"Lovely Sunday afternoons"

Today's Proust sentence is one over-the-top moment of apostrophe:

Lovely Sunday afternoons under the chestnut tree in the garden at Combray, carefully emptied by me of the ordinary incidents of my own existence, which I had replaced by a life of foreign adventures and foreign aspirations in the heart of a country washed by running waters, you still evoke that life for me when I think of you and you contain it in fact from having gradually encircled and enclosed it -- while I went on with my reading in the falling heat of the day -- in the crystalline succession, slowly changing and spanned by leafy branches, of your silent, sonorous, redolent, and limpid hours.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 89

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Movie recommendation: Into Great Silence

Die Große Stille (Into Great Silence) (2005)
directed by Philip Gröning
French and Latin with English subtitles
169 minutes

Into Great Silence is a documentary film about the Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery. I was eager to see this film, about which I've read rave reviews. My wife Elaine and I went to see it yesterday, and we were disappointed, for similar reasons. I think that there are two main problems.

One: There is no narrative structure. That absence (along with the absence of a narrator) is deliberate, and it follows from the filmmaker's avowed intention to make the film "a monastery," allowing the viewer to enter into the possibilities of contemplation. But monastic life is about structure: the days follow a pattern; the year follows a pattern; and the monks have dedicated themselves to a faith that makes all human lives parts of one great narrative pattern. The absence of narrative structure makes it impossible to grasp the pattern of these monks' days and nights. Most conspicuously missing is any indication of one of the greatest difficulties of Carthusian life: the night office, which leaves monks perpetually without the benefit of a night's uninterrupted sleep. Gröning's image-oriented filmmaking, which returns again and again to a handful of motifs -- candles burning, water dripping, dishes drying, grass blowing -- might work well over an hour or so, but a film of this length needs something more. The constant cuts begin to feel both arbitrary and predictable: it's time once again for something completely different.

Two: The emphasis falls on externals. The film is beautiful to look at. But looking at is not the same as seeing into. Many scenes from the film have the beauty of upscale catalogue photography: that stone! that wood! that simple kitchenware! those natural fibers! that Vermeer lighting! But there's very little to allow a viewer entry into the lives of the film's subjects. We see, say, a monk sitting with an open book. Is he learning Latin? Studying Aquinas? Doing devotional reading? We don't know. We see a monk writing in Spanish. A letter? A translation? We don't know. Carthusian monks have more important things to do than talk about themselves to documentary filmmakers, to be sure. But by the end of the film we have almost no idea of what distinguishes these men from one another, what kinds of lives they once led, what brought them to their lives as Carthusians. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, says somewhere that "Our real journey in life is interior." This film gives us almost no chance to see into these monks' journeys.

There are wonderful moments: the benevolent looks on the faces of the older monks as they welcome two novices (one of whom soon disappears from the film), the brief intimacies of barbering, the strenuous efforts of a bent, bearded monk to remove snow from flowerbeds and debris from a stream. I'd recommend the film to any viewer: it's almost certainly the only chance anyone outside a Carthusian monastery will have to see the daily lives of the monks. But Into Great Silence seems finally to be much more about filmmaking than about the lives of its subjects.

Into Great Silence (The film's website)

Proust and Cather

Willa Cather called Marcel Proust "the greatest French writer of his time," but these writers' names don't often turn up together. Yet consider the following passages.

The first, from Proust, concerns the steeple of Combray's Saint-Hilaire, which gives "all the occupations, all the hours, all the viewpoints of the town their shape, their crown, their consecration":

When after Mass we went in to ask Théodore to bring us a brioche larger than usual because our cousins had taken advantage of the fine weather to come from Thiberzy to have lunch with us, we would have the steeple there in front of us, itself golden and baked like a greater blessed brioche, with flakes and gummy drippings of sun, pricking its sharp point into the blue sky. And in the evening, when I was coming home from a walk and thinking about the moment when I would soon have to say goodnight to my mother and not see her anymore, it was on the contrary so soft, at the close of day, that it looked as if it had been set down and crushed like a cushion of brown velvet against the pale sky which had yielded under its pressure, hollowing slightly to give it room and flowing back over its edges; and the cries of the birds that wheeled around it seemed to increase its silence, lift its spire to a greater height, and endow it with something ineffable.

Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 66

This second passage, from Willa Cather's most enigmatic novel, concerns Godfrey St. Peter's early life near Lake Michigan:

When he remembered his childhood, he remembered blue water. There were certain human figures against it, of course; his practical, strong-willed Methodist mother, his gentle, weaned-away Catholic father, the old Kanuck grandfather, various brothers and sisters. But the great fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake. The sun rose out of it, the day began there; it was like an open door that nobody could shut. The land and all its dreariness could never close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you would soon be free. It was the first thing one saw in the morning, across the rugged cow pasture studded with shaggy pines, and it ran through the days like the weather, not a thing thought about, but a part of consciousness itself. When the ice chunks came in of a winter morning, crumbly and white, throwing off gold and rose-coloured reflections from a copper-coloured sun behind the grey clouds, he didn't observe the detail or know what it was that made him happy; but now, forty years later, he could recall all its aspects perfectly. They had made pictures in him when he was unwilling and unconscious, when his eyes were merely open wide.

Willa Cather, The Professor's House (1925)

Before going back to Proust, I will pause to say that The Professor's House is extraordinary -- satiric, poignant, and highly unconventional in form. It's one of my favorite novels.

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Swann on newspapers

M. Swann speaks:

"What I fault the newspapers for is that day after day they draw our attention to insignificant things whereas only three or four times in our lives do we read a book in which there is something really essential."

Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 26

Paris Hilton won't fight sentence (Chicago Tribune)

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Monty Python and Proust

It's Monty Python's All-England Summarize Proust Competition. The goal is to summarize À la recherche du temps perdu in fifteen seconds:

"Proust's novel ostensibly tells of the irrevocability of time lost, the forfeiture of innocence through experience, the reinstallment of extra-temporal values of time regained. Ultimately the novel is both optimistic and set within the context of a humane religious experience, restating as it does the concept of intemporality. in the first volume, Swann, the family friend --"

Gong.

All-England Summarize Proust Competition (YouTube) (Slightly naughty language near the end)

"Help! I'm reading Proust!"

"I've started In Search of Lost Time and found I like it. Should I keep going?"

Thus begins a 2005 thread from MetaFilter, with lots of suggestions for the reader:

Help, I'm reading Proust!

(The appropriate answer to the question is "Yes, keep going." The rewards are considerable.)

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Proust: "Now who can that be?"

I've just begun reading Proust again, my second time through, and will be posting one excerpt a day (at least from Swann's Way), probably single sentences this time through. Here's the narrator's family, working hard to make things sound and look natural when company arrives. I love the final simile, a beautiful example of Proust's genius for accretion:

On those evenings when, as we sat in front of the house under the large chestnut tree, around the iron table, we heard at the far end of the garden, not the copious high-pitched bell that drenched, that deafened in passing with its ferruginous, icy, inexhaustible noise any person in the household who set it off by coming in "without ringing," but the shy, oval, golden double tinkling of the little visitors' bell, everyone would immediately wonder: "A visitor -- now who can that be?" but we knew very well it could only be M. Swann; my great-aunt speaking loudly, to set an example, in a tone of voice that she strained to make natural, said not to whisper that way; that nothing is more disagreeable for a visitor just coming in who is led to think that people are saying things he should not hear; and they would send as a scout my grandmother, who was always glad to have a pretext for taking one more walk around the garden and who would profit from it by surreptitiously pulling up a few rose stakes on the way so as to make the roses look a little more natural, like a mother who runs her hand through her son's hair to fluff it up after the barber has flattened it too much.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 14

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Lord Buckley and Shakespeare

You know why they called him Willie the Shake? Because he shook everybody. They give him a nickel's worth of ink and five cents' worth of paper, he sat down, wrote up such a breeze, brrt, that's all there was, Jack, there was no more.

Lord Buckley does Shakespeare, the funeral oration from Julius Caesar. A bonus: His Lordship sings "A-Tisket, A-Tasket." Knock him your lobes.

