Living inside Time

Reading Proust again, I had planned to post sentences from Swann's Way alone, but it's too difficult to resist going on with at least occasional excerpts from the rest of In Search of Lost Time. Here's one. The narrator's father has acknowledged his son's fixed intention to take up writing (not diplomacy) as a way of life. Might that make the narrator happy?

These words of my father's, though they granted me the freedom to be happy or not in life, made me very unhappy that evening. At each one of his unexpected moments of indulgence toward me, I had always wanted to kiss him on his florid cheeks, just above the beard line; and the only thing that ever restrained me was the fear of annoying him. On this occasion, much as an author, to whom his own conceptions seem to have little value because he cannot think of them as separate from himself, may be alarmed at seeing his publishers putting themselves to the trouble of selecting an appropriate paper for them and setting them in a typeface he may think too fine, I began to doubt whether my desire to write was a thing of sufficient importance for my father to lavish such kindness upon it. But it was especially what he said about my likings probably never changing, and what would make me happy in life, that planted two dreadful suspicions in my mind. The first was that, though I met each new day with the thought that I was now on the threshold of life, which still lay before me all unlived and was about to start the very next day, not only had my life in fact begun, but the years to come would not be very different from the years already elapsed. The second, which was really only a variation on the first, was that I did not live outside Time but was subject to its laws, as completely as the fictional characters whose lives, for that very reason, had made me feel so sad when I read of them at Combray, sitting inside my wickerwork shelter. Theoretically, we are aware that the earth is spinning, but in reality we do not notice it: the ground we walk on seems to be stationary and gives no cause for alarm. The same happens with Time. To make its passing perceptible, novelists have to turn the hands of the clock at dizzying speed, to make the reader live through ten, twenty, thirty years in two minutes. At the top of a page, we have been with a lover full of hope; at the foot of the following one, we see him again, already an octogenarian, hobbling his painful daily way round the courtyard of an old-people's home, barely acknowledging greetings, remembering nothing of his past. When my father said, "He's not a child anymore, he's not going to change his mind," etc., he suddenly showed me myself living inside Time; and he filled me with sadness, as though I was not quite the senile inmate of the poorhouse, but one of those heroes dismissed by the writer in the final chapter with a turn of phrase that is cruel in its indifference: "He has taken to absenting himself less and less from the countryside. He has eventually settled down there for good," etc.

From In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, translated by James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002), 55-56

What a remarkable passage: parental permission to live the life one wants turns into a life- and death-sentence. This passage invites a reader to recall her or his earliest recognitions of what it means to live in time (or Time).

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The bald guy

My son showed me an ad from Discover: "Dad, isn't that the bald guy?"



Yes, it's the bald guy:



I don't mean to make light of disease and suffering. I do mean to point out the strangeness of seeing a stock image reappear in another context.

Why do I have a box of Bald Guyz Head Wipes? Because it features one of the best typos I've ever seen. Read all about it:

Laughing in the drugstore

(Thanks, Ben!)

The long e

At a talk given this past April, the linguist William Labov noted in passing that girls' names ending in a long e sound have become much more prevalent in the last hundred years.

At my son's college registration today, the three students leading the group of student-workers: Ashley, Ebonee, and Kristy.

Barack Obama on facts

There's a wonderful, perhaps apocryphal story that people tell about Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the brilliant, prickly, and iconoclastic late senator from New York. Apparently, Moynihan was in a heated argument with one of his colleagues over an issue, and the other senator, sensing he was on the losing side of the argument, blurted out, "Well, you may disagree with me, Pat, but I'm entitled to my own opinion." To which Moynihan frostily replied, "You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts."

Moynihan's assertion no longer holds. We have no authoritative figure, no Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow whom we all listen to and trust to sort out contradictory claims. Instead, the media is splintered into a thousand fragments, each with its own version of reality, each claiming the loyalty of a splintered nation. Depending on your viewing preferences, global climate change is or is not dangerously accelerating; the budget deficit is going down or going up. . . .

But sometimes there are more accurate or less accurate answers; sometimes there are facts that cannot be spun, just as an argument about whether it's raining can usually be settled by stepping outside. The absence of even rough agreement on the facts puts every opinion on equal footing and therefore eliminates the basis for thoughtful compromise. It rewards not those who are right, but those -- like the White House press office -- who can make their arguments most loudly, most frequently, most obstinately, and with the best backdrop.

Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown, 2006), 126-27

Related posts
Barack Obama on race
Ideology v. values

The iPhone and continuous partial attention

Yes, the iPhone is a thing of beauty. But what strikes me about this Apple commercial (also, yes, a thing of beauty) is its depiction of the iPhone as a tool of continuous partial attention. Watch a movie clip, think calamari, search a map for seafood restaurants, call the closest one. Really just a chic variation on Homer Simpson's "Mmm, donuts."

What about the movie?

What movie?

You can see all three commercials via the link:

iPhone commercials (Apple)

Like the pharaohs

Paul McCartney doesn't read or write music. Neither, he says, did John Lennon:

"Someone once told us that the Egyptian pharaohs couldn't read or write -- they had scribes to put down their thoughts. So John and I used to say, 'We're like the pharaohs!'''

From "When I'm Sixty-Four," a profile of Paul McCartney by John Colapinto (New Yorker, June 4, 2007)

Fire and Knowledge

Choose one:

1. If you're visiting from Joshua Sowin's website, Fire and Knowledge, welcome to Orange Crate Art. You might like browsing via one or more of the Pinboard categories in the sidebar. Or you might enjoy these posts:

The inverse power of praise (On reading and difficulty)
Richard Rorty on the value of literature
Zadie Smith on reading
George Steiner on reading
Mark Edmundson tells it like it is (Excerpt from Why Read?)
Words, mere words (Another excerpt from Why Read?)

