A very short and tender book of essays by Proust. The first half is given to a singular essay about John Ruskin, but the later essay66th book of 2023.
A very short and tender book of essays by Proust. The first half is given to a singular essay about John Ruskin, but the later essays involve a short description of Proust's reading habits as a boy, the armchair he sat in, the curtains nearby, the clock. I've not really read Ruskin, so I probably failed to get onboard and fully appreciate Proust's first essay, but I found the second touching, and not unlike Marcel from In Search of Lost Time. Most interestingly is the final installment in the book, a short essay that reads more like a transcript, quoting Proust. It's only 4 pages long, but the real pinnacle is this tiny, almost already known insight but voiced by the man himself, 'From this point of view,' M. Proust goes on, 'my book would perhaps be like an attempt at a sequence of "Novels of the Unconscious" [...] my work is dominated by the distinction between involuntary and voluntary memory.' To better understand the distinction he is asked by some unknown voice, 'How do you substantiate this distinction?' and Proust explains:
For me, voluntary memory, which is above all a memory of the intellect and of the eyes, gives us only facets of the past that have no truth; but should a smell or a taste, met with again in quite different circumstances, reawaken the past in us, in spite of ourselves, we sense how different that past was from what we thought we had remembered, our voluntary memory having painted it, like a bad painter, in false colours.
Since finishing In Search of Lost Time I essentially decided to read everything about and by Proust that I could get my hands on. I've got a shelf here on GR now called Proust where I'll be hurling it all. I do have, waiting for me, Monsieur Proust, which was written by his housekeeper, a portrait of the man himself. I am almost desperate to begin it, and yet at the moment I am swamped with other things. ...more
As many other reviewers have identified, the story behind this tiny book is more intriguing in some ways to the book itself. Eric Karpeles has writtenAs many other reviewers have identified, the story behind this tiny book is more intriguing in some ways to the book itself. Eric Karpeles has written an introduction that must be read prior to the text itself, which sits otherwise without context in the back half of the book. Józef Czapski was one of many Polish prisoners in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp, kept alive where others had been shot, though they did know why, whether it was God or Fate. To keep their spirits and their sense of self, the prisoners decided that before sleep every night, they would give each other lectures, each prisoner speaking in a field they knew most. Czapski (a painter first and foremost) began by giving lectures of his fellow prisoners about art, but soon shifted his focus onto Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
Of course, no books were allowed in the camp, so Czapski went by his memory alone. He could (like Proust could apparently recite entire pages of Balzac), bring forth passages from Proust verbatim. In this way, more parallels between lecturer and subject were drawn; Czapski realised the importance of involuntary memory, which is one of the many themes that ties the whole of Proust’s novel together. But, as Karpeles says in his introduction, ‘Technically speaking the book in your hand was not written by Józef Czapski He never sat down to commit to paper the words that appear in this volume, but two separate handwritten dictations would eventually be converted into two sets of typewritten pages.’ He goes on to say,
Czapski’s talks, and our knowledge of the circumstances under which they were given, have been handed down to us in this form. Further details remain difficult to verify. We know that Soviet censors monitored all public gatherings in every prison camp, disallowing the presentation of any potentially seditious (i.e. anti-communist) material. Any spoken text had to be submitted in written form for prior approval […] And we know from Czapski that this text was transcribed after the fact of his having given the lectures, not before. How was this procedural detail overcome? Over how many days or weeks did he give his lectures? How many did he give in all? “I dictated part of these lectures,” he wrote (my italics). How much more material was there in his original presentations? When were the handwritten transcriptions typed up, where, and by whom? A typewriter would not have been available to prisoners in the camp. How did these pages, in any form, manage to leave the USSR, and in whose possession? Questions pile up, one uncertainty proposing another.
