My Years With Proust - Day 706

    Life at such moments seems to us like a theatrical pageant in which from one act to another we see the baby turn into a youth and the youth into a mature man, who in the next act totters towards the grave.  And as it is through endless small changes that we feel that these beings, who enter our field of vision only at long intervals, can have  become so different, we feel that we ourselves must have followed the same law in virtue of which they have been so totally transformed that, without having ceased to exist, indeed just because they have never ceased to exist, indeed just because they have never ceased to exist, they no longer in any way resemble what we observed them to be in the past.

   A young woman whom I had known long ago, white-haired now and compressed into a little old witch, seemed to suggest that it is necessary, in the final scene of a theatrical entertainment, for the characters to be disguised beyond all recognition. But her brother was still so straight-backed, so like himself, that one was surprised on his youthful face to see a bristling moustache dyed white.  Indeed everywhere the patches of white in beards and moustaches hitherto entirely black lent a note of melancholy to the human landscape of the party, as do the first yellow leaves on the trees when one is still looking forward to a long summer, when before one has begun to enjoy the hot weather one sees that the autumn has arrived.  So that at last I, who from childhood had lived from day to day and had received, of myself and of others, impressions which I regarded as definitive, became aware as I had never been before - by an inevitable inference from the metamorphoses which had taken place in all the people around me - of the time which had passed for them, a notion which brought with it the overwhelming revelation that it had passed also for me.  And their old age, in itself a matter of indifference to me, froze my blood by announcing to me the approach of my own.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 966-967

I guess this is an appropriately somber fit for the last day of the year.  Proust, finally, has been shown into the party at the Guermantes mansion.  He had spent several moments, and a hundred pages, standing in the waiting room reflecting upon the three memory rushes that had launched another desire, an intensive and irresistible one, to understand the past and to write. Once inside he comes into contact with people he hasn't seen in years, and their age, dramatically reflected in some more than others, alerts him to his own mortality.

"Life at such moments seems to us like a theatrical pageant in which from one act to another we see the baby turn into a youth and the youth into a mature man, who in the next act totters towards the grave."

"A young woman whom I had known long ago, white-haired now and compressed into a little old witch, seemed to suggest that it is necessary, in the final scene of a theatrical entertainment, for the characters to be disguised beyond all recognition."

"And their old age, in itself a matter of indifference to me, froze my blood by announcing to me the approach of my own."

Since I never actually go home I guess my equivalent of this "theatrical pageant" is to peruse Facebook, which I've been on lately since, as I admitted earlier, I had to get back on FB to set up pages for the parents of my travelling students. 

Discography Year Two - Week 17

Well, we've come to the end of 2017, or maybe it's just better to say that we survived 2017.  It was a year of surprises, most of them horrible.  Here's a picture below of Nate and Miranda watching a video for one of the worst products of all time: Jiftip.  We don't need to talk about who introduced them to this video, because it could be anybody (I just remember Cyndi and Kathy talking about it on the deck of their rental guesthouse); suffice it to say that they were beyond horrified.  That said, some of the surprises were far more horrible, and far less productive, and that brings us to the presidency of Donald Trump.  Almost every week Dave Kelley and I find ourselves proposing that even though we knew the Trump presidency would be an unmitigated disaster, it's been far worse than we would have possibly thought.  And although we've survived the years, sadly, and tragically, this is a historically awful presidency (and person) and that one which is doing generational harm.  Still, we live to fight on, and I truly believe that within a year Trump will have been impeached or removed from office, and although President Pence or President Ryan or President Hatch will also be horrible, maybe, at least, they are more familiar evils.  Wow, and I guess it's come to that, it is finally the time of the lesser of several evils.  I remain oddly optimistic.  As the Drive-By Truckers reminded us, "there's a lot of bad wood underneath the veneer," and it's about time America dug out the rotten wood, and maybe this is the only way to do it: make it so painfully clear that American exceptionalism doesn't actually mean that we can't piss it all away and become an authoritarian state.

And this was the least "Miranda and Nate are horrified" picture I took.

Let's make 2018 better for everyone.

Gary Beatrice

Editor's note: As we know, the esteemed GB is taking a little break from the Discography, but it refuses to take a break from him.  Here's his New Year's Eve post from last year.  Enjoy!

"Beck, Debra

Sometimes I get inspired and send G a whole bunch of songs in a short period of time. I did that not too long ago and as a result you got Yeah Yeah Yeahs on Christmas Eve and they aren't the slightest bit related. I've intentionally sent Beck's Debra on the last day of 2016 as a nod to dearly departed Prince.

One of the many things that make Beck so brilliant is his ability to take so many different influences in so many genres and mash them into a unique sound. Debra is one of the few songs in which he doesn't do that. I hear Debra as a straight Prince tribute / send up, from the funky and sensual organ to the falsetto vocals, to the funny and naughty lyrics. Who but Prince would begin a song

            I met you at JC Penny. I think your name tag said "Jenny".

Or better yet

            Cause when our eyes did meet, girl you could tell I was packing heat. Ain't no use in wasting time getting to know each other.

But best of all is the chorus punch line, one that only Prince could pull off:

            I want to get with you
            And your sister
            I think her name's Debra.

I hope you all have a wonderful 2017."

Dave Wallace

J. Geils Band - (Ain't Nothin' But a)House Party

To help you get ready for whatever New Year's Eve party you may be attending tomorrow, here's this awesome nugget by the J. Geils Band.  IMHO, J. Geils is one of the most underrated rock bands ever.  I was lucky enough to see them on their last major tour (after Freeze Frame was released; also their high point commercially) before they imploded, and it was one of the best concerts I've ever seen.

Kathy Seiler

Sarah McLachlan – Song for a Winter’s Night (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV4F2yfEt9o)

As we enter into the deep cold of winter, I think of this song. I don’t think there is anything quite like a snowy day or long winter nights to cause one’s heart to ache for those they cannot be with, whether it is family, friends, or the love of one’s life. It makes me wonder if we miss people less in the summer because simply being able to spend time outside in warm sunshine and the longer days can serve as some sort of serotonin surge substitute for the company of another. Sarah’s voice seems to perfectly capture this feeling of winter loneliness. Her entire Wintersong album is great and a Christmas must at our house.

