carry that gray on their undersides, a gray suggestive of thunderstorms and bad weather. The visible light beyond the bridge catches the eye, offering it a golden hue, a beckoning illumination. Marking his hometown, laying claim to the vessel he had used for decades, Vermeer painted his initials, VM, on the barge's red interior. Vermeer supposedly used calcite, lead white, yellow ochre, natural ultramarine, and madder lake pigments to paint his View. Full of high sentence, a little abstruse.
The diffused highlights painted on the buildings and in the water led art historian Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. to believe that Vermeer used a camera obscura to create View of Delft.
If I believed that my answer was addressed
To one who would never return to the world,
This flame would remain steadfast.
But since no one returns alive from this depth,
If I hear the truth, I can answer you without fear of infamy.
And happiest 110th to all who have measured their lives by the coffee-spoons of their relationship to this Eliot poem across decades!