Antiquitopia

When a mind has a tendency towards day-dreams, it's a mistake to shield it from them, to ration them. So long as you divert your mind from its day-dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will be the victim of all sorts of appearances because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little day-dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of one's day-dreams if one is not to be troubled by them.... (Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove , In Search of Lost Time ; trans. Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Enright) Here the character speaking is the painter Elstir, relaying this information to our day-dreaming narrator at his studio in seascape vistas of Balbec. He almost comes off as a Platonist in his desire to move from the appearances of things to the things themselves, but the true nature here to be grasped is not the form or idea of the good or beautiful, but the tr...

A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the an who contradicts it. Partaking of the universal community of minds, it infiltrates, grafts itself on to, the mind of him whom it refutes, among other contiguous ideas, with the aid of which, counter-attacking, he complements and corrects it; so that the final verdict is always to some extent the work of both parties to a discussion. It is to ideas which are not, strictly speaking, ideas at all, to ideas which, based on nothing, can find no foothold, no fraternal echo in the mind of the adversary, that the latter, grappling as it were with thin air, can find no word to say in answer. (Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove , I n Search of Lost Time ; trans. Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Enright) This reminds me of a saying by Oscar Wilde: "When people agree with me, I always think I am in the wrong." Similarly, Proust suggests that when your ideas encounter no opposition, they are simply flimsy, lacking robustness; they la...