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His lectures themselves had a different focus than I imagined. The tone is easy. Czapski describes trying once to read Proust (beginning with Vol. 3 and realising it was near enough a 600-page dinner party) and swiftly dropped it before getting ill several months later and trying again (this time with Vol. 5) and falling in love. My experience with Proust was very much the same: I began Vol. 1 in Paris, gave up, and then several months later pulled it off my shelf and began reading again, and was in love. Czapski also gives anecdotes about Proust’s character (he befriended many of Proust’s old friends before the war, though never met the man himself, of course, he began reading him several years after he had died). His memory mostly serves him well, it is interesting to see which scenes and ideas come to him in his prison camp. Naturally he talks about the two great epiphanies in the novel, the tasting of the madeleine in the beginning of Vol. 1 and the epiphany that happens right at the end of Vol. 7 (which, amazingly, I discovered in this book, Proust apparently wrote the final volume before all the others). People call this a good introduction before committing to Proust; I disagree. If one intends to read the whole novel, I would avoid reading this beforehand, for Czapski does talk about later events, the big ideas at the end of the novel, and all the other things I read over 4,000 pages to discover myself. It is meant to be that way. Proust had grand ideas for his novel —
He had wanted the whole thing to appear in a single volume, without paragraphs, without margins, without sections or chapters. The prospect was seen as completely ridiculous by the most refined edtors in Paris, and as a result Proust was forced to break his book up into fifteen or sixteen sections, as each separately titled volume was broken down into two or three sections
— and to spoil some of the larger moments of it through someone else’s thoughts would be a shame, I think.
Overall a tiny but multifaceted look at Proust himself, his illness, his writing process and the moments and themes of his giant novel. I’ve only recently finished his whole novel myself, so I can almost still feel it settling down somewhere in my brain or soul; I am yet to speak with any conviction about whether it changed my life, even whether it was worth months of continuous reading. I am, however, fascinated by the history of this small book and the man it was written about, a sickly man who devoted his entire life to the writing of such a long and complex book. ...more
I began Vol. 1 on the Eurostar into Paris. Vol. 2 got soaked through and warped on a long walk in Cambridge. Vol. 3 kept me company on a living room fI began Vol. 1 on the Eurostar into Paris. Vol. 2 got soaked through and warped on a long walk in Cambridge. Vol. 3 kept me company on a living room floor in London. Vol. 4 was hailed on near Brighton. Vol. 5 and 6 were read at home in my loft-bedroom. I completed Vol. 7 in Paris again, in Pere Lachaise Cemetery, in front of Proust's very tomb.
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After a false start with Vol. 1 back in 2019, I finished Vol. 1 in 2020. It drained me but I was in awe of Proust. I took a long break before returning to Vol. 2 in 2021. By the time I was ready for Vol. 3, now in March 2022, I had been reading the novel for 2 years. Since March I have read a volume every month (technically two volumes in May as they are combined into one) to finish now, in June. My journey with Proust rushed to a sudden end after a long and slow beginning.
I was keen to see if it changed my life or something of the sort. I don't think it has, but maybe it's too early to tell. Am I glad I did it though? Or rather, was it worth it? I think it's hard to know how to answer that; I think there's so much pressure put onto making the most of your time, or not wasting time, these days. There's constant movement and stimulation from almost every direction. It's very rare to see someone just standing and staring into space. I think reading Proust is a little like putting the world into slow-motion, and even after putting the book down, the world is a little slower. That's the thing with reading, it helps us to understand, but it also helps us to think and to live. So in some way I could say Proust has helped me to live and understand better. It was really a test of endurance than difficulty; Proust is not 'hard' to read, he's just long, oh so long. The novel finishes at over 4000 pages long. For me the best volumes are the first and the third. The last three were never edited by Proust and they are full of inconsistencies, but having said that, the prose itself hardly suffers without the edits he probably imagined.
It's surreal to say I'm done, though I'm not and never will be. I guess thanks for the long ride, Proust. I wish I tallied up how long I physically spent reading these books, timed myself per reading session, to add it all up. The guy I work with has something like 4000 hours on this one particular computer game, which I worked out for him as being equivalent to spending five months straight without stopping. Five months of his life on a computer game. But we spend our time where we enjoy it, and he enjoys it. To him, no doubt, spending God knows how many hours reading this book about a boy dipping a biscuit into his tea and remembering the whole of his human experience and ruminating on life, art, time, memory, love, sexuality, being, etc., probably seems like an utter waste of time and effort. C'est la vie.
Six volumes of Proust's novel, the longest novel ever written, lead to this point. Sadly, Proust never edited a single volume after 60th book of 2022.