2. If you're a regular or occasional reader of Orange Crate Art, you might want to look at Michael Leddy on Reading, an interview that I just did with Josh for his Reading Interviews series.

And then you might like to browse Fire and Knowledge, which, in Josh's words, "addresses culture, books, technology, ecology, religion, and other topics." The excerpts from his reading that Josh posts are always thought-provoking, and they make Fire and Knowledge something of a digital commonplace book. If Josh can get a city-kid like me to borrow some Wendell Berry from the library, he must be doing something right.

Proust: "memory's pictures"

The narrator brings us into present time at the end of Swann's Way, when he recounts taking a walk "this year" in the Bois de Boulogne, where he used to see Mme. Swann, looking "like a queen." From the novel's final paragraph:

Nature was resuming its rule over the Bois, from which the idea that it was the Elysian Garden of Woman had vanished; above the artificial mill the real sky was gray; the wind wrinkled the Grand Lac with little wavelets, like a real lake; large birds swiftly crossed the Bois, like a real wood, and uttering sharp cries alighted one after another in the tall oaks under their druidical crowns and with a Dodonean majesty seemed to proclaim the inhuman emptiness of the disused forest, and helped me better understand what a contradiction it is to search in reality for memory's pictures, which would never have the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from not being perceived by the senses. The reality I had known no longer existed.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 443-44

[A note glosses Dodonean: "In Dodona, in Epirus, the priests of Zeus' sanctuary gave oracles by interpreting the sound of the wind in the sacred oaks." (463)]

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

Twinkie, Deconstructed, rewritten

My daughter, glancing at Steve Ettlinger's Twinkie, Deconstructed (2007) in the library, pronounced it "Unreadable." She may be right. The subtitle alone is off-putting:

My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated into What America Eats

Publishers rely upon ever-lengthening subtitles to press (yes, press) content into the reader's face. But there's a clumsy dissonance between the terse, elegant title (which assumes at least a pop-culture grasp of deconstruction) and the self-promoting, astonished, grandiose tone of what follows: My Journey; Yes, Mined; What America Eats. (What America will soon be eating, at least in my house, is an Amy's California Burger.)

Skipping the Acknowledgments, I stopped at the first two paragraphs of "A Note to the Reader":

One could be forgiven for thinking that all one might have to do to find out what goes into a Hostess® Twinkies® "Golden Sponge Cake with Creamy Filling" is to simply ask the company that makes them. But it is not that simple.

In fact, Interstate Bakeries Corporation, one of the country's largest wholesale bakeries, which owns Hostess®, Drake's® Cakes (Yodels, Devil Dogs, Yankee Doodles, and Ring Dings), Wonder® Bread, Home Pride®, Dolly Madison Bakery®, Butternut®, Merita®, and Cotton's® Holsum, among other familiar brands, was initially receptive to my requests for tours and interviews. However, after about twenty-four hours of contemplation, the company declined via phone, citing its preference to help writers who are merely reminiscing about their sweet childhood memories.

"One could be forgiven": A cliché, and one that makes no sense if the reader has read the book's subtitle.

"One could be forgiven . . . one might have to do": Repeating one is tedious.

"[A]ll one might have to do . . . is to simply ask": Is should be would be.

"[A] Hostess® Twinkies® . . . the company that makes them": Agreement is all askew: a (singular) Twinkies® (plural) Golden Sponge Cake (singular). If "a Hostess® Twinkies® Golden Sponge Cake" is singular, there's also a problem with them.

"[S]imply ask . . . not that simple": The repetition is clumsy. What does it mean to simply ask anyway? Write a letter? Make a phone call? Knock on a door? Use small words?

"In fact": This transition makes no sense in light of the sentence that precedes it. The phrase leads the reader to expect a fact that contradicts the preceding sentence's hypothesis: You might think it would be easy. In fact, it is not.

"Hostess®, Drake's® Cakes (Yodels, Devil Dogs, Yankee Doodles, and Ring Dings), Wonder® Bread, Home Pride®, Dolly Madison Bakery®, Butternut®, Merita®, and Cotton's® Holsum": The second paragraph of the book is not the best place to present a reader with this inventory. As is, the list raises unnecessary questions: why don't Yodels, for instance, get the registered trademark sign?

"[A]bout twenty-four hours of contemplation": Was the company contemplating, like a monk? Was anyone? For twenty-four hours?

"[T]he company declined via phone": A company cannot use the phone. Via phone is also odd because we don't know how the author made contact. Was there a friendly visit, followed by a curt phone call?

"[M]erely reminiscing about their sweet childhood memories": Merely reminiscing about sweet treats? Merely? So much for Proust! Another problem: there's redundancy in the idea of reminiscing about memories.

Here's what I think is a plausible revision of these two paragraphs:

One might think that finding out what goes into Hostess® Twinkies® would require no more than asking the company that makes them. But it was not that simple.

Interstate Bakeries Corporation, one of the country's largest wholesale bakeries, was initially receptive to my requests for tours and interviews. But one day after I visited IBC headquarters, a company representative called me to decline, citing the company's preference to help writers who reminisce about childhood foods.

Looking closely at these sentences reminds me that with contemporary non-fiction, it's often smart to try (via the library), not buy.

And now, America (my America) eats.

[This post is no. 13 in a very occasional series, "How to improve writing," dedicated to improving stray bits of published prose.]

All "How to improve writing" posts (Pinboard)
Twinkie, Deconstructed (the website for the book)

Memorial Day, continued

Related post
Memorial Day