Lost Time Thursday: In Search of Lost Proust
I have one major resolution for 2016, and that is to read In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. Why haven't I read it already? I started a couple of times, back in the Nineties, but always stalled out. Now I'm about a hundred pages into Swann's Way and it's completely intoxicating, in the now-established tradition of books I put off reading for years because of intimidating cultural osmosis.
[Cut for unsolicited personal anecdote]
Why was I intimidated? Well, it's hella long, but that shouldn't matter. The real reason is much pettier: back in the Ancient Days, Proust was particularly beloved of some self-consciously intellectual hipsters whose company invariably left me feeling hopelessly stupid (fear of people realizing that I was stupid was the dominant vice of my teens and 20s, which isn't to say there weren't others) but whom I was convinced were "good for me" because otherwise I would go around not feeling stupid, which was a lie! Anyway, I didn't want to read Proust because then I would be expected to talk about Proust, and if I had to talk about Proust, all my painfully ignorant philistine opinions would be exposed for good, and I would no longer be worthy to hang out with the people who made me feel stupid.
I used to waste an unconscionable amount of time on things like that. I don't anymore, or at least when I do I catch myself and stop. Proust was the very last hold-out among the hundreds of things I was afraid that I would love the wrong way or not at all, so this year I'm storming that fortress. But quietly, so I don't wake all the maiden aunts.
So far I love this book a lot. The narrator was a child once, but is no longer a child (we don't know yet what he's been doing in the meantime) but his childhood is always beside and in front of him -- at least for now, until he forgets again. I don't even know his name yet -- Marcel, maybe? -- he's just "the boy." Swann's Way is full of the garbled and poetic misunderstandings of childhood, like the narrator's early love of theatre:
"At this date I was a lover of the theatre: a Platonic lover, since my parents had not yet allowed me to enter one, and so inaccurate was the picture I had formed in my mind's eye of the pleasures to be enjoyed there that I almost believed that each of the spectators looked,as through a stereoscope, at a scene that existed for himself alone, though similar to the thousand other scenes presented to the rest of the audience individually."
This leads to a discussion of the pleasures of categorization, how the narrator and his friends used to rank actors and the thrill he got when a new acquaintance challenged his ranking, and then to a story about the narrator's uncle that is melancholy and funny and suddenly terribly sad and unjust. This is a book of memories, made so far entirely of memories, and it captures the feeling of remembering beautifully, with its viney sentences that are like daydreams. It's been extremely difficult to stick to the daily page limit I set for myself -- an attempt to keep myself from getting overwhelmed that I might have to abandon. It carries you away quietly and very far, like time itself will if you don't find some way to stick a pin in it.
So I don't have much to say yet and I don't know if I will have much to say, except: this book is great and I'm sorry I've put off reading it for so long. Maybe at some point I'll feel bogged down by all the digression, but right now it's the opposite of a bog.
[Cut for unsolicited personal anecdote]
Why was I intimidated? Well, it's hella long, but that shouldn't matter. The real reason is much pettier: back in the Ancient Days, Proust was particularly beloved of some self-consciously intellectual hipsters whose company invariably left me feeling hopelessly stupid (fear of people realizing that I was stupid was the dominant vice of my teens and 20s, which isn't to say there weren't others) but whom I was convinced were "good for me" because otherwise I would go around not feeling stupid, which was a lie! Anyway, I didn't want to read Proust because then I would be expected to talk about Proust, and if I had to talk about Proust, all my painfully ignorant philistine opinions would be exposed for good, and I would no longer be worthy to hang out with the people who made me feel stupid.
I used to waste an unconscionable amount of time on things like that. I don't anymore, or at least when I do I catch myself and stop. Proust was the very last hold-out among the hundreds of things I was afraid that I would love the wrong way or not at all, so this year I'm storming that fortress. But quietly, so I don't wake all the maiden aunts.
So far I love this book a lot. The narrator was a child once, but is no longer a child (we don't know yet what he's been doing in the meantime) but his childhood is always beside and in front of him -- at least for now, until he forgets again. I don't even know his name yet -- Marcel, maybe? -- he's just "the boy." Swann's Way is full of the garbled and poetic misunderstandings of childhood, like the narrator's early love of theatre:
"At this date I was a lover of the theatre: a Platonic lover, since my parents had not yet allowed me to enter one, and so inaccurate was the picture I had formed in my mind's eye of the pleasures to be enjoyed there that I almost believed that each of the spectators looked,as through a stereoscope, at a scene that existed for himself alone, though similar to the thousand other scenes presented to the rest of the audience individually."
This leads to a discussion of the pleasures of categorization, how the narrator and his friends used to rank actors and the thrill he got when a new acquaintance challenged his ranking, and then to a story about the narrator's uncle that is melancholy and funny and suddenly terribly sad and unjust. This is a book of memories, made so far entirely of memories, and it captures the feeling of remembering beautifully, with its viney sentences that are like daydreams. It's been extremely difficult to stick to the daily page limit I set for myself -- an attempt to keep myself from getting overwhelmed that I might have to abandon. It carries you away quietly and very far, like time itself will if you don't find some way to stick a pin in it.
So I don't have much to say yet and I don't know if I will have much to say, except: this book is great and I'm sorry I've put off reading it for so long. Maybe at some point I'll feel bogged down by all the digression, but right now it's the opposite of a bog.