Six volumes of Proust's novel, the longest novel ever written, lead to this point. Sadly, Proust never edited a single volume after Vol. 4 because he finally died in 1922 in Paris. His brother oversaw the publication of the final three volumes. In Vol. 7 Proust finally begins to ruminate on why he decided to dedicate his already sickly life to such a long novel. He began in 1909: thirteen years of his life. In some ways, and Proust also confirms this in many other ways, this is a giant autobiography. It is the autobiography of a sickly man, of his failings in love, his sadness and his success. The entire thing spins from that first madeleine taste, that goodnight kiss. It begins to circle back to those early moments and the word Combray, reappearing again and again, as Marcel (narrator) casts his mind back. I thought it would be predictable if I gave the final volume 5-stars, and presumed I would inevitably be blown over by it, if not simply because I finished the whole thing. The final volume is good, the best passages are when Proust turns his attention to Lost Time and his reasons for writing, the reasons why anyone writes, the meaning of the very process of writing. I was going to share some quotes but I wondered if it was worth spoiling a single line of this volume when it could take someone so long to get to it. So maybe I won't.
Paris is presently hot. The last few months I have been reading a lot of Proust so I could finish it here in the city. As it turns out, on the days where I wasn't falling asleep before I got into the apartment on my feet, I managed to read some good chunks. On the final morning, before walking to the Metro to take us to the Père Lachaise Cemetery, I read almost to the end. I slid the novel into my bag with just two pages unread. I decided I would squat/sit in front of Proust's very tomb in the Cemetery and read the final two pages of his novel there, before the man himself. The Metro line 2 took us overground towards Père Lachaise Cemetery. We walked the cemetery's quiet cobbled paths. It was about eleven o'clock in the morning and the sun was just starting to pinpoint its way between the leaves of the trees. It was as if we were walking through a forest and not a cemetery. We saw Colette's tomb, Jim Morrison's, Oscar Wilde's, Gertrude Stein's, Chopin's, Honoré de Balzac's. At last we came to Proust's. It was not directly facing a main path. I had to step towards it. There were flowers thrown onto it and a small note written in Spanish. I used my phone to translate it (perhaps very poorly), 'Thanks for recovering lost time to several bugs from multiple latitudes.' His tomb was simple. I finished the book there on my haunches and put it back into my bag. Afterwards, we walked south down Boulevard de Ménilmontant and fell into a café-restaurant. Our table had a typewriter in the middle of it. We all ate burgers and beer, the walls of Père Lachaise just outside the thrown-open doors. L. asked me if I felt changed, if Proust had changed my life as sometimes people often say he does. She asked me what I felt like. I replied as honestly as I could and answered, Relieved. I felt no great epiphany, no tears came to my eyes from the sheer beauty or majesty of the novel, I felt simply content; I also felt surreal, as if there was another volume, as if it would continue for the rest of my life, as if there would always be another volume, every time I thought I was nearly finished, so I became a sort of Sisyphus. And, drinking the last gulp of beer and stepping back onto Boulevard de Ménilmontant, I realised that perhaps that was my grand epiphany, that I would be reading Proust for the rest of my life, that he would remain unfinished, constant, endless, immortal.
Me, this morning (13/06/22), closing the final page of In Search of Lost Time before Proust's tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris.
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Other Proust related pictures from my time in the city.
4.5. This is another placeholder review as I have just finished the combined volumes 5 & 6 by Moncrieff and Kilmartin. Some of the reflections on grie4.5. This is another placeholder review as I have just finished the combined volumes 5 & 6 by Moncrieff and Kilmartin. Some of the reflections on grief, forgetting and remembering were stunning here. The sojourn in Venice (though it's been a while since I visited the city) felt so real and truthful to my own memory of the place. The middle section of the novel is definitely more character-based, dialogue-heavy, but now these later volumes are returning to the ethereal and dreamlike thoughts of Marcel. We are slowly reentering his inner world. Someone asked me the other day, has Proust changed your life so far? I usually hate that 'this book changed my life' schtick and almost never believe it, but I guess when I close the final page in Paris in a few weeks, I'll know for sure. ...more
This is a placeholder as I continue to read Moncrieff and Kilmartin's translation of Vol. 5 & 6 combined. I wanted to review this separately and give This is a placeholder as I continue to read Moncrieff and Kilmartin's translation of Vol. 5 & 6 combined. I wanted to review this separately and give some thoughts before diving into the next without marking it with any read date so it exists only as a thought-bank. Though there are some oversights as expected (now posthumous works here on out (as large as characters being called dead and then reappearing later on very much alive, oversights that big)) this was a great read and the novel is really showing its structure now; Proust is now showing us the arc like a star's trail: so much is now mirroring the earlier volumes and the narrator's time with Albertine is very much like the "Swann in Love" chapter of Vol. 1, complete with giant long ruminations on jealousy and love. Marcel our narrator is a little bit sociopathic in this, manipulating poor Albertine but the realness of his character is baffling in some ways. There are beautiful sentences as ever. Vol. 6 is the shortest one of them all it seems, just over 300 pages by my edition so that shouldn't take me too long, and then it's on for the grand finale. Never thought I'd get this far so soon, but here we are. ...more
So, I have a single volume of Proust's novel left. Volumes 5 & 6 centre almost entirely around Albertine and Marcel's relationship, 49th book of 2022.