Lord Buckley (You Bet Your Life, with Groucho Marx)

More on Lord Buckley:

Lord Buckley (The official website)
Lord Buckley (Wikipedia)
Transcripts of Lord Buckley monologues

Happy birthday, Ben!

[Our family, drawn by my son Ben, some years ago.]

Main Street: The dowdy world goes shopping

[Postcard from the collection of Maggie Land Blanck. Used by permission.]

That's Main Street in Hackensack, New Jersey, pictured on a postcard postmarked 1971. That's Main Street as I knew it, circa 1969 and 1970, when it was my introduction to bookstores and record stores, via a short bus ride from my town of Ridgefield. I was in middle school then, not old enough to drive.

When I think about Main Street, I can reconstruct it only as isolated points of interest amid long stretches of commercial something-or-other. There was the Relic Rack, my first record store (my friend Chris Sippel, with whom I first made these bus trips, was listening to oldies). I bought my first blues records at the Relic Rack, the Columbia double-album The Story of the Blues. Across the street a little further up, there was Woolworth's, where I found Canned Heat's Living the Blues in the $1.99 section, back when every Woolworth's, Kreskge, and W.T. Grant had one or more bins of bargain LPs. Then there was Prozy's Army-Navy, where I once bought a blue web belt. Further up the street and back across was Hackensack Record King (such modesty in that name). I can remember buying John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat's Hooker 'n Heat there. Then the Hackensack Library, where I borrowed Art Tatum records and books on T.S. Eliot. And up another block or so, Womrath's, the first great bookstore I ever knew.

Imagine: a large independent bookstore on a downtown street in a modest-sized city. I remember many books from Womrath's: James Joyce's Ulysses (a Modern Library hardcover), Dashiell Hammett's novels, Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths, and Frederick Copleston's multi-volume History of Philosophy, small paperbacks whose bindings tended to crack when the books were opened. I can also remember standing in Womrath's and puzzling over Wisconsin Death Trip, which seemed too scary to bring home.

Near the end of the shopping territory was a corner shoe store where I bought Adidas and Converse All-Stars and Pumas. The Pumas were Clydes, named for the Knicks' Walt Frazier ("Clyde," apparently in honor of a hat like one that Warren Beatty worn in Bonnie and Clyde). Yes, that's the Walt Frazier who now does commercials for Just for Men hair coloring.

The strangest store on Main Street, so strange that I can't place it in relation to the others, was Wehman Brothers, which seemed to be partly a book warehouse and partly a used-book store. The storefront windows were always filled with tools, plumbing fixtures, and pieces of machinery. The attraction of this place for me was an enormous inventory of Dover paperbacks -- not as cheap as Dover's Thrift editions, but still modestly priced.

There were two Wehman brothers, old guys who might be described as heavy-set Collyer brothers. One smoked cigars and sat behind a counter piled with papers and books. He claimed to have known Andy Razaf, the lyricist for "Ain't Misbehavin'," "Black and Blue," and "Honeysuckle Rose." I remember the other brother once showing me a picture of a bodybuilder, minus clothing, and asking if I wanted to buy it. All I could think of saying was "No." After that, I didn't go back. Further strangeness: I have now discovered, via Google, that the Wehmans were apparently also publishers, reprinting books on Freemasonry, hypnosis, magic, sexuality, and UFOs.

My teenaged shopping habits mirrored those of the general population: though I visited Womrath's all through college (supplemented by the Gotham Book Mart and the Strand Book Store in Manhattan), I forsook the rest of Main Street as soon as I could drive to Garden State Plaza in Paramus, the home of Sam Goody's, a then-great record store. Life in malltime had begun.

I still have every record and book I've mentioned in this post. Of the stores I've mentioned, only Hackensack Record King, now simply The Record King, remains.

*

July 2021: The Record King is closing because of Main Street redevelopment. And as I now know, the “Wehman brothers” were Joe and Murray Winters. The Winters bought the Wehman business in 1936 and moved from Manhattan to Hackensack in 1953 — or was it 1962? The store closed in 1979. Two articles from the New Jersey newspaper The Record — 1, 2 — tell the story, with two dates for the move. Thanks, librarian.

Hackensack, New Jersey (Postcards from the collection of Maggie Land Blanck)

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