A Proust Problem

I get lots of grief from my friends because I've read Proust's In Search of Lost Time a few times, and, well, I guess they have a point. That said, I'm not going to delve into the new translation - stacked on the left in the picture - for at least two years. I'm thinking that will be a retirement project. Of course, I'm also two hundred pages into the Proust biography and swore up and down that I was not going to open that book for a couple years as well.

I was thinking of writing a novel the other day about an old man who decides at a certain point that he's simply going to delve back into In Search of Lost Time and never leave it until death. It would serve as a love of beauty and a rejection of the crass external world worthy of Pessoa, but it would also be a mechanism for sharing what a work that is, much like the epics project, I guess, that goes unread because people think, as my excellent friend David Rous elegantly opined, that it is impenetrable.

Fundamental Notes

 This was the Venice that I explore in the afternoons, if I did not go out with my mother. For this was where I found it easier to meet women of the people, march-sellers and bead-stringers, glass- or lace-workers, young working-girls whose long black, fringed shawls were no barrier to my love, since I have nearly forgotten Albertine, yet some were more attractive than others, for I did still remember her a little.  I wonder if anyone could have told me exactly how far, in this passionate perusal of Venetian women, what was due to them, and what to Albertine, or my former desire to travel to Venice. Our slightest desire, although striking its own, unique chord, contains within it the fundamental notes on which our whole lives are based. And if perchance we suppressed one or other of these notes, even unheard, even unconscious, a note absolutely no relation to the object of our pursuit, we would none the less feel our whole desire for this object fade away. There was much that I did not attempt to elucidate in the midst of my excited pursuit of Venetian girls. My gondola followed the side canals, as if the mysterious hand of a genie were guiding me through the byways of this oriental city, the more I advanced along the canals the more they seemed to show me the way, slicing through a neighborhood that they divided as their narrow and arbitrarily traced furrows barely perturbed the tall houses and their small Moorish windows; and like a magical guide holding a candle between his fingers to light my passage, they cast ahead of them a ray of sunlight and opened a pathway for it.  You could sense that between the humble dwellings that the little canal had just divided and which otherwise could have formed a compact whole, there was so little space available that a church bell-towers or a garden trellis would directly overhand the rio, as in a flooded city.  But for the churches, as for the gardens which underwent the same process of transposition as occurred in the Grand Canal, the seas was so willing to act as a means of communication, like a side or main street, that on either side of the Canaletto, churches rose out of the water in this old, crowded and poor neighborhood. 

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, pp. 228-229 (tr. Peter Collier)

I told myself that I was not going to delve into the new translation of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, but I guess that promise didn't last long. Janet and I are headed to Venice for our Thanksgiving break. For some reason she's never been to Italy, although she's also actively trying to attain Italian citizenship through her grandfather (that is, if the Boston Consulate ever decides to actually do its job and schedule her appointment). I've only been to Italy twice, and I loved it both times. That said, I've never been to Venice, and it's the part of Italy that I've most wanted to visit. Venice is the magic place that Proust mentions so often. This section is drawn from the end of The Fugitive, the sixth volume of In Search of Lost Time, shortly after the death of Albertine. We're thinking of staying at the Hotel Metropole, which is so far out of our price range (although less expensive since we're heading there far out of the tourist season, which makes me happy, more for the space than for any money saved). The Metropole is where both Proust and Thomas Mann stayed, so how could we not stay there? I think my declining health makes us, or at least me, more willing to spend money; essentially, who knows when my last trip will be? My dream is a less-crowded Venice, and plenty of ethereal fog masking the ancient and mysterious city - although hopefully a sinister woman in a red raincoat won't pop up to slit my throat.

Can You Have Too Much Proust?

 I don't know, can you have too much Proust? I'm closing in on a fourth reading of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, which must place in some utterly strange little corner of Americana. It's funny, although not particularly surprising, that our perception of novels or films change over the years. Among the things that jumped out at me on this re-read are: 1) The Guermantes Way is better than I remember (that's the third volume of seven, and usually the one that grinds attempts to read the entire novel into the dust: this is why, when you're at the bookstore, the only volume available is the first, Swann's Way, because many people collapse that early on); 2) Proust is simply a lot funnier with each read, and maybe that's nothing more than the process of naturally getting into the flow of his writing; 3) Albertine is not the only captive in The Captive, the fifty volume - she's joined by Marcel, and the Baron de Charlus, and several other characters, including women, and, to a larger extent, society itself, and 4) there really is a lot of sex in The Fugitive, the sixth volume (I mean, I knew that, but I guess I'm always surprised by it nevertheless) - although all the sex is overwhelmed by Proust's extraordinary writing on loss. 