So, I have a single volume of Proust's novel left. Volumes 5 & 6 centre almost entirely around Albertine and Marcel's relationship, and there is a large plot point that I can't discuss without spoiling it. That said, a lot of reviews for these volumes spoil the big event so if you don't want it spoilt, avoid reviews, especially since many of them do not have the spoiler tag. I, somehow, didn't see any of the spoilers and so the big happening surprised me. Obviously, time/memory continues to be the biggest theme of these volumes but I've been surprised in the last few volumes how often grief comes up too. I guess grief is intrinsically linked to time: whenever I think of grief I think of the old cliche, time heals. Maybe it's true. I was coming back from work the other day in my mate's car and I asked him if it still hurts him to think of his mother whom he lost at 12-years-old. He told me, Not really, no. Of course, he still thinks about her, but it isn't a sadness anymore, per se. If anything, he said, since she died, I just cry at films more easily. He has two young girls and any Disney film ending, he said, makes him cry. With grief there is the obsessive attempts to remember the person who is gone, and with that we circle back around to memory and the act of remembrance [of things past]. The only grief I've dealt with is losing my grandparents many years ago and when I lost them I remember feeling, above any kind of sadness, the weird sensation that they were indeed gone and if I failed to remember them, it would be as if they were never there. Proust explores all of this. I've heard the final volume is the giant philosophical crescendo, the insight into why he wrote this novel, what it all means, and how it all holds together as one giant arc and achievement.
3.5. Reading the final page of this volume means I have now read 2,437 pages of Proust's whole novel. Vol. 4 has a few reputations w38th book of 2022.
3.5. Reading the final page of this volume means I have now read 2,437 pages of Proust's whole novel. Vol. 4 has a few reputations which I learnt before beginning; firstly: it ends with a 'cliffhanger', secondly: more often than not it's called one of the weakest volumes, thirdly: it is the last volume published in Proust's lifetime, from here, the volumes are 'unedited', fourthly, it is where the reader begins to see the forest for the trees, the structure of the 4000+ page novel begins to reveal its monolithic shape. Surprisingly, most of these reputations/expectations ended up being true. The volume ends with a 'cliffhanger', it has been the weakest so far, it is the final one published before Proust's death in 1922 and things are starting to take shape, 2 and a half thousand pages in.
Vol. 3 is brilliant, humorous, witty, astute, fascinating. Vol. 4 involves long dinner parties as the previous did, but without the adjectives I've just used. Proust has hit a dry patch. Nabokov famously said the first half of Proust's novel is one of the greatest things in literature, and so now we find ourselves in the back half which he excluded. I see why already, though I have high hopes for the next three volumes all the same. The theme of this volume is homosexuality and sexual jealousy. The former was interesting and latter was hardly noteworthy, why look anywhere else but the Swann in Love chapter from Vol. 1 Swann's Way for the theme of jealousy? Charlus is the focus of this part of the novel and I don't find him all that compelling. I read the novel for Swann, Saint-Loup, at times, Bloch, and the moments between the narrator and Albertine. The latter came into its own here, I will say. There are some incredible scenes where the narrator displays his own pathetic nature, jealous and manipulative. The end of Part Two: Chapter One is glorious, particularly the ruminations on grief, a theme very apt for me at the moment, but ignoring the odd scene or beautifully written paragraph, I found this volume mostly forgettable. But, the return to Balbec, some of the mirroring that occurs in the narrator's mind near the end of the novel, these things were exciting to me; Proust's vision is becoming clearer and clearer, the loneliness of the work, its exhaustiveness, he is slowly answering some of the questions that surround this 4000+ page novel, mainly, why? why write such a giant novel? What it is for? What does it all mean? It is the final stretch towards the end now with just 3 volumes to go. L. and I have decided that in June, one morning, in Paris, we want to walk the hour's walk (or more) to the Père Lachaise Cemetery and see Proust's tomb. By that point I hope to have Vol. 7 tucked into my shirt.
