My Years With Proust - Day 660

   I closed the Journal of the Goncourts.  Prestige of literature!  I wished I could have seen the Cottards again, asked them all sorts of details about Elstir, gone to look at the shop called Little Dunkirk, if it still existed, asked permission to visit the Verdurin mansion where I had once dined.  But I felt vaguely depressed.  Certainly, I had never concealed from myself that I knew neither how to listen nor, once I was not alone, how to look.  My eyes were blind to the sort of necklace an old woman might be wearing, and the things I might be told about her pearls never entered my ears.  All the same, I had known these people in daily life, I had dined with them often, they were simply the Verdurins and the Duc de Guermantes and the Cottard, and each one of them I had found just as commonplace as my grandmother had found that Basin of whom she had no suspicion that he was the darling nephew, the enchanting young hero, of Mme de Beausergent, each one of them had seemed to be insipid . . .

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 737

Proust quoted a very long section from the Journal of the Goncourts, which may or may not be an actual work (I should look that up), which I left out (for the obvious reason).  I talked yesterday about Proust's comments disparaging his talents as a writer, and, for that matter, the validity of literature itself.  Here on the other side of the section from the Journal of the Goncourts he continues enough self-deprecation to qualify as a Hoosier (or enough sand-bagging to merit membership in my fantasy baseball league).  "My eyes were blind to the sort of necklace an old woman might be wearing, and the things I might be told about her pearls never entered my ears."  It's difficult to imagine that any author ever possessed a greater eye for detail than Proust, so, again, either he's being ironic or modest, or he's sharing with us the challenges of becoming a writer, or learning to acquire these skills.  I would add that one of the most valuable skills would be to get over your own skepticism and be able to discover, or at least express, the magic in the seemingly mundane.  Proust had, at least according to this narrative, found so many of the characters who populated  Remembrance of Things Past "insipid," but in the pages of this work they are hardly that.  Today in class I was talking about magic realism; and it later occurred to me that maybe all literature is a form of magic realism.