THE “MYSTERY AND SADNESS” OF THE IMPERFECT TENSE.
THE “MYSTERY AND SADNESS” OF THE IMPERFECT TENSE. Roger Shattuck quotes Proust on the imperfect tense: “I admit that a certain use of the imperfect indicative—of that cruel tense which presents life to us as something at the same time ephemeral and passive, which in the very act of retracing our actions, turns them into illusions, buries them in the past without leaving us as does the perfect tense the consolation of activity—has always remained for me an inexhaustible source of mystery and sadness.” After quoting this, Shattuck continues: “Proust wrote his own novel predominantly in the imperfect tense, a condition that makes the pervading tone of sadness and illusion untranslatable into English.”
What a terrific sentence (Proust’s I mean, but Shattuck’s is good, too). I wish I’d had it/them to hand when I was writing my NYRB piece on Flaubert.