So, I couldn't possibly be in the mood for more Proust, right? Apparently the answer to that is no. Recently I purchased, and started gently reading, William Carter's biography, Marcel Proust: A Life along with all seven volumes of the new Penguin translation of In Search of Lost Time (the later, and more appropriate translated title, of Remembrance of Things Past). The new translations are supposed to be marvelous, although I don't think I'll tackle it for a couple years on my normal Proustian rotation (he said . . .). I guess I'm going to have to admit to being something of a Proust nut.

I had put off reading a biography of Marcel Proust because, well, isn't that sort of like carrying coals to Newcastle if you've read Remembrance of Things Past? Not entirely, of course, because while there are definite similarities to his life and his society, there's a lot more going on in the novel. Still, some of the similarities are amazing, especially if you've read it a few times and you automatically begin to pair up actual characters with literary ones. Now, I hope this latest reading binge isn't simply my way of avoiding my own writing . . .

My Years With Proust - Day 737

   I understood now why it was that the Duc de Guermantes, who to my surprise, when I had seen him sitting on a chair, had seemed to me so little aged although he had so many more years beneath him than I had, had presently, when he rose to his feet and tried to stand firm upon them, swayed backwards and forwards upon legs as tottery as those of some old arch-bishop with nothing solid about his person but his metal crucifix, to whose support there rushes a mob of sturdy young seminarists, and had advanced with difficulty, trembling like a leaf, upon the almost unmanageable summit of his eighty-three years, as though men spend their lives perched upon living stilts which never cease to grow until sometimes they become taller than church steeples, making it in the end both difficult and perilous for them to walk and raising them to an eminence from which suddenly they fall. And I was terrified by the thought that the stilts beneath my own feet might already have reached that height; it seemed to me that quite soon now I might be too weak to maintain my hold upon a past which already went down so far.  But at least, if strength were granted me for long enough to accomplish my work, I should not fail, even if the results were to make them resemble monsters, to describe men first and foremost as occupying a place, a very considerable place compared with the restricted one which is allotted to them in space, a place on the contrary prolonged past measure - for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch epochs that are immensely far apart, separated by the slow accretion of many, many days - in the dimension of Time.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1106-1107

Wow, I can't believe that I've reached the end, if it is the end, of my clumsy, ill-considered commentary on Remembrance of Things Past.  When I began this two years ago I didn't really think that I'd bang away for seven-hundred thirty-seven posts, although, considering that Proust's work of over three-thousand pages I should I figured that it would a challenge.  I don't know if I'm prepared for it to end, if for no other reason than I don't feel qualified to comment on what I think of Proust or how the process has changed me.  I told someone the other day that there are a small number of books that definitively made me a better person: Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, the Qur'an and Remembrance of Things Past.  There are books that changed me, such as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio or W. Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Six Pence or Haruki Mirakakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Charles Dickens's David Copperfield or Brooks Hansen's The Chess Garden because I read them at times of my life when I was growing or in a state or change or even a state of crisis, and they helped me understand myself and grow - or even just survive - but I don't think that's the same as definitively making me a better person.   The Qur'an and the Meditations were very obvious choices on that front, but why Proust?  Maybe it's a reflection on the mental discipline that it took to get all the way through the novel and to comment on it every day for two years, but it's certainly more than that.  In the process of accompanying Proust on his journey through the past, I was forced to address my own, and it has often been an uncomfortable experience.  I've had to come face to face with so many of my own failings and the damage that I've done to people I love, but maybe in the process of facing these problems, even if I'm positive I have not been nearly hard enough on myself, I can find ways to address these shortcomings and make it up to them.  I think I've learned that the essential human drive is the quest for beauty, and that every other possible answer to that question is a subset of that greater need.  And to understand and reach that beauty, and I'm not nearly there yet, I had to address a lot of ugliness.  In the end, as Proust reminds us, it is in vain that we linger before the hawthorns.

My Years With Proust - Day 736

   In this vast dimension which I had not known myself to possess, the date on which I had heard the noise of the garden bell at Combray - that far-distant noise which nevertheless was within me - was a point from which I might start to make measurements.  And I felt, as I say, a sensation of weariness and almost of terror at the thought that all this length of Time had not only, without interruption, been lived, experienced, secreted by me, that it was my life, was in fact me, but also that I was compelled so long as I was alive to keep it attached to me, that it supported me and that, perched on its giddy summit, I could not myself make a movement without displacing it.  A feeling of vertigo seized me as I looked down beneath me, yet within me, as though from a height, which was my own height, of many leagues, at the long series of the years.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 1106

We've reached the high point of the party, at least for Marcel, and almost the end of the novel.  He understands the adventure and also the challenge that awaits him.  In a moment of pristine clarity he realizes: "And I felt, as I say, a sensation of weariness and almost of terror at the thought that all this length of Time had not only, without interruption, been lived, experienced, secreted by me, that it was my life, was in fact me, but also that I was compelled so long as I was alive to keep it attached to me, that it supported me and that, perched on its giddy summit, I could not myself make a movement without displacing it."  We've talked before about the Things We Carry (and that is a novel I need to reread) and it sometimes staggering when you consider the weight of them.  They're sort of like the chains that Jacob Marley, and Ebenezer Scrooge, carried around in A Christmas Carol.  When I was engaged to the LBG she would sometimes get puzzled/angry at the complexity of my life and its concomitant relationships, and I could only tell her that I was over fifty and I was decades into a life well and messily lived.  And, unlike Proust, I wasn't even trying to make sense of it, just survive it.

