My Years With Proust - Day 631

No doubt it is only in one's mind that one possesses things, and one does not possess a picture because it hangs in one's dining-room if one is incapable of understanding it, or a landscape because one lives in it without even looking at it.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, p. 563

As the excellent Mike Kelly is wont to opine, Proust just shared some truth.  And of all the truths that Proust shares with us in the course of Remembrance of Things Past, this is one of the most important.  We don't actually possess much of anything, nor should we try to, probably, but if we possess anything at all it is in our minds and through our ability to understand it.  Almost every day in my Dar al-Islam: Yemen course, especially, and naturally, in our Quran readings, we've come back again and again to the need for context.  Beyond the need to think (and the sharing of the necessary tools to do so) there's probably not a more important goal of education than providing the context to sort out the deeper meaning and concomitant implications of an event/concept/text (and, truthfully, isn't this part of the tools mentioned above).  Maybe in my own clumsy fashion, this is one of the driving forces which has taken me 631 days into struggling with Proust.  Yes, I want to understand Remembrance of Things Past, and in the process better understand my own past (and present and future) but maybe this effort provides some measure of context (even if only for the twenty people who faithfully, and foolishly, show up every day to read it).  It also makes me even disappointed with myself than usual (which is saying something) in my inability to finish the epics project.  Granted, even finished it may never get published, but, if, by some miracle it does see the light of day, my hope is that it will provide some context and maybe inspire folks to tackle works like the Ramayana or the Iliad or the Shahnameh.  In a life marked by failure, this one is really starting to wear on me, and also explains why I've started writing two or sometimes even three Proust blog posts a day.  It's not that I'm bored with Proust or the project, but rather that time is slipping away.  People my age, some who are remarkably dear to me, are losing that battle that we all lose (although unfairly, cruelly unfairly, long before their time) and thus the ability to finish the type of projects that I'm not finishing simply by being the world's laziest man.