2025 Readings 16

 "And Dante is not the only poet whom Virgil has conducted to the threshold of paradise."

Marcel Proust

This reading was definitely a short one, which is a strange thing to point out when you're talking about Marcel Proust. A while back I stumbled across a very brief collection of Proust's writings called Days of Reading. It opens with a piece that Proust wrote honoring John Ruskin after his death (and if you know your Proust you know that he loved Ruskin), and then it passes on to a couple essays that gave their name to the collection. They a lovely homage to the sheer joy of reading, and so they naturally spoke to me. For example, here's a lovely passage on the feeling of loss that one feels when they finish a book (and it made me think of every time I finish rereading The Chess Garden or Bleak House or, naturally, In Search of Lost Time): 

"Then the last page had been read, the book was finished. The frantic career of the eyes and of the voice which had been following them noiselessly, pausing only to catch its breath, had to be halted, in a deep sigh. And then, so as to give the turbulence loose inside me for too long to be able ot still itself other movements to control, I would get up and start walking up and down by my bed, my eyes still fixed on some point that might have been looked for in vain either inside the room of without, for it was the distance of a soul away, one of those distance not to be measured in metres or in miles, unlike others, and which it is impossible moreover to mistake for them once one sees the 'remote' stare of those whose thoughts are 'elsewhere.' Was there no more to the book than this, then? These creatures on whom one has bestowed more attention and affection than on those in real life, not always daring to admit to what extent you loved them, and even, when my parents found me reading and seemed to smile at my emotion, closing the book with studied indifference or a pretence of boredom, never again would one see these people for whom one has sobbed and yearned, never again hear of them."

Oh, and, obviously, I'm swiping that opening line for the Epics chapter on the Aeneid.