Of course, this is comparing Proust to Proust. Despite the flaws, we read Proust because few writers can construct sentences such as these, that bundle their way through seasons, times of day, colours, subjects, with effortless ease and beauty,
Already, as the summer drew to a close, on our journeys from Balbec to Douville, when I saw in the distance the little resort of Saint-Pierre-des-Ifs where, for a moment in the evening, the crest of the cliffs glittered pink like the snow on a mountain at sunset, it no recalled to my mind—let alone the melancholy which its strange, sudden emergence had aroused in me on the first evening, when it filled me with such a longing to take the train back to Paris instead of going on to Balbec—the spectacle that in the morning, Elstir had told me, might be enjoyed from there, at the hour before sunrise, when all the colours of the rainbow are refracted from the rocks, and when he had so often wakened the little boy who had served him as a model one year, to paint him, nude, upon the sands.
I met my own Swann the other day. This is not a name given in likeness, but truly, my old professor has the surname Swann; and the o23rd book of 2022.
I met my own Swann the other day. This is not a name given in likeness, but truly, my old professor has the surname Swann; and the other day I was getting a train home and he wandered into the station with his collapsible bike looking exhausted, but without a doubt, Swann. He pointed to the final carriage where it was quieter and we boarded the train together, he holding his bike, and I, Vol. 3 of Proust under my arm. I knew his train ride home was reserved for unwinding from the world of reading and writing, so he didn’t ask me about the latter at all. Instead, we discussed Ukraine, the time he spent in Bulgaria and the mafia there (somehow we found ourselves on this topic), our families, my girlfriend (whom he knows, another ex-student of his and old classmate of mine), his wife, etc., as we tunnelled through the dark evening. As I prepared for my oncoming stop, he noticed Proust as I began to slide it into my bag. Ah, you’re reading À la recherche du temps perdu, he said. I read the one named after me—it’s wonderful, isn’t it?—but never continued. One of my biggest regrets. I told him it was wonderful, particularly, I agreed, the one named after him. By then I had placed Proust back in my bag and stood up. Once the train had stopped I told him to keep shining his light (something a prisoner once told him, “You just have to keep shining your light”, when he worked in prisons, getting them to read and write and find empathy) and left the carriage.
Vol. 3 of In Search of Lost Time was a brilliant read, far better, for me, than Vol. 2 [1], which was a little too slow and long, dealing with our young narrator in love. That’s usually my sort of thing: love, and art too, but for some reason I slogged through parts of the previous volume and it didn’t grab me as the first had. As far as explaining Vol. 3 goes, I wasn’t looking forward to it. All 700 pages record our narrator’s struggles to infiltrate Parisian high society. ‘Parties’ go on for hundreds of pages, and they really are rich people sitting around talking about other rich people, their lives, etc.; it was easy to see how before starting I was daunted by the thought of it. But instead, I could hardly put the novel down. The whole thing is dripping with satire and wit, the whole thing is a giant mockery of high society. And it’s brilliant. It’s so intelligent, at times humorous, at times warm; somehow, Proust nails it. And for the first time, Proust’s masterpiece is beginning to feel like a ‘novel’: the characters are beginning to cement themselves, our narrator is now on his way to adulthood and becoming more concrete. Everything is firmer than the mostly abstract, etherealness of the first two volumes, which I adored in the first, and less so in the second. This feels a little like the novel is just now beginning, some 1,600/1,700 pages in. But, I suppose if you think about the novel’s size, the portion we are in is probably equivalent to the long openings novels used to have, setting up characters and whatnot, so now perhaps this is the ‘beginning’. But yeah this is brilliant stuff, worthy of a rare 5-stars from me.
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[1] My copy of Vol. 2 now sits on my shelf, warped and swollen, from getting saturated on a long walk through Cambridge in torrential English rain....more
99th book of 2021. Artist for this review is French painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877).
