Proust

I finished reading In Search of Lost Time last night, five months and two days after I started. The final volume, titled Finding Time Again in the Penguin translation, took me only six days, during which I began to have the awful thought that if "anything" were to "happen to me" (that odd euphemism), it could happen before I had finished reading Proust. I had to keep reading! How strange then to find that as In Search of Lost Time nears its end, the work's still-unnamed narrator, after finally coming to understand his vocation as a writer, fears that something might happen to him before he is able to finish his work.

Proust really seems in such ways to be a kindred spirit. He seems to have understood in so many ways what it is that "we" (recurring word in the novel) experience in our relations to people, places, and things in time. He is, for me, the writer of consciousness and memory. His explorations of both, alas, make the stream of consciousness of Ulysses -- e.g., "Sardines. Little things. Good with toast." -- seem a bit like a dated gadget. (That's a made-up sample of Joyce. But if I'm reading correctly, some of the comments in Finding Time Again on the representation of consciousness in fiction appear to be aimed at Joyce's work-then-in-progress.)

I finished reading Proust for the first time: that's what I should've written above. I plan to go back, soon. Before I do, I want to read Pleasures and Days (sketches and short stories), a volume of letters, Céleste Albaret's memoir Monsieur Proust (CA was Proust's housekeeper), Edmund White's short bio, and Howard Moss' The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust (a used-book find). And I plan to dip, at least, into the large biographies, Gilles Deleuze's Proust and Signs, and, of course, the French text and the earlier translations. And I'm wondering whether I want to read Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life. He already has.

Here's one passage from Finding Time Again, in which the narrator is contemplating what a book might be. I've corrected one typo in the Penguin paperback:

How much better life seemed to me now that it seemed susceptible of being illuminated, taken out of the shadows, restored from our ceaseless falsification of it to the truth of what it was, in short, realized in a book! How happy the writer of a book like that would be, I thought, what a labour awaited him! To give some idea of it, one would have to go to the most elevated and divergent arts for comparisons; for this writer, who would also need to show the contrasting aspects of each character to create depth, would have to prepare his book scrupulously, perpetually regrouping his forces as in an offensive, and putting up with the work like tiredness, accepting it like a rule, constructing it like a church, following it like a regime, overcoming it like an obstacle, winning it like a friendship, feeding it up like a child, creating it like a world, without ever neglecting its mysteries, the explanations for which are probably to be found only in other worlds, while our occasional inklings of them are what, in life and in art, move us most deeply. In books of this scope, there are parts which have never had time to be more than sketched in and which will probably never be finished because of the very extent of the architect's plan. Think how many great cathedrals have been left unfinished! One feeds a book like that, one strengthens its weak parts, one looks after it, but eventually it grows up, it marks our tomb, and protects it from rumours and, for a time, from oblivion. But to return to myself, I was thinking about my book in more modest terms, and it would even be a mistake to say that I was thinking of those who would read it as my readers. For they were not, as I saw it, my readers, so much as readers of their own selves, my book being merely one of those magnifying glasses of the sort the optician at Combray used to offer his customers; my book, but a book thanks to which I would be providing them with the means of reading within themselves. With the result that I would not ask them to praise me or to denigrate me, only to tell me if it was right, if the words they were reading in themselves were really the ones I had written (possible divergences in this regard not necessarily always originating, it should be said, in my having been wrong, but sometimes in the fact that the reader's eyes might not be of a type for which my book was suitable as an aid for self-reading).

Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, translated by Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003), 342-343

[Pictured, the last manuscript page of À la recherche du temps perdu, via Gallica Proust.]

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Overheard

While waiting for a concert to begin:

"He said, 'I'm the reason you're gonna be able to buy that cheaper now.'"

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Proust on perception

Doubtless, objects present man with no more than a limited number of their immeasurable attributes, because of the poverty of our senses. Things are coloured because we have eyes; how many other epithets might they not deserve if we had hundreds of senses? But this different aspect that they could have had is made easier for us to understand by what in life is a minimal incident of which we know only a part, believing it to be the whole, and which someone else perceives as if through a window on the other side of the house giving a different view.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, translated by Peter Collier (London: Penguin, 2003), 646

Only (?) 342 pages of In Search of Lost Time to go.

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Mom, dad, son, hand, thumb

My son Ben and I were playing music -- Sufjan Stevens' "Jacksonville" (Ben, banjo; I, guitar).

"Your hands move the same way when you play," Elaine said.

"We each have an opposable thumb," I said.

"Evolution!" said Ben.

Vanity plates for TCHRS

There's a revealing account in the Chronicle of Higher Education of an assistant professor's experiences at orientation sessions for new faculty. "Graham Bennett" is an assistant professor of English at an American research university. Like many honest commentators on higher education, he is writing under a pseudonym. Here's a sample:

As part of the session on improving classroom discussion, participants were asked to imagine what their teaching philosophy would look like if it were the vanity plate for their car. We were allowed 12 letters with which to represent ourselves. For five minutes, people silently scribbled on -- or, like myself, hostilely stared at -- the sheets of paper that had been given to us for this little exercise.

