STATE OF THE ART, PART THREE

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.

Marcel Proust 

Belatedly the finale to our State of the Art triptych:

And as British Summer Time has not long ended, a short round-up of the PA (Petherbridge Academy) Summer Exhibition:

Portrait of Proust, aged twenty-one
by Jacques-Emile Blanche

Having been absorbed for the past couple of months in the world of George Eliot, I am at last reading the greatest twentieth-century French novel, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). And I’m reminded of a limerick I wrote when I was beleaguered for days on a dull film set in a south London backwater, doing an episode of a police series for TV. Worried at on point about some continuity issue with my breast-pocket handkerchief, I was told it didn’t matter for the next shot because I was going to be in the back of it.

    To the back of the shot I am used

    Where my image is vague and diffused

    I do not demur

    At being a blur

    But I could be at home reading Proust.

As it happens, Proust was as absorbed as I by the novels of George Eliot and once admitted to the diplomat Robert de Billy ‘two pages of Mill on the Floss reduce me to tears.’