And we've reached the penultimate post on this two year journey.  So, if anyone ever asks you how blog posts it takes to comment on all of Remembrance of Things Past, the Correct Answer is 737. Having said, that, I suspect there will be additional posts as I come to terms with all this, especially when I embark on the great Re-Read.

"One . . . two . . . three . . . seven hundred thirty-seven [crunch]."

My Years With Proust - Day 735

On the contrary, having forgotten the exact manner in which they faded away and wanting to re-learn this, to hear them properly again, I was obliged to block my ears to the conversations which were proceeding between the masked figures all round me, for in order to get nearer to the sound of the bell and to hear it better it was into my own depths that I had to re-descend.  And this could only be because its peal had always been there, inside me, and not this sound only but also, between that distant moment and the present one, unrolled in all its vast length, the whole of that past which I was not aware that I carried about within me.  When the bell of the garden gate had pealed, I already existed and from that moment onwards, for me still to be able to hear that peal, there must have been no break in continuity, no single second at which I had ceased or rested from existing, from thinking, from being conscious of myself, since that moment from long ago still adhered to me and I could still find it again, could retrace my steps to it merely by descending to a greater depth within myself.  And it is because they contain thus within themselves the hours of the past that human bodies have the power to hurt so terribly those who love them, because they contain the memories of so many joys and desires already effaced for them, but still cruel for the lover who contemplates and prolongs in the dimension of Time the beloved body of which he is jealous, so jealous that he may even wish for its destruction.  For after death Time withdraws from the body, and the memories, so indifferent, grown so pale, are effaced in her who no longer exists, as they soon will be in the lover whom for a while they continue to torment but in whom before long they will perish, once the desire they owed its inspiration to a living body is no longer there to sustain them.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1105-1106

Proust is still fixated on the bell, the ferruginous sound (see, I did make an effort to use that word more in polite company, or at least the company that reads this blog) of which keeps bringing him back to his childhood. "When the bell of the garden gate had pealed, I already existed and from that moment onwards, for me still to be able to hear that peal, there must have been no break in continuity, no single second at which I had ceased or rested from existing, from thinking, from being conscious of myself, since that moment from long ago still adhered to me and I could still find it again, could retrace my steps to it merely by descending to a greater depth within myself." It wasn't simply that the bell reminded him of the first time he heard it, and the person that he was then, but that the bell had never stopped sounded and that person in the past had never stopped existing; this is because Marcel himself had never stopped existing and thus the memory had never stopped existing, which meant that that moment had not stopped existing. It's like there are little Russian nesting doll versions of ourselves living inside of ourselves, just as the earlier reptile brain continues to exist within our modern brain.  So all of these different versions of ourselves negotiate with each other as we work through each day to construct a new reality?

"For after death Time withdraws from the body, and the memories, so indifferent, grown so pale, are effaced in her who no longer exists, as they soon will be in the lover whom for a while they continue to torment but in whom before long they will perish, once the desire they owed its inspiration to a living body is no longer there to sustain them." Oddly, this passage reminds me of a conversation that we had today in my Heroines & Heroes class about the nature of being a heroine/hero, and the externality of heroism.  Essentially, if no one saw you carrying out a heroic act were you actually a hero, and thus your heroism died with you.  I favored a more internal sense of a heroic (read moment of sacrifice/selflessness) deed, but I granted that in a godless universe no one would know your heroism and thus it would die with you.  With that in mind, what happens to the wealth of memories which you have carefully squirreled away over the years if there is no afterlife?  Do they simply disappear.  Marcus Aurelius suggested that soon you will have forgotten the world and the world will have forgotten you.  What a pity that those memories are gone, unless you, like Proust, record them in detail in your own version of Remembrance of Things Past or your own blog.  It's not as if you can download them all, at least yet.