Phillip Seiler

Elliott Smith "Tomorrow, Tomorrow"

They took your life apart

And called your failures art

They were wrong though

They won't know

'Til tomorrow

This passage, more than any, sums up Elliott's work and soul for me. He laid it on the page, his pain obvious. He suffered from depression and substance abuse problems throughout his short life. His death at 34 left years of music unrecorded and unwritten. But he left so much beauty and yes, art behind. Based on the above lyrics, I wonder how much of it he hated. He must have despised praise of works he felt were not ready or not good, and that could only feed into his feelings of failure. Depression is a cruel beast but it must be a million times harder for creatives. 

This is a truly great song though with beautiful guitar work and harmonies. I hope he liked it too.

Dave Kelley

"Dream Baby Dream"   Bruce Springsteen

 This may be an odd post for New Year's Eve weekend, but I am an odd man.

This is Bruce's cover of a song by the 80's group Suicide.  His version is part lullaby, part prayer, and part I don't know what.  I have seen him play it live several times and always find it mesmerizing.  A crowd which was raucous only a few minutes before becomes quiet.

This has been a horrible year for our world and our nation, and 2018 could be worse.  Maybe "I just want to see you smile" is an appropriate wish for the new year.

Kevin Andrews

Here’s a song to celebrate the Winter Solstice. Looking ahead to a week of below zero temperatures, just knowing that each day is getting longer and closer to golfing weather almost provides enough motivation to pull the covers off each morning. This is Malone, NY’s favorite son Bob Mould with See a Little Light.

Gary Scudder

Neil Young, Don't Let It Bring You Down

OK, so it's been a pretty brutal year, both individually and collectively, so I thought I'd send the old year out with a hopeful song.  WTF?  While Don't Let It Bring You Down must have set some world record for most depressing metaphors in in one song, it actually ends with this suggestion: "Find someone who's turning, and you will come around."  One of the peculiarities of misery is that we tend to want to wallow in it alone, when often simply the presence of one friend would bring us out of it.  For the last two years (and for some of you, decades) you have helped me come around, and it is much appreciated.  The song is off of After the Gold Rush, an album which is oddly overlooked (including by me) when discussing great NY albums; it's wonderful from beginning to end.  Plus, as every right thinking individual knows, it has the greatest album cover of all time.  Annie Lennox provided a nice cover for the classic film American Beauty.

Sam

It's rare that Facebook earns its keep, but occasionally it will send along a reminder notice of something I posted years earlier.  Here's a great picture of the most excellent Sam Kelly (one of the Barbarians) from three years ago.  And some old dude.

For some reason Sam, even as a baby, took an instant like to me. Recently I was goofing with the Barbarians and told Jack Jack (the Middle Barbarian) "But Jack, you've always been my favorite of the Kelly boys."  Sam, the most loquacious of the Barbarians, immediately kicked back with, "What did I just hear?"
 

My Years With Proust - Day 705

   It occurred to me, as I thought about it, that the raw material of my experience, which would also be the raw material of my book, came to me from Swann, not merely because so much of it concerned Swann himself and Gilberte, but because it was Swann who from the days of Combray had inspired in me the wish to go to Balbec, where otherwise my parents wold never have had the idea of sending me, and but for this I should never have known Albertine.  Certainly, it was to her face, as I had seen it for the first time beside the sea, that I traced back certain things which I should no doubt include in my book.  And in a sense I was right to trace them back to her, for if I had not walked on the front that day, if I had not got to know her, all these ideas would never have been developed (unless they had been developed by some other woman).  But I was wrong too, for this pleasure which generates something within us and which, retrospectively, we seek to place in a beautiful feminine face, comes from our senses: but the pages I would write were something that Albertine, particularly the Albertine of those days, would quite certainly never have understood.  It was, however, for this very reason (and this shows that we ought not to live in too intellectual an atmosphere), for the reason that she was so different from me, that she had fertilised me through unhappiness and even, at the beginning, through the simple effort which I had had to make to imagine something different from myself.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 953-954

Proust realizes that in the end the heart of his novel will have to be his own life.  In a way, of course, he was playing games with time with us, because he's over three thousand pages into that self-same novel when he reveals that to us; or maybe it's better to say that he officially revealed it to us because he's been pointing us in that direction page by page page.  He writes:  "It occurred to me, as I thought about it, that the raw material of my experience, which would also be the raw material of my book, came to me from Swann, not merely because so much of it concerned Swann himself and Gilberte, but because it was Swann who from the days of Combray had inspired in me the wish to go to Balbec, where otherwise my parents wold never have had the idea of sending me, and but for this I should never have known Albertine."  In the end doesn't every writer eventually realize that their novel, at least their first novel, and especially their truest novel, is about their own life?  Even if I were to write a science fiction story or a brutal roman noir story (both of which, by the way, would be historically and transcendentally terrible) I'd still be filtering them through my own life. 

Having said all that, there was no Albertine, at least not an Albertine exactly like the Albertine that dominates (although, as I've proposed, maddeningly behind a veil) so much of Remembrance of Things Past, and not an Albertine of that particular gender. Still, if there was an actual Albertine, would she understand the Albertine that he sketched in the novel?  Proust assures us, no:  "But I was wrong too, for this pleasure which generates something within us and which, retrospectively, we seek to place in a beautiful feminine face, comes from our senses: but the pages I would write were something that Albertine, particularly the Albertine of those days, would quite certainly never have understood."  And how could she?  She could never have seen herself as Proust saw her.  I've told several women over the years that I wish they could see themselves as I saw them (not in a bad way, but rather to try and convince them that they were far more intelligent and beautiful and generally amazing than they seemed to realize), but in the end they never could.  I proposed recently, although it will not pop up in the blog until I'm out of the country (like Proust, or Scrooge, I'm living in the past, present and future in a confusing blur), that, quoting the great Canadian philosopher, that "we are only what we feel," and this popped into my head when I initially read this passage from Proust.  He adds, "It was, however, for this very reason (and this shows that we ought not to live in too intellectual an atmosphere), for the reason that she was so different from me, that she had fertilised me through unhappiness and even, at the beginning, through the simple effort which I had had to make to imagine something different from myself."  One of the reasons why Albertine - or the various and sundry women of my life - could never understand how Proust presented her in the book (or I presented them via conversation) was that he (and I) was trying to make the point intellectually, as compared to emotionally.  Come to think of it, this is probably more proof of my endless failures as a husband/boyfriend/fiance: they should have known and understood their intelligence and beauty and how generally amazing they were/are with every glance from me.

