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:
“We become moral when we are unhappy.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, my candle barely put out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have the time to say to myself: ‘I am falling asleep’.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“I waited alone, in the company of orchids, roses and violets who—like people waiting beside you, but to whom you are unknown—maintained a silence which their individuality of living things rendered more imposing and in their chilly manner received the heat from an incandescent coal fire, preciously placed behind a crystal glass, in a white marble tub where it dropped, from time to time, its dangerous rubies.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“He admired the terrible recreative power of his memory. It was only with the weakening of this generator whose fecundity diminishes with age that he could hope for his torture to be appeased. But it appeared that the power to make him suffer of one of Odette’s statements seemed exhausted, then one of these statements on which Swann’s spirit had until then not dwelled, an almost new word relayed the others and struck him with new vigor.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)