Vol. 2 is really our introduction to our narrator "Marcel". He99th book of 2021. Artist for this review is French painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877).
Vol. 2 is really our introduction to our narrator "Marcel". He has grown up a little from the first volume and is now to be spending his time at a hotel by the sea in Balbec, and finds himself falling in love. I recently read Turgenev's First Love, and this reminded me of a very long and Proustian version of that. Our narrator is young, naive, unsure; it is something we all ourselves recognise. On starting this volume I said about there being far more "plot" than Vol. 1 and that is partly true, there is a little more; but on reaching the end of this 600 page novel, and looking back, I realise that, again, not much actually happened. Instead we remain in the ethereal internal haze of Proust's prose and our narrator's mind. Despite the blurb suggesting that our narrator meets 'the great love of his life', this plot element doesn't come into fruition till about 500 pages into the 600. Before that we have dinner parties, long discussions about certain French families and their reputations, winking memories of Combray from the previous volume, etc.
[image] "Seacoast"—1854-57
My first journey with Proust failed when I took Swann's Way to Paris with me and sat reading it on the Eurostar and wondering what all the fuss was about. I tried again months later and something had, somehow, clicked. Proust isn't "hard" to read, but he requires a great amount of concentration. Last week I was in Cambridge, staying in the university accommodation, and found that I could only absorb about 10 pages at a time, before leaving in the morning for sightseeing, in the evenings, before I inevitably fell asleep, but later in the same week I then went west to stay in a Shepherd's Hut in the middle of the Dorset countryside and found that in those long drowsy afternoons after a walk, I could read a large chunks of it at once by sinking into it. By this point the novel was also making a lovely crinkling/cracking noise as I read it as on the way to the station in Cambridge, in torrential rain, the book got rather soaked through and as it dried it ballooned and warped. So I suppose that like with anything complex, Proust requires attention and patience. Though I enjoyed the narrator becoming a focal point in this volume, the middle section between his dreaming of Gilberte and the end section with his newfound dreaming of Albertine dragged a little at times. Proust makes the long sections about reputation, etiquette, French society, oddly compelling with his dreamy prose but it pales compared to the "Swann in Love" part of the first volume, which centred around love and jealousy, was more engaging for me.
[image] "The Calm Sea"—1869
Recently I've been considering the idea that every novel has a single line or paragraph that can, alone, portray the entire essence of a work. If I had more time and faith in the theory, I would start doing it for every review, choosing a single line or paragraph at the end which sums it all up, so to speak. It is quite a long one for this novel, but for me, this felt like the very glowing heart of the whole volume. For some reason, this speech given by an artist the narrator befriends, feels like something Proust wanted the volume to convey. So I'll end with it, as it was also one of my favourite parts of the whole thing, and it is not often that the mistakes in our lives are celebrated.
"There is no man," he began, "however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man—so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise—unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young people, the sons and grandsons of distinguished men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement from their schooldays. They may perhaps have nothing to retract from their past lives; they could publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have no been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I can see that the picture of what we were at an earlier stage may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not repudiate it, for it is a proof that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life, of the life of studios, of artistic groups—assuming one is a painter—extracted something that transcends them."
I first attempted to read Proust in Paris, December last year, 2019. On the Eurostar, feeling sick and giddy from the early morning105th book of 2020.
I first attempted to read Proust in Paris, December last year, 2019. On the Eurostar, feeling sick and giddy from the early morning rise, I read it slowly. There had been some problem with the seating; my father, mother, brother and I found a young man sat in one of the four seats we had booked around a table. When we suggested he was in the wrong seat he denied it, assured us it was the seat marked on his ticket, but did not show his ticket. I offered to sit down the carriage in a vacant seat on a table of four with a woman and her son and daughter. They were American. The only thing I remember about them is that the daughter had a University of Boston phone case. That is all. And despite wandering out of Gard du Nord and spending the successive days wandering along the Seine, trying grappa as Hemingway once did, buying a copy of ‘The Outsider’ in French, I could not urge myself to continue with Proust. I was bored. The language didn’t interest me, or impress me. Instead, I read Satori In Paris, and by the final day, had moved onto The War of the Worlds, which I started on a stool in a café not far from the Eiffel Tower.