My Years With Proust - Day 704

But all the same, when a living creature is so faultily constituted (and perhaps, if such a creature exists in nature, it is man) that he cannot love without suffering, and that he has to suffer in order to apprehend truths, the life of such a creature becomes in the end extremely wearisome.  The happy years are the lost, the wasted years, one must wait for suffering before one can work.  And then the idea of the preliminary suffering becomes associated with the idea of work and one is afraid of each new literary undertaking because one thinks of the pain one will first have to endure in order to  imagine it.  And once one understands that suffering is the best thing that one can hope to encounter in life, one thinks without terror, and almost as of a deliverance, of death.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 947

Once again we are struggling with that old chestnut about how suffering is the seed of all great art.  Proust reminds us, "The happy years are the lost, the wasted years, one must wait for suffering before one can work." I can remember the times when I was crazy happy in love, and I assure you that no classic novels were being written (several world records were being shattered, but, sadly, and happily, no profound novels were being written).  This brings me back to my argument carried out a one bar or another with the esteemed Dave Kelley over whether it's better to be a painfully unoriginal but successful Victorian portrait painter or Paul Gauguin.  Maybe this is all true because when you're happy and in love you're thinking of someone else, but when you're miserable you're completely living inside of your own sorrow, and art is the most lonely, egotistical, self-absorbed journey.

Christmas with the Boy

I wasn't able to get down to see my son until the day after Christmas, due to a combination of two busy schedules and a very misleading weather forecast.  It was a lovely, albeit short, visit, including way too much food at Sheryl's Restaurant across the street.  We spent a long time discussing a proposed visit to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Initially I thought he was just testing his father's adventurous spirit by his DRC suggestion, but he's won me over and the planning is in motion.  He had me at gorillas AND volcanoes.

On a previous visit I surprised him with a real Christmas tree, which was his first.  The little guy is still holding up pretty well.  

Here's a picture of him tearing into the presents.  Naturally, as his father, I immediately flashed back to a series to a series of wonderful and happy and elegiac memories of him doing the same thing as a boy. Our children always remain versions of Dickens's Ghost of Christmas Past, they constantly flicker and shape-shift with earlier versions of themselves.

I can't help seeing this and thinking of the boys in A Christmas Story realizing that the packages they tore open contained socks, and then throwing them over their shoulders.  Actually, he was deeply appreciative, and effusive in doling out thank yous, for all the kitchen goods for his new apartment.  Here he is, much like his father would be, intently tearing through his Lonely Planet Guide to Africa.

My Years With Proust - Day 703

Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure our heart; the transformation itself, even, for an instant, releases suddenly a little joy.  But successors only in the order of time, for the primary element, it seems, is the Idea, and grief is merely the mode in which certain ideas make their fist entry into us.  But within the tribe of ideas there are various families and some of them from the very first moment are joys.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 944

"Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure our heart; the transformation itself, even, for an instant, releases suddenly a little joy."  We've bandied around the idea that suffering is the heart of the creative process, and although it may seem like an old chestnut I still suspect that it is true.  However, when the "grief" becomes an "idea," then we have intellectualized it and thus it no longer packs the same sting.  Of course, we've also oddly defiled it by dragging it from the realm of emotion to the realm of the intellect, as much as we'd like to think of the latter world as purified.  We've simply repackaged it and sucked the life out of it, sort of the emotional equivalent of one of those plastic storage bags that you hook up to a vacuum to suck out the oxygen, and in the process create enough room to store under your bed or at the back of your closet.

My Years With Proust - Day 702

Saddening too was the thought that my love, to which I had clung so tenaciously, would in my book be so detached from any individual that different readers would apply it, even in detail, to what they had felt for other women.  But had I a right to be shocked at this posthumous infidelity, shocked that strangers should find new and alien objects for my feelings in unknown women, when this infidelity, this division of love between a number of women, had begun in my life-time and even before I started to write? It was true that I had suffered successively for Gilberte, for Mme de Guermantes, for Albertine.  But successively I had also forgotten them, and only the love which I dedicated to different women had been lasting.  The profanation of one of my memories by unknown readers was a crime that I had myself committed before them.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 939-940

Proust finds himself reflecting upon a fact that anyone who ever publishes a book realizes: once the book is published you no longer own it.  Not only do people get to interpret it all sorts of ways that you didn't intend (and that whole deconstructionalist thing about the reader's interpretation trumping the author's interpretation suddenly doesn't seem so funny or clever), but now people that the author will never meet get to "borrow" his characters and events and thoughts for their own repurposing. Proust writes, "Saddening too was the thought that my love, to which I had clung so tenaciously, would in my book be so detached from any individual that different readers would apply it, even in detail, to what they had felt for other women."  Marcel's intensely individualistic love for Albertine will now be "generalized" for much broader use, which, I guess, would qualify as proof that the author has, maybe incidentally, achieved an universality of experience and perception.  In the end Proust accepts it, partially because, "The profanation of one of my memories by unknown readers was a crime that I had myself committed before them." Essentially, he had done it himself, as all readers have.

My Years With Proust - Day 701

   And when we seek to extract from our grief the generality that lies within it, to write about it, we are perhaps to some extent consoled for yet another reason apart from those that I have mentioned, which is that to think in terms of general truths, to write, is for the writer a wholesome and necessary function the fulfilment of which makes him happy, it does for him what is done for men of a more physical nature by exercise, perspiration, baths.  This conclusion, I must admit, I was a little reluctant to accept.  I was ready to believe that the supreme truth of life resides in art, and I could see, too, that I was no more capable of an effort of memory of being still in in love with Albertine that I was of continuing to mourn my grandmother's death, and yet I asked myself whether a work of art of which they would not be conscious could really for them, for the destiny of these two poor dead creatures, be a fulfilment.  My grandmother, whom with so little feeling I had seen agonise and die beside me! I longed that in expiation, when my work should be finished, I might, incurably stricken, suffer for long hours, abandoned by all, and then die!

