The Arcades Project - Operi

identity, we can transport ourselves into even the purest of all regions-into
death:' Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Buck der Freunde (Leipzig, 1929), p. 111.'
[S2,2]
Very striking how Hofmarmsthal calls this "somehow one being" a being in the
sphere of death. Hence the inmlOrtality of his "religious novice;' that fictional
character of whom he spoke during his last meeting with me, and who was
supposed to make his way through changing religions down the centuries, as
through the suite of rooms of one grand apartment.' How it is that, within the
narrowly confined space of a single life, this "being somehow one" with what has
been leads into the sphere of death-this dawned on me for the first tinle in Paris,
during a conversation about Proust, in 1930. To be sure, Proust never heightened
but rather analyzed humanity. His moral greatness, though, lies in quite another
direction. With a passion unknown to any Wliter before him, he took as his
subject the fidelity to things that have crossed our path in life. Fidelity to an
afternoon, to a tree, a spot of sun on the carpet; fidelily to garnlents, pieces of
furniture, to perfumes or landscapes. (The discovery he ultinlately makes on the
road to Meseglise is the highest "moral teaching" Proust has to offer: a sort of
spatial transposition of the semper idem.) I grant that Proust, in the deepest sense,
"perhaps ranges himself on the side of death:' His cosmos has its sun, perhaps, in
death, around which orbit the lived moments, the gathered things. "Beyond the
pleasure principle" is probably the best commentary there is on Proust's works.
In order to understand Proust, generally speaking, it is perhaps necessary to
begin with the fact that his subject is the obverse side, Ie revers, "not so mnch of
the world but of life itself." [S2,3]
The eternity of the operetta, says Wiesengrund in his essay on this form,!! is the
eternity of yesterday. [S2,4]
'Perhaps no simulacrum has provided us with an ensemble of ohJects more precisely
attuned to the eoncept of "ideal' than that great simulacrum whi(h eonstitutes
the revolutionary ornamental architecture of Jugendstil. No eollective effort
has sueeeeded in ereating a dream world as pure, and as disturhing, as these
Jugendstil buildings. Situated, as they are, on the margins of architecture, they
alone constitute the realization of desires in which an exeessively violent and eruel
aut.omatism painfully betrays the sort of hatred for reality and need for refuge in
an ideal world that we fmel in childhood neurosis." Salvador Dall, '''L'Ane
pourri," Le Surrealisme au. service de La revolution, 1, no. 1 (Paris, 1930), p. 12.
o Industry 0 Advertising 0 [S2,5]
"Here is what we can still love: the inlposing block of those rapturous and frigid
structures scattered across all of Europe, scorned and neglected by anthologies
and studies." Salvador Dali, "VAne pourri;' Le Surreafisme au service de fa revolution,
1, no. 1 (Paris, 1930), p. 12. Perhaps no city contains more perfect examples