Marcel Proust
Harrison rented a ramshackle cottage near the Brittany town of Beg-Meil, and each evening raced to the dunes to watch the sun set over the ocean. In late-summer 1896, he was joined there by struggling writer Marcel Proust and composer Reynaldo Hahn. He opened their eyes to how light plays on water:
"We have seen the sea successively turn blood red, purple, nacreous with silver, gold, white, emerald green, and yesterday we were dazzled by an entirely pink sea specked with blue sails."
Hahn is considered the inspiration for the title character in Proust's attempted first novel Jean Santeuil, but another character, "C", seems to be based on Harrison, along with aspects of the character Elstir, the painter in Remembrance of Things Past.
Read more about this topic: T. Alexander Harrison
Famous quotes by marcel proust:
“When we are in love, the sentiment is too great to be contained whole within us; it radiates out to our beloved, finds in her a surface which stops it, forces it to return to its point of departure, and it is this rebound of our own tenderness which we call the other’s affection and which charms us more than when it first went out because we do not see that it comes from us.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“Even the simple act that we call ‘going to visit a person of our acquaintance’ is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“I was the one who was working to destroy the one thing to which I was committed, that is, my relationship with Gilberte; I was doing so by creating, little by little and through the prolonged separation from my friend, not her indifference, but my own. It was toward a long and cruel suicide of the self within myself which loved Gilberte that I continuously set myself ...”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)