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 939

In writing this blog, both generally and also specifically as part of the exploration of Remembrance of Things Past, I have doubtless, although never maliciously, told tales out of school.  There have been characters, often thinly veiled, who have played a continuing and formative role in the narrative.  Names were changed and events slightly altered as part of a general obfuscation, although I tried to be most honest and direct in detailing my own failures and crimes.  Now, if this whole process helped me examine and theoretically deal with my own past, and my own demons, I have somehow benefited from the process, but what about these other characters?  I'm asking the question because it relates to a point Proust makes today:  "I was ready to believe that the supreme truth of life resides in art, and I could see, too, that I was no more capable of an effort of memory of being still in in love with Albertine that I was of continuing to mourn my grandmother's death, and yet I asked myself whether a work of art of which they would not be conscious could really for them, for the destiny of these two poor dead creatures, be a fulfilment."  Essentially, if in writing Remembrance of Things Past had led Proust to some measure of "fulfilment" (my spellchecker just can't get used to the British spelling of fulfillment), what about his grandmother and Albertine, two characters who played a huge role in the novel and who had both passed on by the time he was writing?  What about their "fulfilment?"  The situation is somewhat similar, although for very different reasons: Marcel's grandmother and Albertine were dead, whereas the people I have mentioned in this blog, like the rest of the population of the planet, don't read my blog.  This brings us back to an issues we've discussed a couple times: are people, both in art but also in our own real lives, nothing more than props, plot points, in our hero's (or in my case, villain's) journey?  I'm going to say no, for one big reason: they weren't props at that moment; instead, they simply seem like props or plot points years later when you're staring back at your life and trying to make sense of it, to impose a narrative on it.  But of course, this is still a very different issue than whether or not they would receive some fulfillment from the process.  Or, to think of it another way, does it benefit any of us to hear years later what a person thought of the role that we played in their lives?  I made the point one time that we always want the women we've loved to think kindly, or at least gently, about us.  Would we even want to know?  If these women were nothing more than props or plot points in my life, then, by definition, I was probably nothing more than a prop or a plot point in theirs

My Years With Proust - Day 700

And then a new light, less dazzling, no doubt, than that other illumination which mad made me perceive that the work of art was the sole means of rediscovering Lost Time, shone suddenly within me.  And I understood that all these materials for a work of literature were simply my past life; I understood that they had come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in indolence, in tenderness, in unhappiness, and that I had stored them up without divining the purpose for which they were destined or even their continued existence any more than a seed does when it forms within itself a reserve of all the nutritious substances from which it will feed a plant.  Like the seed, I should be able to die once the plant had developed and I began to perceive that I had lived for the sake of the plant without knowing it, without ever realising that my life needed to come into contact with those books which I had wanted to write and for which, when in the past I had sat down at my table to begin, I had been unable to find a subject.  And thus my whole life up to the present day might and yet might not have been summed up under the title: A Vocation. Insofar as literature had played no part in my life the title would not have been accurate.  And yet it would have been accurate because this life of mine, the memories of its sadnesses and its joys, formed a reserve which fulfilled the same function as the albumen lodged in the germ-cell of a plant, from which that cell starts to draw the nourishment which will transform it into a seed long before these is any outward sign that the embryo of a plant is developing, though already within the cell there are taking place chemical and respiratory changes, secret but extremely active.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 935-936

Although Proust has been circling around this realization forever, he here clearly spells out the fact that that literature, and specifically the creation of what would become Remembrance of Things Past, is what will help him recover Lost Time.  He tells us, "And then a new light, less dazzling, no doubt, than that other illumination which mad made me perceive that the work of art was the sole means of rediscovering Lost Time, shone suddenly within me."  And this brings up the question: does a quest like this require, if not a years-long struggle like Proust's pursuit, a deliberately structured approach?  His memory flashes had been random and unexpected, but they led to a much more intentional quest.  On a much less impressive front, I took on the challenge of writing on Proust every day for what has turned out to be almost two years, and while I had several goals, one of them was to try and grapple with my own past (at which I've been much less successful than Proust, but I've had the occasional victory).  Maybe one way to think of Proust's odyssey is to think of it as research.  I can remember reading through so many 16th century letters and governmental documents that I discarded as I sorted through material that would prove the basis for my dissertation.  Proust could not have known what were the essential memories when he began his search and thus it became necessary to view seemingly all of them to find the key ones (let alone the fact that the quest alone is probably the most important factor).  Proust explains: "And I understood that all these materials for a work of literature were simply my past life; I understood that they had come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in indolence, in tenderness, in unhappiness, and that I had stored them up without divining the purpose for which they were destined or even their continued existence any more than a seed does when it forms within itself a reserve of all the nutritious substances from which it will feed a plant."  We always have to write what we know, and what do we know more than our own life?  But here's the thing: it really is a Catch-22 because unless we examine our own life we don't really know our own life at all.

My Years With Proust - Day 699

The greatness, on the one hand, of true art, of the art which M. de Norpois would have called a dilettante's pastime, lay, I had come to see, elsewhere: we have to rediscover, to reapprehend, to make ourselves fully aware of that reality, remote our daily preoccupations, from which we separate ourselves by an even greater gulf as the conventional knowledge which we substitute for it grows thicker and more impermeable, that reality which it is very easy for us to die without ever having known and which is, quite simply, our life.  Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated - the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived - is literature, and life thus defined is in a sense all the time immanent in ordinary men no less than in the artist.  But most men do not see it because they do not seek to shed light upon it.  And therefore their past is like a photographic dark-room encumbered with innumerable negatives which remain useless because the intellect has not developed them.  But art, if it means awareness of our own life, means also awareness of the lives of other people - for style for the writer, no less than colour for the painter, is a question not of technique but of vision: it is the revelation, which by direct and conscious methods would be impossible, of the qualitative difference, the uniqueness of the fashion in which the world appears to each one of us, a difference which, if there were no art, would remain for ever the secret of every individual.  Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist in the moon.  Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 931-932

"Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist in the moon."

