The Arcades Project - Operi

in those peculiar places, railway stations, which do not constitute, so to speak, a
paft of the surrounding town but contain the essence of its personality, just as
upon their signboards they bear its painted name .... Unhappily dl0se marvel·
ous places which are railway stations, from which one sets out for a remote
destination, are tragic places also, for ... we must lay aside all hope of going
horne to sleep in our own bed, once we have made up our mind to penetrate into
the pestiferous cavern through which we may have access to the mystery, into
one of those vast, glass-roofed sheds, like that of Saint-Lazare, into which I must
go to find the train for Balbec, and which extended over the rent bowels of the
city one of those bleak and boundless slcies, heavy with an accumulation of
dramatic menaces, like certain slcies painted with an almost Parisian modernity
by Maotegna or Veronese, beneath which could be accomplished only some
solemn and tremendous act, such as a departure by train or the Elevation of the
Cross." Marcel Proust, A l'Ombre desjeunesfilles e"flew, ( paris), vol. 2, pp. 62-
63. '"
[SI0a]
Proust on the museum: 'But in this respect, as in every other, our age is infected
with a mania for showing things only in the environment that properly belongs to
them, thereby suppressing the essential thing: the act of mind which isolated them
from that environment. A picture is nowadays "presented' in the midst of' furniture,
ornaments, hangings of' the same period, a secondhand scheme of decoration
. .. ; and among these, the masterpiece at which we glance up from the table
while we dine does not. give us that exhilarating delight which we can expect from it
only in a public gallery, which symbolizes far better by its bareness, by the ahsence
of all irritating detail, those innermost spaces into which the artist withdrew to
create it." Marcel Pronst, A l'Ombre des jeunes fiUes en fleurs (Paris), vol. 2,
pp. 62-63." [Sl1,l]
How does modernism become Jugendstil? [Sl1,2]
Battlefield or hazaar? In former times, we may recan, there was, in literature, a
movement of generous and disinterested activity. There were schools and leaders
of schools, parties and leaders of parties, systems comhating other systems, intellectual
currents and countercurrents . .. -a passionate, militant literary life . ...
Ah yes, around 1830, I should say, all the men of letters used to glory in being
soldiers on an expedition, and what they required of puhlicity they got, in the
shadow of some banner or other, from the proud summons to the field of battle
. ... What remains to us today of all this hrave show? Our forefathers fought
the good fight, and we-we manufacture and sell. Amid the confusion of the present,
what is most clear to me is that in place of the battlefield have come myriad
shops and workshops, where each day sees the production and vending of the
newest fashions and what, in general, is known as the Paris article." Yes, modiste
is the word for our generation of thinkers and dreamers." Hippolyte Babon, Les
Payens innocents (Paris, 1858), pp. vii-viii (,,"Lettre a Charles Asselinean").
[Sl1,3]