When the person sitting next to me (who was similarly not writing anything down) asked why I wasn't participating, I explained that this was exactly the sort of activity I loathed as a student, that I found such activities useless and annoying. Two other people at my table sighed with relief and nodded their heads in agreement. It seems I'm not the only one with little patience for "out of the box" exercises (so many of which turn out to be recycled from the same irritating, warm-and-fuzzy, "I'm pretending this activity is original even though it's completely derivative" edutainment box).

Read the whole piece and find out what Bennett wrote for his license plate.

(Dis)Orientation (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Proust: "That's her!"

The narrator is in Venice, about to dine with his mother and Mme Sazerat in a private room in a hotel. He has just told the ladies that Mme de Villeparisis is in the hotel restaurant. Mme Sazerat seems about to faint:

"Couldn't I look at her for a moment? I have dreamed of this all my life."

"Yes, but don't take too long, Madam, for she will soon have finished dining. But why should she interest you so?"

"Because it was Mme de Villeparisis, the Duchesse d'Havré by her first marriage, as beautiful as an angel but as wicked as a witch, who drove my father mad, ruined him, then left him forthwith. And yet! Although she acted like a common whore and caused me and my family to live in straitened circumstances in Combray, now that my father is dead, I console myself with the thought that he loved the most beautiful woman of his day, and since I have never seen her, despite everything it will be a relief . . ."

I led Mme Sazerat, who was trembling with emotion, to the restaurant and pointed out Mme de Villeparisis.

But, like the blind, who direct their eyes everywhere but where they should, Mme Sazerat failed to focus her gaze on Mme de Villeparisis's dinner-table, and sought out another corner of the room.

"Well, she must have left, I can't see her where you say."

And she continued to hunt for the detestable, adorable vision that had haunted her imagination for so long.

"No she hasn't, she's at the second table."

"We must be starting our count from different ends. At what I call the second table there's only an old gentleman sitting beside a horrid little old lady with a red face and a hunchback."

"That's her!"

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, translated by Peter Collier (London: Penguin, 2003), 598-599

(415 pages of In Search of Lost Time to go.)

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Zadie Smith on reading

[Welcome, Boing Boing readers!]

Zadie Smith tells it like it is. These are useful, useful words for any student of literature:

But the problem with readers, the idea we're given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don't know, who they probably couldn't comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That's the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It's an old moral, but it's completely true.

Bookworm interview: Zadie Smith (KCRW FM, Santa Monica, CA, via kottke.org)

Related posts
George Steiner on reading (excerpt from "The end of bookishness?")
Words, mere words (excerpt from Mark Edmondson's Why Read?)

Homer's Rumsfeld

From a brief interview with Robert Fagles, whose translation of the Aeneid was published last week:

"I was asked by a reporter, 'Is there a Rumsfeld in the Iliad?' I said, 'I don't think so, but isn't one enough?'" Fagles said. "He laughed and didn't print it."

That reporter may have been hoping that Fagles would liken the Greek leader Agamemnon to Donald Rumsfeld. The similarities are not difficult to work out: when the Iliad begins, the Greek forces are in an ever-worsening situation, dying of a plague sent by the god Apollo. Is Agamemnon doing anything to change that? No. Moreover, he himself has caused the problems the Greeks are facing, by refusing to honor the priest Chryses' plea for the return of his daughter Chryseis, now Agamemnon's war prize. When the Greek prophet Calchas explains what is happening and what must be done to appease Apollo -- return Chryseis and make sacrifices, Agamemnon is furious. Here's a particularly Rumsfeldian bit of arrogance and cranky complaint about the media (or the medium):

                                                    "You damn
    soothsayer!
You've never given me a good omen yet.
You take some kind of perverse pleasure in
    prophesying
Doom, don't you? Not a single favorable omen ever!
Nothing good ever happens!"

(Iliad 1, translated by Stanley Lombardo)

A reader interested in exploring broad parallels between Homer's world of war and our own should investigate Jonathan Shay's Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming.

Fagles brings Aeneas into modern world (dailyprincetonian.com)

Exploring Combat and the Psyche, Beginning with Homer (article on Jonathan Shay, New York Times)

Veterans Day

The first World War ended on November 11, 1918. Armistice Day was observed the next year. In 1954, Armistice Day became Veterans Day.

From a letter by American Lieutenant Lloyd Brewer Palmer, November 15, 1918:

Dearest Mother:

November 11th 1918 will always be remembered by yours truly. We moved out at 4:00 AM in a heavy mist and marched about 4 km. At 9:30 there was a terrific German barrage. I sure thought it was all up.

At 10:45 the order came to cease firing. Rumors started to spread that it was the end and I am sure I was not the only one to utter a prayer that it was true. Then, 11 o'clock, and a dead silence! That was absolutely the happiest moment of my life.

The PBS site for War Letters (an episode from the documentary series American Experience) includes a transcript with the text of this letter and many others.

War Letters (PBS)

Proust: falling in love

We fall in love with a smile, the look in someone's eyes, a shoulder. That is enough; then during the long hours of hope or sadness, we create a person, we compose a character.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, translated by Peter Collier (London: Penguin, 2003), 496

(Only 515 pages of In Search of Lost Time to go!)

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