Recently I suggested on Twitter that anyone with aspirations should be forced to read Time Regained, the final volume of Remembrance of Things Past.  Now, I didn't go as far as the esteemed Sanford Zale, who, after I pestered him into reading In Cold Blood (after we traveled together to Holcomb, Kansas), stated that every American, if at gun point, should be forced to read the Capote classic work.  In much the same way anyone who ever questions what art means, what it can do, should read this moving passage from Proust.  Dewey proposed that art was as a language that could be studied to connect to other cultures, which is an idea which reflects the idea in the sentence I culled out above.  Not only can art connect us to others, but without it we are left alone.  I think of our increasingly intellectually stunted and art-starved students, and how they sit before every class staring at their phones trying desperately to connect with someone else, even on the most transient, surface level - and how when I drag them over to the Fleming Museum in my Aesthetic Expressions class so many of them tell me that they've never stepped foot in a museum before.  Not only is it leaving them intellectually and culturally emaciated, but it is emotionally deaf and mute.  I especially like his last line in this passage: "Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance."  Just as dead stars can continue to shine lights for millennia, the truly great artists can make connections as real and vibrant as when they first wrote or painted centuries ago.

Discography Year Two - Week 16

   "When the clock struck eleven, this domestic ball broke up.  Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig took their stations, one on either side of the door, and, shaking hands with every person individually as he or she went out, wished him or her a Merry Christmas.  When everybody had retired but the two 'prentices, they did the same to them; and thus the cheerful voices died away, and the lads were left to their beds; which were under a counter in the back-shop.
   During the whole of this time Scrooge had acted like a man out of his wits.  His heart and soul were in the scene, and with his former self.  He corroborated everything, and underwent the strangest agitation.  It was not until now, when the bright faces of his former self and Dick were turned from them, that he remembered the Ghost, and became conscious that it was full looking full upon him, while the light upon its head burnt very clear.
   'A small matter,' said the Ghost, 'to make these silly folks so full of gratitude.'
   'Small!' echoed Scrooge.
   The Spirit signed to him to listen to the two apprentices, who were pouring out their hearts in praise of Fezziwig: and when he had done so, said:
   'Why!  Is it not?  He has spent  but a few pounds of your mortal money: three or four, perhaps.  Is that so much that he deserves this praise?'
   'It isn't that,' said Scrooge, heated by the remark, and speaking unconsciously like his former, not his latter self. 'It isn't that, Spirit.  He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil.  Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count 'em up: what then? The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.'
   He felt the Spirit's glance, and stopped.
   'What is the matter?' asked the Ghost.
   'Nothing particular,' said Scrooge.
   'Something, I think?' the Ghost insisted.
   'No,' said Scrooge, 'no.  I should like to be able to say a word or two to my clerk just now.  That's all.'"
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

There is no War on Christmas.  No one says Merry Christmas more than me, and I'm a Muslim.  And if there is a War on Christmas, it is being waged by the very people making the false accusation: Trump, the GOP, the alt-Christians.  They are the hypocrites defaming Christmas by their greed and callous disregard for the poorer and more needy members of our world.  Christmas is not about a plastic baby in a manger scene in someone's yard or the image of a suffering figure hanging from a cross in a church.  Christmas is a series of small kindnesses repeated willingly, happily and endlessly.

Merry Christmas to you my dear friends.  You are in my heart.

Gary Beatrice

As we know the excellent Gary Beatrice is taking a little break from the Discography, but we Lovers of All Things Beatrice cannot take a break from him.  So here's his Christmas selection from last year, which we can all agree is excellent:

Blind Boys of Alabama and Mavis Staples, Born in Bethlehem

I love Christmas but I generally don't listen to a ton of Christmas music. Typically I don't pull out our collection until the week before the holiday.

For the past decade or so I've strongly preferred the old Christmas classics from the pre-rock era, especially if it's broadcast on an AM radio (searching for a truer sound). Chief among this is Sinatra's I'll Be Home For Christmas. The sentiment always got to me, presumably a young man serving his country, missing his sweetheart at holiday time. He will be home, but then the crushing reality "if only in my dreams".

But I'm not completely immune to Christmas music performed in a modern style. Perhaps because The Blind Boys of Alabama and Mavis Staples are both artists who perform spiritual music year round, I find their Christmas music especially compelling. "Born In Bethlehem " rocks the house down, and would be the highlight of a Blind Boys live performance even in mid July.

Editor's note: I also have to admit to my shame that I didn't catch his "searching for a truer sound" reference last year.  Even more so than usual, I hold my intellectual manhood cheap.

Dave Wallace

The Temptations - Little Drummer Boy

 For my last Christmas song of 2017, it occurs to me that I haven't selected any Motown (which you know I love) lately, so, for Christmas weekend, I give you one of my favorite versions of The Little Drummer Boy, done by the Temptations. 

Alice Neiley

"O mio babbino caro" -- Puccini/Renee Fleming 

Well, last night I had the privilege of hearing the National Orchestra of Canada (NACO) play Handel's Messiah, Karen at the helm with The Trumpet Shall Sound, AND some amazing vocalists. The soprano absolutely floated, a rich, fluid sound that made my jaw actually drop. Her name was Jessica Rivera, and sadly, she's not on Youtube. However, she strongly reminded me of Renee Fleming, so in the spirit of musical transcendence, I give you her version of Puccini's 'O Mio Babbino Caro'. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HTHCI79vgU

It's essentially a song of pleading (Lauretta to her father -- he doesn't approve of her love interest), of desperation and beauty, of the contrast between a magical voice and the dark tension of instrumental chords, and of course, of love. 

Enjoy. Be transported :). 

Phillip Seiler

This is the season of giving, at least for those of us with a conscience and a heart who still believe we owe something to our fellow earth travelers. So in that spirit I offer three holiday songs from Carbon Leaf for you to enjoy. Carbon Leaf is about as country as my tastes normally go (although I have grown to appreciate the genre more as discography has progressed over the last year and half.) They are a good case study in the evolution of pop from country from traditional celtic folk as they dabble in all these genres with their songs with a good deal of success at each. They put out a Christmas album of original tunes a few years back from which I grabbed two songs. The third is just a fun bit of cover for those of us of a certain age.