My Years With Proust - Day 734

   This notion of Time embodied, of years past but not separated from us, it was now my intention to emphasise as strongly as possible in my work.  And at this very moment, in the house of the Prince de Guermantes, as though to strengthen me in my resolve, the noise of my parents' footsteps as they accompanied M. Swann to the door and the peal - resilient, ferruginous, interminable, fresh and shrill - of the bell on the garden gate which informed me that at last he had gone and that Mamma would presently come upstairs, these sounds rang again in my ears, yes, unmistakably I heard these very sounds, situated though they were in a remote past.  And as I cast my mind over all the events which were ranged in an unbroken series between the moment of my childhood when I had first heard its sound and the Guermantes party, I was terrified to think that it was indeed this same bell which rang within me and that nothing that I could do would alter its jangling notes.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 1105

Proust has his own style, obviously.  And who else has Proust's style? When I read John Irving or Rohinton Mistry or J.K. Rowling I always hearken back to Dickens (as much as everybody tries to tie Rowling to Tolkien I think Dickens is the better fit).  I guess this popped into my head when I read this because it initially sounded very Dickensian.  But again, who has Proust's style?  Sometimes you'll hear books described as having a somewhat Proustian scope or attention to detail or level of psychological exploration, but I don't know if I can think of anyone whose writing style itself was compared to Proust's. Anyway, I guess I thought of Dickens because of the use of the word ferruginous, which just seems appropriately Dickensian [note to self: use the word ferruginous more in polite company].

In this passage Proust is once again taking us back to the first pages of the novel and those earliest childhood memories.  I joked earlier that I was not going to follow the example of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and immediately reread Remembrance of Things Past after finishing it, but I'm now rethinking that decision.  I promised that I would hold off because I have so many other projects I need to tackle, but whenever Proust includes one of these references to his childhood, and the earliest sections of the book, I feel that I missed so much and need to go back.  Obviously, there are worlds within worlds in this novel.  It would also be nice to go back freed of the need to write notes to myself throughout the entire novel, and just immerse myself in it for the joy of reading (not that it wasn't lovely the first time through).  That said, of course I'd end up writing all over it again and I reconsidered things.  Oh, and speaking of Breyer, I feel that as a culture celebrate idiocy - and our president is an unlettered moron - the age in which public officials were actually undeniable literate scholars is coming to an end.  I feel so much of my career has been a long fight against the dying of the intellectual light (hence we read the epics in my class while my much cooler colleagues read graphic novels) but retreating into the house I'm thinking of buying in Zanzibar and simply reading and writing sounds better with each passing day.

My Years With Proust - Day 733

Other errors, though of a more serious kind, I might continue to commit, placing features, for instance, as we all do, upon the fact of a woman seen in the street, when instead of nose, cheeks and chins there ought to be merely an empty space with nothing more upon it than a flickering reflection of our desires.  But at least, even if I had not the leisure to prepare - and here was a much more important matter - the hundred different masks which ought properly to be attached to a single face, if only because of the different eyes which look at it and the different meanings which they read into its features, not to mention, for the same eyes, the different emotions of hope and fear or on the contrary love and habit which for thirty years can conceal the changes brought about by age, and even if I did not attempt - though my love-affair with Albertine was sufficient proof to me that any other kind of representation must be artificial and untruthful - to represent some of my characters as existing not outside but within ourselves, where their slightest action can bring fatal disturbances in its train, and to vary also the light of the moral sky which illumines them in accordance with the variations in pressure in our own sensibility (for an object which was so small beneath the clear sky of our certainty can be suddenly magnified many times over on the appearance of a tiny cloud of danger) - if, in my attempt to transcribe a universe which had to be totally redrawn, I could not convey these changes and many others, the needfulness of which, if one is to depict reality, has been made manifest in the course of my narrative, at least I should not fail to portray man, in this universe as endowed with the length not of his body but of his years and as obliged - a task more and more enormous and in the end too great for his strength - to drag them with him wherever he goes.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1103-1104

There is a reason why someone can make reference to Proustian detail and an educated person will nod knowingly (and not simply that academic nod we learn in graduate school where you nod in a subtle but convincing fashion even though you have no idea what they're talking about).  Even if Proust was not able to prepare "the hundred different masks which ought properly to be attached to a single face" he did strive to dig deeper with his characters.  Obviously, this is a tremendous, and necessary, challenge for any writer, because when you're writing there are characters in your work who are clearly just plot points.  Granted, Dr. Watson was more than simply a plot point in the Sherlock Holmes stories, but in the end his role was often just to just record events and to, more importantly, ask Holmes how he figured things out.  Now, the beauty of the Sherlock Holmes stories is that Watson does have a backstory and he's not simply that guy who asked his brilliant friend to explain it once more again and a bit more slowly.  Now, the irony of this, ans this is a point I've made several times, is that I still think Albertine, Marcel's greatest foil, remains maddeningly out of focus in the novel.  Maybe if we understood her personal motives better we'd find her less interesting, and, knowing human nature, Marcel would have found her less interesting.