It is now June, six months later. For less reason than anyone does anything, I took Proust off my bookcase and continued reading where I had left off. I hadn’t got far, I remembered what had happened, which frankly, wasn’t a lot. Swann mentions something about the “hierarchy of the arts,” which is an interesting concept, so I write it down as a potential quote to use in my coming dissertation. From then, I keep reading, and I find that in six months something had changed in Proust, or something had changed in me. It is the latter, of course. But what, I don’t know.
Because now I am enchanted. Reading Proust has become like finding a pool of water in a cave, which one imagines isn’t very deep, but once submerged, one realises the pool tunnels endlessly downwards. I am submerged; and, as I propel myself deeper, deeper still, it occurs to me that the water is becoming thicker, and by that, the water I have already passed through above me is weighing down on me too. Still, there is no bottom to speak of.
Recently I have become more irritated by noise. The solace and quiet of Proust, descending the silent pool of water, makes reality too noisy, too shallow. The characters’ thoughts lap against my mind, as if soothing it. Half way through I think that Proust tells us how to live, that Swann’s Way is a book on how to live. I later discover that I was wrong – Proust does not teach us how to live, Proust illuminates how we live. He dissects living, all living; the memories of the narrator, the jealousy and love Swann feels, they are all things we have felt ourselves. And Proust’s tender voice turns a light to them, no brighter than moonlight and no louder than an evening’s waves, to show us.
I have written down on one page, “The steeples of Martinville allow me to picture the spire of Chichester Cathedral once more, it allows me to be younger. Happier, maybe.” I have noticed recently that when one is sad, one looks into the past at happier times, which in turn, makes one believe that they are only ever happier in the past. Nowadays, I spend my time pondering the past and aching, for I am tired of being happier then. I wish to be happier now. Proust has prompted me to explode, to look for beauty, in the ordinary. The way the moonlight lights the raindrops left on my bedroom windows. The perfect globe of shadow on my bed. I imagine Proust has made me question the familiar – that the brain closes its eyes to the familiar. That every night I lie in bed and forget that the moonlight cradles the raindrops above me as if a baby’s head. That the sounds of cats and foxes, the rattling windows, are all signs that the world is greater, that the world continues to exist, even when I am not conscious of it. The only world that no longer exists is the world of memory – it has died, and one remembers it, the same way one remembers the dead.
The streets are currently like memories. There are no cars on the road when I walk to the bakery; it is silent, save the birds, and occasionally the wailing of the level crossing, which has often found itself echoing in my dreams. Lockdown has settled on the town like slumber. When I am home again I sit with a cup of tea and continue to read, to circle deeper into the lives of the narrator, or Swann. I even admit to myself that Proust is boring by the common sense of the word, that nothing happens, but I cannot find myself from reading more, from falling in love with the endless reams of thought, of remembering, as if I need the narrator to remember his own life so I can remember my own.
The final pages of Combray make me want to weep. And later, everything Swann has felt I have felt before in damaged love. Some of the feelings and the dialogue so startlingly real, that I feel as if, sometimes, I am not reading, but looking into some sort of mirror. Proust slowly stuns one into silence, into melancholy and into reflection. The most real reflection comes from silence, maybe. I have identified one of the plants in our house as some ordinary fragment which I will hold onto in my memory. On certain occasions I find it sat in the bathtub, its giant stalk trailing out over the rim and onto the floor, like a giant twisting knot of hair. I find the green of its leaves against the white of the bathtub oddly pleasing to look at. It is not only the plant though, it is how the plant finds itself in the bathtub. I never see it moved from the top of the cupboard (where its leaves hang down like rope) to the bathtub. It is a testament to my mother’s invisible work around the house, keeping it running, clean, watered, alive. It is also lonely in the bathtub. The pot sat in an ether of white, waiting to be lifted back to its home.
Sundays, for me, balance on the precipice which falls one of two ways: the first, forwards into Monday, and the week of work and responsibility; the second, simply in the moment: peaceful, rainy (Sundays, in my mind’s eye are always rainy) and thoughtful. It is apt that on this Sunday I finish Swann’s Way. It is not raining, no, but my windows continue to blow down whenever I open them. I have a lot more to say, but not the words in which to say them. The final lines of Swann’s Way I will hold to my chest, and re-enter the world after lockdown with some new-found knowledge, maybe, or understanding, at least, with new-found beauty....more
Matthew Ted
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Books:
writer-proust
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