Overheard

Waiting this afternoon in -- where else? -- a waiting room, while work was done on our car, I was also in Babel. A movie played on a large wall-mounted screen, with the sound coming from a speaker at the opposite end of the room. Among my fellow waiters, two or three cellphone conversations went on at all times. I slouched in a chair and shut out most of the noise by reading, but I did catch these words, from the movie:

"When they say 'hardwood floors,' what they really mean is 'hard wood floors.'"

And these words, spoken into a cellphone by someone two chairs down:

"Is she still getting beautiful, or is she fully done?"

A Google search tells me that the line about the floors is from the 1988 movie Funny Farm: "Chevy Chase finds life in the country isn't what it's cracked up to be!" The Internet, it has everything.

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Parents, weather, plaid, mourning, hums

The narrator's Aunt Léonie has died (trust me; that's not a spoiler), and the servant Françoise is grief-stricken. Today's Proust sentence has a little of everything:

That autumn, completely occupied as they were with the formalities that had to be observed, the interviews with notaries and tenants, my parents, having scarcely any time to go on excursions, which the weather frustrated in any case, fell into the habit of letting me go for walks without them along the Méséglise way, wrapped in a great plaid that protected me from the rain and that I threw over my shoulders all the more readily because I sensed that its Scottish patterning scandalized Françoise, into whose mind one could not have introduced the idea that the color of one's clothes had nothing to do with mourning, and to whom, in any case, the sorrow that we felt over the death of my aunt was not very satisfactory, because we had not offered a large funeral dinner, because we did not adopt a special tone of voice in speaking of her, because I even hummed to myself now and then.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 157

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Chariot racing in Brazil

Brazilian sugar-cane farmer Luiz Augusto Alves de Oliveira has built a hippodrome and is seeking to revive the ancient sport of chariot racing:

The Brazilian Mr. de Oliveira's career as a charioteer began about 10 years ago while he was recovering from a motorcycle accident and had nothing to do but watch the Charlton Heston Ben-Hur over and over. When he finally got back on his feet, Mr. de Oliveira set about working with field hands and friends to build and race aluminum chariots.

Neighbors such as Heloísa Consoni were apprehensive at first about the goings-on at Mr. de Oliveira's ranch. "We weren't sure if he meant to bring in lions and gladiators, too," Mrs. Consoni says. But now she is a fan. "How can you not love that speed?" she says.

The New Ben-Hurs: Chariot Racing Stages a Comeback (Wall Street Journal)

Proust and Porter

Listening to my son's final high-school chorus concert tonight (way to go, Ben!), I realized that Cole Porter's "All of You" is the most Proustian of love songs. It is about nothing less than possession. Here's Proust:

I looked at her, at first with the sort of gaze that is not merely the messenger of the eyes, but a window at which all the senses lean out, anxious and petrified, a gaze that would like to touch the body it is looking at, capture it, take it away and the soul along with it . . . .

From Swann’s Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 144

And Cole Porter:

I love the looks of you, the lure of you.
I'd love to take a tour of you.
The eyes, the arms, the mouth of you;
The east, west, north, and the south of you.
I'd love to gain complete control of you
And handle even the heart and soul of you.
So love at least a small percent of me, do,
For I love all of you.

Hearing this lyric sung by high-schoolers might seem a bit strange, but it can't compare to the experience my wife Elaine and I had some years back of hearing a chorus of elementary-school children sing "YMCA." We're city slickers, so we found that scenario both embarrassing and hilarious. But we kept our mouths shut.

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Love and hate and Proust

Gilberte Swann made her first appearance in these pages last year. Here she is again, in a sentence from Swann’s Way that captures the sort of self-division that will come to shape the narrator’s relationships with women throughout In Search of Lost Time. The narrator has just seen Gilberte for the first time:

I thought her so beautiful that I wished I could retrace my steps and shout at her with a shrug of my shoulders, “I think you’re ugly, I think you’re grotesque, I hate you!”

From Swann’s Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 145

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Another Proust sentence

I like the way this sentence shows a writer listening:

A little tap against the windowpane, as though something had struck it, followed by a copious light spill, as of grains of sand dropping from a window above, then the spill extending, becoming regular, finding a rhythm, turning fluid, resonant, musical, immeasurable, universal: it was the rain.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 103-104

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More "Giant Steps"

John Coltrane's tenor solo comes to life on the page. I can't imagine the amount of patient work that went into Dan Cohen's short film:

"Giant Steps" (YouTube, via Fojazz)

Related post
"Giant Steps" (Michal Levy's animation)

"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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