My Years With Proust - Day 385

   Calmed by my confrontation with Albertine, I began once again to live in closer intimacy with my mother.  She loved to talk to me gently about the days when my grandmother had been younger.  Fearing that I might reproach myself with the sorrows with which I had perhaps darkened the close of my grandmother's life, she preferred to turn back to the years when my first studies had given my grandmother a satisfaction which until now had always been kept from me.  We talked of the old days at Combray.  My mother reminded me that there at least I used to read, and that at Balbec I might well do the same, if I was not going to work.  I replied that, to surround myself with memories of Combray and of the charming coloured plates, I should like to re-read the Thousand and One Nights.  As, long ago at Combray, when she gave me books for my birthday, so it was in secret, as a surprise for me, that my mother now sent for both the Thousand and One Nights of Gallard and the Thousand Nights and One Night of Mardrus.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 864-865

I suppose that anyone who grew up reading it is only natural that at times of stress we re-immerse ourselves in our favorite books.  I've read books like David Copperfield or the Chess Garden many times, and I wonder if you could trace my emotional highs and lows based solely on when I read and re-read those works?   Like Marcel, there are certainly books that I associate with my childhood, although none of them are children's books per se (not that a Thousand and One Nights is a children's book, at least in its unexpurgated form).  As a young teenager I mainly remember reading Winesburg, Ohio and Sherlock Holmes and The Moon and Six Pence, although I must have read more age-appropriate books and for some reason they just didn't register.    To be fair, this may be more of a reflection of growing up in the middle of a cornfield in an age before cable TV or video games than any great statement about my intellectual curiosity.

I also find this statement from his mother interesting: "My mother reminded me that there (Combray) at least I used to read, and that at Balbec I might well do the same, if I was not going to work."  Maybe it's just our recent discussion of Marxist literary criticism in my Heroines & Heroes class, but I would propose that it's important to keep in mind that Proust is a product of a class where a life of leisure is an option (although, to be fair, aren't almost all writers products of privilege, at least intellectual privilege?).  I keep reflecting back upon the Tale of Genji, and how both stories are on one level stories of privilege, but somehow transcend that mere designation.

Finally, I should note that my wonderful friend Cyndi and I are organizing a student trip to Jordan for March 2018 in a Heroines & Heroes class where we'll be reading a selection from the Thousand and One Nights, which will force me - or maybe it's more accurate to say, enable me - to re-read a book I haven't read in depth in decades.