Carbon Leaf

Christmas Child

Red Punch, Green Punch

Barbecue

Carbon Leaf is at their best when they are mining the veins of nostalgia we all experience from time to time. It's dangerous territory, of course, and leads to nonsense like Making Christmas Great Again!!! when really no such greatness exists. We just have filtered out the mundane and awful bits of our past to preserve an idealized vision of that past. Still, sometimes, it is nice to wander back into those old hallways. Christmas Child is all about that heady anticipation as the days tick by to Christmas morning. Red Punch, Green Punch is a love letter to the parties we kids got dragged to, in our best Sunday clothes, knowing we would have nothing to do but sit around on old couches and try not to get yelled at for spilling the snacks. But we all had our unique bowl of treats (brach's holiday mints and peanuts) that seemed to exist only at these parties. Finally, Barbeque is just a fun little cover from Jim Henson's Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas.

Happy holidays all, whichever you choose to celebrate...or not. We are still free to make this choice, I think.

Kathy Seiler

Loreena McKennit – God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen 

This is my absolute favorite take on this song, which I never really liked very much until I heard this version. The Middle Eastern vibe is so perfect for a Christmas song, considering where Jesus was actually from – why don’t all Christmas songs sound like this? Happy Christmas, friends. May your holiday be filled with love and joy.

Dave Kelley

"Fairytale of New York"  The Pogues

 Like much of the Pogues' music I find this to be heartbreaking, poignant, and profane.  I cannot see the Mormon Tabernacle Choir ever doing a version of this, but I love it.  The Merriest of Christmases to all.

Gary Scudder

Johann Sebastian Bach, Partita no. 2 (Lara St. John)

OK, so this is not really a Christmas song, obviously, but for some reason it seems to fit the season (at least here in suddenly snowy and dark Vermont).  This is Bach's Partita no. 2, which is one of a series of works that he wrote for solo violin.  This also would be a great choice for the proposed thematic week of works that are simply too obvious to be promoted.  Every great violinist in the world, and some much better than Lara St. John, has recorded this classic work, but maybe because I was first introduced to the work through her recording it has remained my favorite.  I think it is just heartbreakingly beautiful and elegiac and transcendent, and, truthfully, isn't this what defines the Christmas season?

My Years With Proust - Day 698

So that the essential, the only true book, though in the ordinary sense of the word it does not have to be "invented" by a great writer - for it exists already in each one of us - has to be translated by him.  The function and the task of a writer are those of a translator.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 926

I wonder if someone doesn't become a "writer", in the sense of a craftsman, until their second or third novel.  They lived with their "essential . . . only true book" for years, and they only had to translate it.  The argument would be that even if the translation was a "loose" one it was still based on an internal book that had existed for years, and every following book would be based on smaller and smaller segments of the original whole, and thus they require more specific, deliberate, acts or creation.

My Years With Proust - Day 697

Had not nature herself - if one considered the matter from this point of view - placed me on the path of art, was she not herself a beginning of art, she who, often, had allowed me to become aware of the beauty of one thing only in another thing, of the beauty, for instance, of noon at Combray in the sound of its bells, of that of the mornings at Doncieres in the hiccups of our central heating?  The link may be uninteresting, the objects trivial, the style bad, but unless this process has taken place the description is worthless.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 925

What makes an artist an artist?  Nature vs. nurture is an obvious central theme of our COR 110, Concepts of the Self, course we teach here at Champlain.  This year I had my first year students read snippets of Proust (and, of course, a snippet of Proust is not like a snippet of anyone else) and ask whether Proust wrote with such extraordinary precision and in such remarkable detail because we simply worked to become that writer, had been taught to become that writer, or whether or not he simply saw the world in that way.  The students tend to favor the latter reason, maybe because they think nobody could be forced to "become" Proust (although that might be a natural reaction against the tyranny of their overbearing professor); in fact, they opined that it must have been exhausting to be Proust, to see the world in that precision all the time.  Several times recently I've proposed that the essential human drive is the pursuit of beauty, which I would argue actually explains other typical theories for the basic human emotion: love, freedom, sex (what is more beautiful than a totally fulfilling orgasm?), God. In my COR 220, Aesthetic Expressions, course the students will often struggle, at least initially, with analyzing art, but there are always some students who come to it very naturally, not simply because they went to a more posh school, but rather that they just naturally "see" beauty more readily.  The assumption here is that Proust was one of those individuals, on steroids and infused with gamma rays, who simply saw beauty, and not simply detail, on an unparalleled level, and thus "nature herself - if one considered the matter from this point of view - placed me on the path of art."

My Years With Proust - Day 696

   Certain people, whose minds are prone to mystery, like to believe that objects retain something of the eyes which have looked at them, that old buildings and pictures appear to us not as they originally were but beneath a perceptible veil woven for them over the centuries by the love and and contemplation of millions of admirers.  This fantasy, if you transpose it into the domain of what is for each one of us the sole reality, the domain of his own sensibility, becomes the truth.  In that sense and in that sense alone (but it is a far more important one than the other), a thing which we have looked at in the past brings back to us, if we see it again, not only the eyes with which we looked at it but all the images with which at the time those eyes were filled.  For things - and among them a book in a red binding - as soon as we have perceived them are transformed within us into something immaterial, something of the same nature as all out preoccupations and sensations of that particular time, with which, indissolubly, they blend.  A name read long ago in a book contains within its syllables the strong wind and brilliant sunshine that prevailed while we were reading it.  And this is why the kind of literature which contents itself with "describing things," with giving them merely a miserable abstract of lines and surfaces, is in fact, though it calls itself realist, the farthest removed from reality and has more than any other the effect of saddening and impoverishing us, since it abruptly severs all communication of our present self both with the past, in which things incite us to enjoy the essence of the past a second time.  Yet it is precisely this essence that an art worthy of the name must seek to express; the at least, if it fails, there is a lesson to be drawn from its impotence (whereas from the successes of realism there is nothing to be learnt), the lesson that this essence is, in part, subjective and incommunicable.