My Years With Proust - Day 732

   In my awareness of the approach of death I resembled a dying soldier, and like him too, before I died, I had something to write.  But my task was longer than his, my words had to reach more than a single person.  My task was long.  By day, the most I could hope for was to try to sleep.  If I worked, it would be only at night.  But I should need many nights, a hundred perhaps, or even a thousand. And I should live in the anxiety of not knowing whether the master of my destiny might not prove less indulgent than the Sultan Shahriyar, whether in the morning, when I broke off my story, he would consent to a further reprieve and permit me to resume my narrative the following evening.  Not that I had the slightest pretension to be writing a new version, in any way, of the Thousand and One Nights, or of that other book written by night, Saint-Simon's Memoirs, or of any of those books which I had loved with a child's simplicity and to which I had been so superstitiously attached as later to my loves, so that I could not imagine without horror any work which should be unlike them.  But - as Elstir had found with Chardin - you can make a new version of what you love only by first renouncing it.  So my book, though it might be as long as the Thousand and One Nights, would be entirely different.  True, when you are in love with some particular book, you would like yourself to write something that closely resembles it, but this love of the moment must be sacrificed, you must think not of your own taste but of a truth which far from asking you what your preferences are forbids you to pay attention to them. And only if you faithfully follow this truth will you sometimes find that you have stumbled again upon what you renounced, find that, by forgetting these works themselves, you have written the Thousand and One Nights or the Memoirs of Saint-Simon of another age.  But for me was there still time?  Was it not too late?

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1101-1102

"In my awareness of the approach of death I resembled a dying soldier, and like him too, before I died, I had something to write.  But my task was longer than his, my words had to reach more than a single person.  My task was long.  By day, the most I could hope for was to try to sleep.  If I worked, it would be only at night."

Once again, I'm interested in Proust's reference to the Thousand and One Nights, and not simply because I'm using it for my Heroines & Heroes class this semester.  I am planning on bringing in my well-marked copy of Remembrance of Things Past to read this section in class on Tuesday (anything to get more Proust in the curriculum).  Now that I've finished, and before the next big reread - and after the stupid epics book is finished - I need to do more research on Proust himself, and part of that is learning more about his relationship to the Thousand and One Nights.  In this particular passage I think it's fascinating how he mentions the fact that he only wrote at night, which is certainly part of the Proustian mythology, certainly, as he slept most of the day and wrote most of the night, living a life of isolation as he rushed to finish his novel.  It's appropriate, and more than a bit heartbreaking, that he is essentially comparing himself to Shahrazad, with the spinning of tales keeping him alive for another day.

I was also struck by these words: "True, when you are in love with some particular book, you would like yourself to write something that closely resembles it, but this love of the moment must be sacrificed, you must think not of your own taste but of a truth which far from asking you what your preferences are forbids you to pay attention to them. And only if you faithfully follow this truth will you sometimes find that you have stumbled again upon what you renounced, find that, by forgetting these works themselves, you have written the Thousand and One Nights or the Memoirs of Saint-Simon of another age."  Writers, like any person who loves to read (as all right-thinking individuals do), have their own favorite works and it's doubtless human nature, and a dangerous trap, to try and and rewrite our favorite books.  Of course, as Proust warns us, that would not be our truth, but if we pursue our own truth then we have a chance to produce works that will also resonate and transcend the centuries.

My Years With Proust - Day 731

   The idea of death took up permanent residence within me in the way that love sometimes does.  Not that I loved death, I abhorred it.  But after a preliminary stage in which, no doubt, I thought about it from time to time as one does about a woman with whom one is not yet in love, its image adhered now to the most profound layer of my mind, so completely that I could not give my attention to anything without that thing first traversing the idea of death, and even if no object occupied my attention and I remained in a state of complete repose, the idea of death still kept me company as faithfully as the idea of my self.  And, on that day on which I had become a half-dead man, I do not think that it was the accidents characterising this condition - my inability to walk downstairs, to remember a name, a get up from a chair - that had, even by an unconscious train of thought, given rise to this idea of death, this conviction that I was already almost dead, it seems to me rather that the idea had come simultaneously with the symptoms, that inevitably the mind, great mirror that it is, reflected a new reality.  Yet still I did not see how from my present ailments one could pass, without warning of what was to come, to total death.  Then, however, I thought of other people, of the countless people who die every day without the gap between their illness and their death seeming to us extraordinary.  I thought also that it was only because I saw them from within - rather than because I saw them in the deceptive colours of hope - that certain of my ailments, taken singly, did not seem to me to be fatal although I believed that I would soon die, just as those who are most convinced that their hour has come are, nevertheless, easily persuaded that if they are unable to pronounced certain words, this is nothing so serious as asphasia or a stroke, but a symptom merely of a local fatigue of the tongue, or a nervous condition analogous to a stutter, or the lassitude which follows indigestion.

