Proust was a soldier

Neuroscientist? Yes. Next president? Yes. Marcel Proust was a soldier too. He enlisted at the age of 18, in 1889, for one year of service, joining an infantry regiment at Orléans.

William Carter calls Proust a "strange but zealous private." Private Proust was permitted to live in a room in a private house because his coughing kept his fellow soldiers awake at night. He was excused from morning parades and jumping ditches on horseback. He went home on Sundays. He never learned to swim. After finishing his service as 63rd (of 64) in his class, Proust applied to reënlist and was turned down.

In the early sketch "Memory's Genre Paintings," Proust writes of his "regimental life" as "a series of small paintings," "filled with happy truth and magic over which time has spread its sweet sadness and its poetry." Évelyne Bloch-Dano reports that Proust "always had excellent memories" of his army days. His service is of course the background for the narrator's visit to Robert de Saint-Loup in The Guermantes Way.

Ghislain de Diesbach, quoted in Bloch-Dano's Madame Proust, likens Proust in the photograph above to "a clown disguised as a municipal security guard and a sultan's page trying out a dance step."

Works consulted

Bloch-Dano, Évelyne. Madame Proust: A Biography. Trans. Alice Kaplan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Carter, William C. Proust: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

Proust, Marcel. Complete Short Stories. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Cooper Square, 2001.

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W!SCONS!N

"Number nine, number nine, number nine . . . ."

[Primary night. Yes, we can.]

Iambic pentameter

It isn't very difficult to do. A little practice, that is all it takes:

Answering casual questions in iambic pentameter (xkcd, "A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language")

[This post replaces a previous post whose title, made of five iambs (x /), might suggest to a search engine quintuple-X content, as forward slashes don't appear as characters in a url. Thanks to the commenter who got me to think about this point.]

Proust contest

For Proustheads: Mari Mann at Madeleine Moments is celebrating the one-year anniversary of her blog with a contest. There are five Proust-related questions, with a $25 Amazon gift certificate as prize:

One-Year Anniversary Contest (Madeleine Moments)

A semicolon in the news

A semicolon on a New York City subway sign is in the news; read about it here:

Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location (New York Times)

(Reading this article has made me realize that semicolon has no hyphen. I have been misspelling — or better, mispunctuating — this word for years.)

Related posts
France debates le point-virgule
Paul Collins on the semicolon

Dueling chin dimples

[Kirk Douglas (Whit Sterling) and Robert Mitchum (Jeff Markham), in Out of the Past, dir. Jacques Tourneur (1947).]

Reviewing Out of the Past in the New York Times (November 26, 1947), Bosley Crowther was lukewarm: "If only we had some way of knowing what's going on in the last half of the film, we might get more pleasure from it. As it is, the challenge is worth a try." It is, but there's a lot to be said for surrendering to ambience too.

Aristeia

The aristeia (from aristos, best) is a recurring element in Homer's Iliad. It's a warrior's moment of greatest glory in battle, the poem focusing on him alone as he kills victim after victim after victim.

The longest and bloodiest aristeia in the poem is that of Achilles, who seeks to make the Trojans pay for killing his beloved comrade Patroclus. What sets Achilles' aristeia apart from all others in the Iliad is that it is, at heart, a suicide mission: Achilles knows that if he kills the Trojan warrior Hector (who dealt the final blow to Patroclus), his own death will soon follow. He doesn't mind. When his horse Xanthus — magical, immortal, and gifted with prophetic speech — warns Achilles of his fate, he replies, "I don't need you to prophesy my death, / Xanthus. I know in my bones I will die here."

What follows is unrelenting in its horror. Spattered with blood and tissue, fire shooting from his head, Achilles is both animal and god. He has lost his humanity, killing and mutilating as he moves toward his own death. He fights not alongside his fellow Achaeans, but in a private war. The only community he can now acknowledge is a community of the dead, the one that holds Patroclus and which he soon will join.

I think that what we're seeing in a campus rampage is a version of Achilles' aristeia, the work of a person dissociated from his own humanity and from reality. Simone Weil called the Iliad the poem of force, force being that which turns a human being into a thing. In the fragile version of pastoral that is the open American campus, it seems terrifyingly easy for one who would wield that force to be able to do so.

[Iliad translation by Stanley Lombardo, 1997.]

LAUNDRY

John Holt on learning to read:

I remember the first time I discovered that a written word said something. The word was LAUNDRY. I was about four, perhaps a bit younger. Young enough so that nobody had yet started to teach me that words said things. We lived in New York City. In our walks through the streets, to the park or elsewhere, we passed many stores, with their signs. Most of these signs said nothing that would help a child know what they were saying; that is, the grocery signs were Gristede's, First National, A & P, the drugstore signs were Rexall's, Liggett's, and so on. But wherever there was a laundry, the sign over it said LAUNDRY. Ten, twenty, a hundred times, I must have seen that sign, and under it, in the window, the shirts and other clean clothing that told me that this was a place where things were washed. Then, one day, I realized that there was a connection between those letters over the store, and the shirts in the window, and what I knew the store was doing; that those letters over the store told me, and were there to tell me, that this place was a laundry, that they said "laundry."

That is all I can remember about teaching myself to read.

From How Children Learn (1967)

Related post
John Holt on learning and difficulty

Northern Illinois University

Here in Illinois, it's simply Northern. My heart goes out to Northern.

"Dowdy world" love story

Back when there were phone booths:

Janet and Nathan Polsky, both 84, were prom dates as high school sweethearts in 1941. He soon entered the military, and the two became involved in separate lives. He studied art at New York University. She, who had wanted to be an opera singer, joined the chorus of the original Broadway production of "Oklahoma!”

One afternoon after World War II, she was at the Museum of Modern Art and accidentally left her wallet in a phone booth. He called her the next day. He said: “This is Nat. Did you lose your wallet?” He had also been at MoMA, just happened to be the next person to go into the booth, and found it. Shortly afterward, they married.

Mrs. Polsky mused, “Talk about destiny.”

Mortals Amid the Immortals, Savoring the Romance of Art (New York Times)

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