   Not is this all.  A thing which we saw, a book which we read at a certain period does not merely remain for ever conjoined to what existed then around us; it remains also faithfully united to what we ourselves then were and thereafter it can be handled only by the sensibility, the personality that were then ours.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 920-921

There are a couple concepts here which really grabbed my attention. Proust tells us, "A name read long ago in a book contains within its syllables the strong wind and brilliant sunshine that prevailed while we were reading it."  We know that our emotional state and our own experiences shapes our perception of art, just as my oft-repeated example of the three different times I read Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and the three different responses I had to the novel.  Similarly, the work of art absorbs the world around it, and I would argue that this is especially true of novels because the nature of the medium requires us to put some much work, and so much of ourselves, into them, so they in turn keep that portion forever bound up within the covers. My copy of Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle will forever carry with it the pain and guilty and fear that I felt on the first Christmas day after my marriage fell apart (I'm being more than a bit disingenuous in using that terminology since I was the one that left).  I was sad and miserable and broke, and treated myself to my first Murakami novel and spent the entire day locked up in my apartment in the Woolen Mill avoiding contact with other people.  I found myself at the bottom of a well worthy of Murakami.  I can never re-read the novel, and I have a couple times already, without feeling that same sense of personal loss and failure, and it continues to haunt the novel years later. 

I was also struck by this line: "For things - and among them a book in a red binding - as soon as we have perceived them are transformed within us into something immaterial, something of the same nature as all out preoccupations and sensations of that particular time, with which, indissolubly, they blend."  So much of the novel has, naturally, focused on the process where the present because the past, and for that matter the forgotten becomes the remembered.  Inherent in all this is the process where the material becomes the immaterial, which in turn gives it a transcendence and an immortality that it never possessed in its more material status.  Think of it this way: I was in love with a woman once, and she had a material form, a physical, carnal body, and while we were together we spoke words of the transcendent and the immortal as we promised the promises that lovers promise, but we were bound by the material world so the words meant nothing; but if the relationship ends, then her material body passes into the material world, and while that seems light as a wisp, in reality it possesses a permanence, and immortality, a weight, that the material version never achieved.

My Zanzibari Brothers

I shamelessly swiped this picture from Steve Wehmeyer.  We've had this maddening day trying to sort out absurd last minute troubles with the upcoming Zanzibar trip.  I think we were both about the end of our tether (although not as bad as it was on our first trip when Wehmeyer's ulcer was killing him and I had a constant run of cluster headaches).  In the midst of the chaos Steve sent me an email with the header: why we do it . . ..  Figuring it was some inspirational message about teaching I opened the email and instead was very pleasantly surprised to see a picture I'd never seen before of our friends Seif and Abdul.  When we saw them in May, Seif gave me a big bear hug and said, "I've been waiting all year for you to come back."  Soon, my brothers, soon.

This must have been snapped on our spice tour two years ago.  I can tell by the hats, not Abdul's classic Zanzibari hat, but instead Seif's one made from coconut fronds (there's a picture of me wearing that same hat, although not looking nearly as handsome - or happy).

My Years With Proust - Day 695

  I had arrived then at the conclusion that in fashioning a work of art we are by no means free, that we do  not choose how we shall make it but that it pre-exists us and therefore we are obliged, since it is both necessary and hidden, to do what we should have to do if it were a law of nature, that is to say to discover it. But this discovery which art obliges us to make, is it not, I thought, really the discovery of what, though it ought to be more precious to us than anything in the world, yet remains ordinarily for ever unknown to us, the discovery of our true life, of reality as we have felt it to be, which differs so greatly from what we think it is that when a chance happening brings us an authentic memory of it we are filled with an immense happiness? 

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 915

I've told the story, too often, of the time twenty years ago in Atlanta when I was driving home from teaching a night class, that an entire short story dropped, seemingly from space, on to (in to) my head like a hat.  When I was trying to write I would often think of one moment or one sentence or one look, and essential crux of the story, and then the writing would involve writing out from there, creating the structure to get us to and from that one moment or one sentence or one look.  In that particular instance it was as if the story already existed, maybe in another dimension that I had crossed into on the way home, and it just happened to bump into me.  But maybe the story did already exist, but existed inside of me, and had patiently waited for me for years until I was able to understand it, or at least to write it.  This all sounds a bit ethereal, but isn't this what Proust is getting at, and why we found ourselves in that spiritual discussion a couple posts ago.  If it's not a creation as as much as a discovery, then it is, as Proust opines, "a discovery of our true life."  And if this is true then it speaks to the legitimacy, and the urgency, of Proust's journey - and the journey of every artist.

My Years With Proust - Day 694

   As for the inner book of unknown symbols (symbols carved in relief they might have been, which my attention, as it explored my unconscious, groped for and stumbled against and followed the contours of , like a diver exploring the ocean-bed), if I tried to read them no one could help me with any rules, for to read them was an act of creation in which no one can do our work for us or even collaborate with us.  How many for this reason turn aside from writing! What tasks do men not take upon themselves in order to evade this task! Every public event, be it the Dreyfus case, be it the war, furnishes the writer with a fresh excuse for not attempting to decipher this book: he wants to ensure the triumph of justice, he wants to restore the moral unity of the nation, he has no time to think of literature.  But there are mere excuses, the truth being that he has not or no longer has genius, that is to say instinct.  For instinct dictates our duty and the intellect supplies us with pretexts for evading it.  But excuses have no place in art and intentions count for nothing: at every moment the artist has to listen to his instinct, and it is this that makes art the most real of all things, the most austere school of life, the true last judgment.  This book, more laborious to decipher than any other, is also the only one which has been dictated to us by reality, the only one of which the "impression" has been printed in us by reality itself.  When an idea - an idea of any kind - is left in us by life, its material pattern, the outline of the impression that it made upon us, remains behind as the token of its necessary truth.  The ideas formed by the pure intelligence have no more than a logical, a possible truth, they are arbitrarily chosen.  The book whose hieroglyphs are patterns not traced by us is the only book that really belongs to us.  Not that the ideas which we form for ourselves cannot be correct in logic; that they may well be, but we cannot know whether they are true.  Only the impression, however trivial its material may seem to be, however faint its traces, is a criterion of truth and deserves for that reason to be apprehended by the mind, for the mind, if it succeeds in extracting this truth, can by the impression and by nothing else be brought to a state of greater perfection and given a pure joy.  The impression is for the writer what experiment is for a scientist, with the difference that in the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes the experiment and in the writer it comes after the impression.  What we had not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours.  From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 913-914

