At all events, in these awakenings which I have just described, and which I experienced as a rule when I had been dining overnight at la Raspeliere, everything occurred as though by this process, and I can testify to it, I, the strange human who, while he waits for death to release him, lives behind closed shutters, knowing nothing of the world, sits motionless as an owl, and like that bird can only see things at all clearly in the darkness. Everything occurs as though by this process, but perhaps only a wad of cotton-wool has prevented the sleeper from taking in the internal dialogue of memories and the incessant verbiage of sleep. For (and this may be equally manifest in the other, vaster, more mysterious, more astral system) at the moment of his entering the waking state, the sleeper hears a voice inside him saying: "Will you come to this dinner to-night, it would be so nice?" and thinks: "Yes, how nice it would be, I shall go"; then, growing wider away, he suddenly remembers: "My grandmother has only a few weeks to live, so the doctor assures us." He rings, he weeps at the thought that it will not be, as in the past, his grandmother, his dying grandmother, but an indifferent valet that will come in answer to his summons. Moreover, when sleep bore him so far away from the world inhabited by memory and thought, through an ether in which he was alone, more than alone, without even the companionship of self-perception, he was outside the range of time and its measurements. But now the waiter is in the room, and he dares not ask him the time, for he does not know whether he has slept, for how many hours he has slept (he wonders whether it should not be how many days, with such a weary body, such a rested mind, such a homesick heart has he returned, as from a journey too distant not to have taken a long time).
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1014-1015
I find the following passage heartbreaking: " . . . I can testify to it, I, the strange human who, while he waits for death to release him, lives behind closed shutters, knowing nothing of the world, sits motionless as an owl, and like that bird can only see things at all clearly in the darkness." It's not that Proust didn't routinely write more beautiful or haunting lines, but it's difficult to imagine that he ever wrote one more true. We all know the stories of Proust's final days, living as a recluse, writing continually, trying to finish Remembrance of Things Past before he died, and only venturing out in the middle of the night. In an obviously much less profound, or tragic, way it reminded me of the Neil Young song Don't Be Denied, which is buried on the overlooked album Time Fades Away (mainly because Young refuses to release it to CD, his only album so abandoned). Don't Be Denied is Young's most honest song, and I've often wondered if this helps explain why he hasn't released the album to CD; he claims it's because of the limitations of the recording, but, come on, this is the Godfather of Grunge, and he's made a career out of distortion and feedback. Cycling back to Proust, certainly all of art is a personal reflection, but are there times when the artist is too honest and it just cuts too close to the bone? One of the reasons why I love James Ellroy's My Dark Places is, beyond the fascinating and unsuccessful attempt to solve his mother's murder (another metaphor of how he failed her), his brutally honest reflection on his childhood (how many authors, especially in the macho genre of roman noire, would discuss their circle jerks?). I'm over thirteen-hundred posts into this decade-long blog and I sometimes wonder if I've ever told the truth in any one of them? Would it really be any different if I were writing in a journal buried in the bottom of the desk drawer in my office? Maybe if we tell the entire truth we have completely lost control of the narrative, and for that matter our lives?
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