   No doubt my books too, like my fleshly being, would in the end one day die.  But death is a thing that we must resign ourselves to.  We accept the thought that in ten years we ourselves, in a hundred years our books, will have ceased to exist.  Eternal duration is promised no more to men's works than to men.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1100-1101

Proust finds himself fascinated with death, not because he loved it, far from it: "The idea of death took up permanent residence within me in the way that love sometimes does.  Not that I loved death, I abhorred it." I think Proust had a much longer, and more stable relationship with death than he ever did with Albertine.  He certainly understood death in a way that he never understood her, and he and death were certainly more faithful to each other. "But after a preliminary stage in which, no doubt, I thought about it from time to time as one does about a woman with whom one is not yet in love, its image adhered now to the most profound layer of my mind, so completely that I could not give my attention to anything without that thing first traversing the idea of death, and even if no object occupied my attention and I remained in a state of complete repose, the idea of death still kept me company as faithfully as the idea of my self." I keep coming back, not surprisingly, to the Sherwood Anderson chapter "Death" from Winesburg, Ohio.

It is very rare that I disagree with Proust, but I'm afraid I need to do so this time.  Of course, I have the advantage of history on my side.  He opines, "No doubt my books too, like my fleshly being, would in the end one day die.  But death is a thing that we must resign ourselves to.  We accept the thought that in ten years we ourselves, in a hundred years our books, will have ceased to exist.  Eternal duration is promised no more to men's works than to men." It's a hundred years down the road and people are still reading (although, sadly, not as many as should be reading) Remembrance of Things Past, and that will still be true a thousand years from now.  Granted, it will be in the rest of the world as we in the US get dumber and dumber by the day, and, who knows, Proust may end up on the wrong side of the burgeoning Trump police state (I wonder if anyone uses the hashtag #policestate on Twitter as much as I do?).

My Years With Proust - Day 730

The best minds of posterity might think what they chose, their opinions mattered to me no more than those of my contemporaries. The truth was that, if I thought of my work and not the letters which I ought to answer, this was not because I attached to these two things, as I had during my years of idleness and later, in that brief interval between the conception of my book and the day when I had had to cling to the banister, very different degrees of importance.  The organisation of my memory, of the preoccupations that filled my mind, was indeed linked to my work, but perhaps simply because, while the letters which I received were forgotten a moment later, the idea of my work was inside my head, always the same perpetually in process of becoming.  But even my work had become for me a tiresome obligation, like a son for a dying mother who still, between her injections and her blood-lettings, has to make the exhausting effort of constantly looking after him.  Perhaps she still loves him, but it is only in the form of a duty too great for her strength that she is aware of her affection.  In me, in the same way, the powers of the writer were no longer equal to the egotistical demands of the work.  Since the day of the staircase, nothing in the world, no happiness, whether it came from friendship or the progress of my book or the hope of fame, reached me save as a sunshine unclouded but so pale that it no longer had the virtue to warm me, to make me live, to instil in me any desire; and yet, faint though it was, it was still too dazzling for my eyes, I closed them and turned to the wall.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1099-1100

I can remember when I was writing my dissertation and how it seemed to be hovering over me the entire time, whether I was actively writing or whether it was just plaguing me like a ghost when I wasn't.  If I were optimistic I guess I could make the argument that even when I wasn't working I was still "working" because the dissertation was percolating along beneath the surface.  Of course, following that same logic I'm actively "working" on the epics book while I'm tinkering with Proust.   Considering how my witless dissertation plagued me I can't imagine how Remembrance of Things Past haunted Proust, not only because of the immense size of it but also because of how crucially important that it was to him (whereas my dissertation was clearly a means to an end to get to a place where I could teach college).  Proust tells us, "The organisation of my memory, of the preoccupations that filled my mind, was indeed linked to my work, but perhaps simply because, while the letters which I received were forgotten a moment later, the idea of my work was inside my head, always the same perpetually in process of becoming." I wonder how anybody survives writing a dissertation - or writing a novel - because everything else, including the very social activities that are keeping you sane and allowing you to work, seem like a major distraction.

