Noel’s Reviews > The Captive / The Fugitive > Status Update
Noel
is 56% done
I could, if I chose, take Albertine on my knee, hold her head in my hands, I could caress her, run my hands slowly over her, but, just as if I had been handling a stone which encloses the salt of immemorial oceans or the light of a star, I felt that I was touching no more than the sealed envelope of a person who inwardly reached to infinity. How I suffered from that position to which we are reduced by the
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— 1 hour, 57 min ago
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Noel’s Previous Updates
Noel
is 56% done
How many people, how many places (even places which did not concern her directly, vague haunts of pleasure where she might have enjoyed some pleasure, places where there are a great many people, where people brush against one) had Albertine—like a person who, shepherding all her escort, a whole crowd, past the barrier in front of her, secures their admission to the theatre—from the threshold of my
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— 2 hours, 29 min ago
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Noel
is 54% done
Perhaps it was in this, I said to Albertine, this unknown quality of a unique world which no other composer had ever yet revealed, that the most authentic proof of genius lies, even more than in the content of the work itself. “Even in literature?” Albertine inquired. “Even in literature.” And thinking again of the sameness of Vinteuil’s works, I explained to Albertine that the great men of letters
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— 3 hours, 35 min ago
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Noel
is 49% done
Since starting this book I have moved countries, I’ve gone through university, I’ve been heartbroken, I’ve broken hearts…
— Oct 03, 2026 12:34AM
Noel
is 37% done
“But in that case is it not true that those elements—all the residuum of reality which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk, even from friend to friend, from master to disciple, from lover to mistress, that ineffable something which differentiates qualitatively what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases…”
[Cont’d]
— May 29, 2023 10:30PM
[Cont’d]
Noel
is 26% done
To write a passage so beautiful and then return to the same mind-numbing topics…
“At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic’s article, he noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and, finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall.”
[Cont’d]
— May 21, 2023 10:58PM
“At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic’s article, he noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and, finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall.”
[Cont’d]
Noel
is 10% done
Oh, can’t you see
You belong to me?
How my poor heart aches
With every step you take?
Every move you make
And every vow you break
Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
I’ll be watching you
Every move you make
Every step you take
I’ll be watching you
— Jan 03, 2023 03:35PM
You belong to me?
How my poor heart aches
With every step you take?
Every move you make
And every vow you break
Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
I’ll be watching you
Every move you make
Every step you take
I’ll be watching you
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1 hour, 56 min ago
obliviousness of nature which, when instituting the division of bodies, never thought of making possible the interpenetration of souls! And I realised that Albertine was not even for me (for if her body was in the power of mine, her thoughts eluded the grasp of my thoughts) the marvellous captive with whom I had thought to enrich my home, while concealing her presence there as completely, even from the friends who came to see me and never suspected that she was at the end of the corridor, in the room next to my own, as did that man of whom nobody knew that he kept the Princess of China sealed in a bottle; urging me with cruel and fruitless insistence in quest of the past, she resembled, if anything, a mighty goddess of Time. And if I had to waste years of my life and much of my fortune for her sake—and provided that I can tell myself, which is by no means certain, alas, that she herself lost nothing—I have nothing to regret. No doubt solitude would have been better, more fruitful, less painful.
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The problem with Proust’s portrayal of love isn’t even that it’s wrong. It’s just that it’s terribly one-sided. It’s as if Anna Karenina consisted entirely of Anna and her husband Alexei—and were told entirely from Alexei’s perspective—with nothing of Levin and Kitty. To complete the comparison, it’s as if Anna weren’t even cheating with Vronsky, and the book were just as long…