Proust asks us, "How many for this reason turn aside from writing!" I've often asked myself why I stopped writing twenty years ago (which I've discussed occasionally as part of this two year joust with Proust), and there are certainly a lot of reasons. First the "duh" reason, and also the biggest lie: life got busy and complicated.  When I'm at my most harshly self-critical I will focus in on my cowardice, my inability to face criticism.  Or I'll focus on my laziness.  My lack of talent is a given, but that doesn't explain why I stopped trying to write.  Or maybe it wasn't failure that terrified me, but whether the challenge of digging that deep and the terror of what I might find, both the deeper truths and the grappling with unpleasant realities that getting there required: "As for the inner book of unknown symbols (symbols carved in relief they might have been, which my attention, as it explored my unconscious, groped for and stumbled against and followed the contours of , like a diver exploring the ocean-bed), if I tried to read them no one could help me with any rules, for to read them was an act of creation in which no one can do our work for us or even collaborate with us."

But here's the thing, a true artist - and I'm not artist by even the most generous definition - would not have shied away from any of these challenge.  As Proust opines, "But excuses have no place in art and intentions count for nothing: at every moment the artist has to listen to his instinct, and it is this that makes art the most real of all things, the most austere school of life, the true last judgment."  Now, is art the "true last judgment"?  If it is the most individualistic, the most instinctual, of activities then I would have to agree with Proust.  Consequently, it makes the challenge of creating art - and understanding art for that matter - an extraordinarily difficult challenge.  Proust adds, "This book, more laborious to decipher than any other, is also the only one which has been dictated to us by reality, the only one of which the "impression" has been printed in us by reality itself."  By "book" he doesn't mean Remembrance of Things Past (although it would be a classic example), but any novel (or any work of art in a broader textual sense). 

My Years With Proust - Day 693

I remembered - with pleasure because it showed me that already in those days I had seen the same and that this type of experience sprang from a fundamental trait in my character, but with sadness also when I thought that since that time I had never progressed - that already at Combray I used to fix before my mind for its attention some image which had compelled me to look at it, a cloud, a triangle, a church spire, a flower, a stone, because I had the feeling that perhaps beneath these signs there lay something of a quite different kind which I must try to discover, some thought which they translated after the fashion of those hieroglyphic characters which at first one might suppose to represent only material objects.  No doubt the process of decipherment was difficult, but only by accomplishing it could one arrive at whatever truth there was to read.  For the truths which the intellect apprehends directly in the world of full and unimpeded light have something less profound, less necessary than those which life communicated to us against our will in an impression which is material because it enters us through the senses but yet has a spiritual meaning which it is possible for us to extract.  In fact, both in the one case and in the other, whether I was concerned with impressions like the one which I had received from the sight of the steeples of Martinville or with reminiscenses like that of the unevenness of the two steps or the taste of the madeleine, the task was to interpret the given sensations as signs of so many laws and ideas, by trying to think - that is to say, to draw forth from the shadow - what I had merely felt, by trying to convert it into its spiritual equivalent.  And this method, which seemed to me the sole method, what was it but the creation of a work of art?  Already the consequences came flooding into my mind, whether I considered reminiscenses of the kind evoked by the noise of the spoon or the taste of the madeleine, or those truths written with the aid of shapes for whose meaning I searched in my brain, where - church steeples or wild grass growing in a wall - they composed a magical scrawl, complex and elaborate, their essential character was that I was not free to choose them, that such as they were they were given to me.  And I realised that this must be the mark of their authenticity. I had not gone in search of the two uneven paving-stones of the courtyard upon which I had stumbled. But it was precisely the fortuitous and inevitable fashion in which this and the other sensations had been encountered that proved the truness of the past which they brought back to life, of the images which they released, since we feel, with these sensations, the effort that they make to climb back towards the light, feel in ourselves the joy of rediscovering what is real.  And here too was the proof of the trueness of the whole picture formed out of those contemporaneous impressions which the first sensation brings back in its train, with those unerring proportions of light and shade, emphasis and omission, memory and forgetfulness to which conscious meditation and conscious observation will never know how to attain.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 912-912

There is a famous verse in the Quran which goes:

"It was He who created the heavens and the earth in all truth.  On the day when He says: 'Be,' it shall be.  His word is the truth.  All sovereignty shall be His on the day when the trumpet is sounded.  He has knowledge of the unknown and the manifest.   He alone is wise and all-knowing."
                                              Quran 6:73 (Dawood translation)

The "unknown" and the "manifest" are often translated as the "unseen" and the "seen."  Essentially, the verse is saying that God alone knows the seen and the unseen, and the rest of us can't, by definition know them, but that we have to believe in what we can't see, which is the very definition of faith.  So, why in the hell would I introduce this discussion of Proust with a passage from the Quran?  Good question.  For some reason as I was reading this paragraph from Remembrance of Things Past I kept thinking about this Quranic passage (there are several like it).  Proust has talked a lot about the transcendent, mainly beauty or love, but he hasn't delved much into faith, and even here he's only skirting the issue.

Proust tells us, "For the truths which the intellect apprehends directly in the world of full and unimpeded light have something less profound, less necessary than those which life communicated to us against our will in an impression which is material because it enters us through the senses but yet has a spiritual meaning which it is possible for us to extract."  It seems to me that Proust is suggesting that while there is knowledge that we can bring in through the cold light of logic, it pales in comparison to the truths we learn uncontrollably, almost against our will, spiritually.  In this way, at least in Proust's opinion, this justifies his trying to express these profound truths through a work of fiction (as much as Remembrance of Things Past is a work of fiction, I suppose): " . . . what I had merely felt, by trying to convert it into its spiritual equivalent.  And this method, which seemed to me the sole method, what was it but the creation of a work of art?" So then art could achieve a truth that logic, philosophy, could not. "And here too was the proof of the trueness of the whole picture formed out of those contemporaneous impressions which the first sensation brings back in its train, with those unerring proportions of light and shade, emphasis and omission, memory and forgetfulness to which conscious meditation and conscious observation will never know how to attain." Divorcing ourselves from religion, does the attainment of all knowledge mean that we have to be open to the seen and the unseen?