My Years With Proust - Day 522

   I had promised Albertine that, if I did not go out with her, I would settle down to work.  But in the morning, just as if, taking advantage of our being asleep, the house had miraculously flown, I awoke in different weather beneath another clime.  We do not begin to work as soon as we disembark in a strange country to the conditions of which we have to adapt ourselves.  And each day was for me a different country.  How could I even recognise my indolence itself, under the novel forms which it assumed? . . .

   I followed his example, and did as I had always done since my first resolution to become a writer, which I had made long ago, but which seemed to me to date from yesterday, because I was regarded each intervening day as non-existent.  I treated this day in a similar fashion, allowing its showers of rain and bursts of sunshine to pass without doing anything, and vowing that I would begin to work next day.  But then I was no longer the same man beneath a cloudless sky; the golden note of the bells contained, like honey, not only light but the sensation of light (and also the sickly savour of preserved fruits, because at Combray it had often loitered like a wasp over our cleared dinner-table)

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 76-78

There are many times during my trek through Remembrance of Things Past when I've felt great kinship with Marcel, and, sadly, this is one of them.  It's difficult to think of someone who wrote this massive novel, and other works, and thousands of personal letters, as someone who struggled to write, but if we're to believe Proust then it is true.  In the end he blames his indolence and his lack of focus, and I can certainly appreciate that comment.  I've been working, clumsily and haphazardly, on this book on the epics for years, and even though I've written a lot I haven't written nearly as much as I should have.  Yes, it would certainly help if I didn't take on these travel courses (although they are utterly transformative for the students, and, truthfully, a hell of a lot of fun) or projects like hosting online music discussions or spending a couple years reading Proust and commenting upon it or being so active on Twitter, but I think it's more than that.  I think I am just intellectually lazy, and it's depressing/humbling to think what I might have accomplished in my career if I were not so, to borrow a favorite word from Proust, indolent.  My father always beat it into my head that I was about the laziest kid in the world, and it well be that he was more than a bit of a prophet.  It's especially frustrating because as I think about the next few years of my life the most obvious path would be to write; it's the natural crossroads where my fading energy and desire for teaching meets my increasing knowledge and broadened perspective.  Still, I am so embarrassingly unproductive.I wish I had a better answer, and a less depressing one.