Places v. People
More sentences from Proust’s The Times Rediscovered:
As to monuments, the destruction of a unique masterpiece like Rheims is not so terrible to me as to witness the destruction of such numbers of _ensembles_ which made the smallest village of France instructive and charming….
Even before the war they [the Americans] loved our country and our art and paid high prices for our masterpieces of which they have many now. But it is precisely this deracinated art, as M. Barrés would say, which is the reverse of everything which made the supreme charm of France. The Chateau explained the church which in its turn, because it had been a place of pilgrimage, explained the _chanson de geste_….
…M. Barrés who alas! has been the cause of our making too many pilgrimages to the statue of Strasbourg and to the tomb of M. Deroulède, was moving and graceful when he wrote that the Cathedral of Rheims itself was less dear to us than the life of one of our infantrymen. This assertion makes the rage of our newspapers against the German general who said that the Cathedral of Rheims was less precious to him than the life of a German soldier, rather ridiculous.
One point of this book seems to be that art is necessary to capture the present, or the past, or any time, and that even the mundane moment is valuable and worth capturing. Maybe it is easier to capture the grand and special moments, and so we should devote more time to them, but that is a different motive from the value of the grandness in itself.