My Year With Proust - Day 20

   "While I was reading in the garden, a thing my great-aunt would never have understood my doing save on a Sunday, that being the day on which it was unlawful to indulge in any serious occupation, and on which she herself would lay aside her sewing (on a week-day she would have said, 'How you can go on amusing yourself with a book; it isn't Sunday, you know!' putting into the word 'amusing' an implication of childishness and waste of time)."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p 105

I began this process to try, among other goals, obviously, to shake some memories loose.  This short passage definitely achieved that goal, as two different and very distinct memories came to mind.

The first stretches back almost thirty years.  Brenda, a very young Gary and I were living with my parents.  We had to move in for a year late in my graduate career, after I had run out of funding at UC and before I pulled together a livable deal at Franklin College (where I worked while I finished my dissertation).  Anyway, I was on the computer (and it's funny to think what constituted a computer then) working on a chapter when my mom popped around the corner and asked me if I would run to the store for her.  While I have a million flaws, I normally don't ever squawk about being asked to run errands.  However, I was at a point where I actually had developed some momentum in my writing and was getting some serious work done, so I asked if she could ask Eric or Beth (my youngest siblings, who were both at home at the time) if they could go instead.  She responded that they were watching TV.  The point was that they were doing something that she could understand, and thus was serious, and so it would constitute an inconsiderate interruption to ask them to go.  Whereas I was doing something so alien to her understanding that it could not have been serious, and so it was not an interruption.

Secondly, I remember riding on the shuttle from central Vermont to Burlington one time, happily buried in a volume of Dickens.  One of the other commuters asked what I was reading, and I told her Bleak House or David Cooperfield or whatever tome I was plowing through at that moment.  She said, "Oh, that's one of the classics, isn't it?"  And it wasn't a good "oh".  It wasn't an "oh" of "wow, that's what I should be doing right now," but rather an "oh" of "I'm so sorry, how did this happen?"  It's actually one of the inspirations for my (never to be finished) book on the epics.  People all too often take that viewpoint when thinking about "classic" literature, and I'm hoping that the book helps people to understand that these works are are actually much more accessible than people think - and that they contain a world of enlightenment and joy - and so you should tackle them.  On a related note, folks on the bus would interrupt me all the time while I was reading, I guess thinking that they were doing me a favor by breaking up that hateful chore, reading.

One final thought: I've had students encourage me to read graphic novels because they're "a quicker way to get the information" than more standard novels.  For a person who loves to read, it's very sad to meet so many people who never give themselves that gift.