www.ruthrosengarten.com




Drawing and photography are central to my practice. Both make pressing - if sometimes fictitious - claims to the capture of lost moments.




05/09/2011

From the archive: a dear and vanished outline

... if a passer-by who is ‘putting me on the right road’ shews me from afar, as a point to aim at, some belfry of a hospital, or a convent steeple lifting the peak of its ecclesiastical cap at the corner of the street which I am to take, my memory need only find in it some dim resemblance to that dear and vanished outline, and the passer-by, should he turn round to make sure that I have not gone astray, would see me, to his astonishment, oblivious of the walk that I had planned to take or the place where I was obliged to call, standing still on the spot, before that steeple, for hours on end, motionless, trying to remember, feeling deep within myself a tract of soil reclaimed from the waters of Lethe slowly drying until the buildings rise on it again; and then no doubt, and then more uneasily than when, just now, I asked him for a direction, I will seek my way again, I will turn a corner... but... the goal is in my heart...




Talking of the remembered steeple of the church at Combray...
 Marcel Proust, À la recherche, sublimely pedantic and precise in the   Scott-Moncrieff translation.