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... And yet, perhaps I was not wrong in sacrificing the pleasures not
only of society but of friendship to that of spending the whole day in
this green garden. People who have the capacity to do so - it is true
that such people are artists, and I had long been convinced that I should
never be that - also have a duty to live for themselves. And friendship
is a dispensation from this duty, an abdication of self. Even conversation,
which is friendship's mode of expression, is a superficial digression
which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without
doing more than indefinitely repeating the vacuity of a minute, whereas
the march of thought in the solitary work of artistic creation proceeds
in depth, in the only direction that is not closed to us, along which we
are free to advance - though with more effort, it is true - towards a
goal of truth. And friendship is not merely devoid of virtue, like
conversation, it is fatal to us as well. For the sense of boredom
which those of us whose law of development is purely internal cannot
help but feel in a friend's company (when, that is to say, we must remain
on the surface of ourselves, instead of pursuing our voyage of discovery
into the depths) - that first impression of boredom our friendship
impels us to correct when we are alone again, to recall with emotion
the words which our friend said to us, to look upon them as a valuable
addition to our substance, when the fact is that we are not like buildings
to which stones can be added from without, but like trees which draw
from their own sap the next knot that will appear on their trunks, the
spreading roof of their foliage.
From Marcel Proust's Within A Budding Grove |