My Years With Proust - Day 729

Then suddenly a word in my letter reminded me that Mme Sazerat had lost her son and I wrote to her as well, after which, having sacrificed a real duty to the factitious obligation to appear polite and sympathetic, I fell back exhausted and closed my eyes, not to emerge from a purely vegetal existence before a week had elapsed.  During this time, however, if all my unnecessary duties, to which I was willing to sacrifice my true duty, vanished after a few moments from my head, the idea of the edifice that I had to construct did not leave me for an instant.  Whether it would be a church where little by little a group of faithful would succeed in apprehending verities and discovering harmonies or perhaps even a grand general plan, or whether it would remain, like a druidic monument on a rocky isle, something for ever unfrequented, I could no tell.  But I was resolved to devote to all my strength, which ebbed, as it seemed, reluctantly and as though to leave me time to complete the periphery of my walls and close "the funeral gate." Before very long I was able to show a few sketches.  No one understood anything of them. Even those who commended my perception of the truths which I wanted eventually to engrave within the temple, congratulated me on having discovered them "with a microscope," when on the contrary it was a telescope that I had used to observe things which were indeed very small to the naked eye, but only because they were situated at a great distance, and which were each one of them in itself a world. Those passages in which I was trying to arrive at general laws were described as so much pedantic investigation of detail.  What, in any case, was I hoping to achieve?  In my youth I had had a certain facility, and Bergotte had praised as "admirable" the pages which I wrote while still at school.  But instead of working I had lived a life of idleness, of pleasures and distractions, of ill health and cosseting and eccentricities, and I was embarking upon my labour of construction almost at the point of death, without knowing anything of my trade.  I felt that I no longer possessed the strength to carry out my obligation to people or my duties to my thoughts and my work, still less to satisfy both of these claims.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1098-1099

"Before very long I was able to show a few sketches.  No one understood anything of them." According to the legends associated with Remembrance of Things Past three different publishers turned down the first volume of the work before Proust himself decided to pay for the publication for what we become Swann's Way.  The editors just didn't know what to make of it.  Later Andre Gide, one of the editors, wrote a personal letter to Proust and told him, "For several days I have been unable to put your book down . . . The rejection of this book will remain the most serious mistake ever made by the NRF and, since I bear the shame of being very much responsible for it, one of the most stinging and remorseful regrets of my life." Even those who "got it," clearly didn't get it.  As Proust tells us, "Even those who commended my perception of the truths which I wanted eventually to engrave within the temple, congratulated me on having discovered them "with a microscope," when on the contrary it was a telescope that I had used to observe things which were indeed very small to the naked eye, but only because they were situated at a great distance, and which were each one of them in itself a world." As we've discussed, one of my pet theories is that one of the hallmarks of genius is the individual who comes along and completely changes the rules, not simply because they're trying to do so (although sometimes that is true, Cezanne being a great example), but because they cannot not change the rules.  However, in the process of sharing this new world view the artist almost inevitably asks the audience, and the critics, to think a dramatically different way and to do more, to bring more to the artistic interchange, and thus people either don't get it or they are actively opposed to it.  Clearly, people didn't understand Proust, and in many ways still don't, but that doesn't alter the fact that he changed the world forever.

My Years With Proust - Day 728

   And something not unlike my grandmother's illness itself happened to me shortly afterwards, when I still had not started to work on my book, in a strange fashion which I should never have anticipated.  I went out to see some friends one evening and was told that I had never looked so well, and however it was that I had not a single grey hair.  But at the end of the visit, coming downstairs, three times I nearly fell.  I had left my home only two hours earlier; but when I got back, I felt that I no longer possessed either memory or the power of thought or strength of existence of any kind.  People could have come to call on me or to proclaim me king, to lay violent hands on me or arrest me, and I should passively have submitted, neither opening my eyes nor uttering a word, like those travellers of whom we read who, crossing the Caspian Sea in a small boat, are so utterly prostrated by seasickness that they offer not even a show of resistance when they are told that they are going to be thrown into the sea.  I had, strictly speaking, no illness, but I felt myself no longer capable of anything, I was in the condition of those old men who one day are in full possession of their faculties and the next, having fractured a thigh or had an attack of indigestion, can only drag on for a while in their bed an existence which has become nothing more than a preparation, longer or shorter, for a now ineluctable death.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1096-1097

Proust has already informed us that he's afraid that he won't have time, that his body won't cooperate, to finish his novel.  Almost on cue he suffers a moment of physical weakness, almost falling down the stairs three times.  Not only does it leave him physically shaken, but also intellectually shaken: "But at the end of the visit, coming downstairs, three times I nearly fell.  I had left my home only two hours earlier; but when I got back, I felt that I no longer possessed either memory or the power of thought or strength of existence of any kind." I'm falling apart physically, and, well, truthfully, I've always been a bit of a wreck considering that I had my first hip surgery at age fourteen.  Still, I plow away, and go to the gym everyday (including today).  My hip will still sometimes give way, causing me to stumble, and my left shoulder hurts so much that I often have trouble reaching over for a cup of coffee.  I'm not ignoring them, I just can't seem to convince the doctors to operate on them (I think they assume I'll just die on one of my overseas adventures and it would be a poor investment of time and effort).  I know that me losing my balance physically is not the same as me losing my intellectual abilities, but it is also true that the former impacts the latter.  I know that I'm not what I was, and what I was wasn't that impressive in the first place.  That said, I suppose we should be thankful for these little physical stumbles because it reminds us to get on with life.

