Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2005).
This idea reappears in Finding Time Again: “les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus.”
The large and ordinary world as I knew it before March 2020 feels like that paradise right now.
Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)
[Ian Patterson’s translation in Finding Time Again: “the only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost.”]
Tuesday, March 9, 2021
“Paradises lost”
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comments: 4
I have yet to read any Proust, which is one of the lacunae in my cultural development. But the idea you describe above reminds me of Robert Hass's poem, Meditation at Lagunitas, reproduced here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47553/meditation-at-lagunitas
I stumbled upon Orange Crate Art some years ago when I first hopped on Google's RSS reader (RIP), which suggested your blog. And having taken the plunge, it has been wonderful to read your criticism, jokes, reminiscences, dream journals, movie reviews, political screeds, adventures, and all the rest. So thank you for all that, and for evoking the mood of the Hass poem, one of my favorites.
That poem resonates. It sounds to me like the aftermath of a conversation (real or imaginary) about deconstruction and the idea of a lost foundation, lost ground — “a first world / of undivided light.” I’m an anti-foundationalist myself, as I’d bet Robert Hass is.
Oh gosh, Google Reader (another loss). Mark Frauenfelder (of Boing Boing) recommended my blog on his list of picks — I’d met him and David Pescovitz at the U of Illinois, where they were week-long guests in the living-learning community (more or less an arts-and-humanities-focused dorm) where Rachel and Ben were living. His recommendation gave my blog a real boost.
Thanks for reading and commenting, always.
Yes, it was via the group of related blogs when I selected Boing Boing that I found you. Evidently I owe Frauenfelder a beer.
Me too. : )
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