My Years With Proust - Day 727

   But by a strange coincidence, this rational fear of danger was taking shape in my mind at a moment when I had finally become indifferent to the idea of death.  In the past the fear of being no longer myself was something that had terrified me, and this had made me dread the end of each new love that I had experienced (for Gilberte, for Albertine), because I could not bear the idea that the "I" who loved them would one day cease to exist, since this in itself would be a kind of death.  But by dint of repetition this fear had gradually been transformed into a calm confidence.  So that if in those early days, as we have seen, the idea of death had cast a shadow over my loves, for a long time now the remembrance of love had helped me not to fear death.  For I realised that dying was not something new, but that on the contrary since my childhood I had already died many times. To take a comparatively recent period, had I not clung to Albertine more tenaciously than to my own life?  Could I at the time when I loved her conceive my personality without the continued existence within it of my love for her?  Yet now I no longer loved her, I was no longer the person who loved her but a different person who did not love her, and it was when I had become a new person that I had ceased to love her.  And yet I did not suffer from having become this new person, from no longer loving Albertine, and surely the prospect of one day no longer having a body could not from any point of view seem to me as sad as had then seemed to me that of one day no longer loving Albertine, that prospect which now was a fact and one which left me quite unmoved.  These successive deaths, so feared by the self which they were destined to annihilate, so painless, so unimportant once they were accomplished and the self that feared was no longer there to feel them, had taught me by now that it would be the merest folly to be frightened of death.  Yet it was precisely when the thought of death had become a matter of indifference to me that I was beginning once more to fear death, under another name, it is true, as a threat not to myself but to my book, since for my book's incubation this life that so many dangers threatened was for a while at least indispensable.  Victor Hugo says:

Il faut que l'herbe pousse et que les enfants meurent.

To me it seems more correct to say that the cruel law of art is that people die and we ourselves die after exhausting every form of suffering, so that over our heads may grow the grass not of oblivion but of eternal life, the vigorous and luxuriant growth of a true work of art, so that thither, gaily and without a thought for those who are sleeping beneath them, future generations may come to enjoy their dejeuner sur l'herbe.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1094-1095

As Proust decides to undertake the writing of his novel he understands that his poor health, and Time itself, may keep him from completing his quest.  He discovers that he is not afraid of death as an end, but rather death as something that would keep him from finishing his novel.  Proust tells us, "But by a strange coincidence, this rational fear of danger was taking shape in my mind at a moment when I had finally become indifferent to the idea of death.  In the past the fear of being no longer myself was something that had terrified me, and this had made me dread the end of each new love that I had experienced (for Gilberte, for Albertine), because I could not bear the idea that the "I" who loved them would one day cease to exist, since this in itself would be a kind of death." There are simply things that are far more horrible than death, and for Proust the worst option was to not finish writing Remembrance of Things Past.

When I reread Proust's words I can only think of the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian who, in his writings, had unintentionally insulted the emperor, and was ordered to be castrated.  Since this was a shameful (and obviously extraordinarily painful) punishment it was essentially an unofficial order for him to commit suicide.  Instead, Sima Qian accepted the castration so that he could finish his history of early China (which, by the way, is required reading, not only because it is interesting, but also because he takes time out at the end of every chapter to include some insightful analysis on what it all means).  In explaining his decision Sima Qian wrote, "A man has only one death.  That death may be as weighty as Mount Tai, or it may be as light as a goose feather.  It all depends upon the way he uses it . . . It is the nature of every man to love life and hate death, to think of his relatives and look after his wife and children.  Only when a man is moved by higher principles as this not so.  Then there are things that he must do . . . The brave man does not always die for honor, while even the coward may fulfill his duty.  Each takes a different way to exert himself.  Thought I might be weak and cowardly and seek shamefully to prolong my life, yet I know full well the difference between what ought to be followed and what rejected.  How could I bring myself to sink into the shame of ropes and bonds?  If even the lowest slave and scullery maid can bear to commit suicide, why should not one like myself be able to do what has to be done?  But the reason I have not refused to bear these ills and continued to live, dwelling among this filth, is that I grieve that I have things in my heart that I have not been able to express fully, and I am shamed to think that after I am gone my writings will not be known to posterity."

In addition, Proust writes, "For I realised that dying was not something new, but that on the contrary since my childhood I had already died many times." In COR 110 we talk about identity and how we create, destroy and recreate ourselves many times in the course of a lifetime.  Certainly the women we love come and go, and the death of each love affair brings its own death of the self.  I have trouble believing that in the end the death of my bodily self will be as painful as the death of my marriage. "To me it seems more correct to say that the cruel law of art is that people die and we ourselves die after exhausting every form of suffering, so that over our heads may grow the grass not of oblivion but of eternal life, the vigorous and luxuriant growth of a true work of art, so that thither, gaily and without a thought for those who are sleeping beneath them, future generations may come to enjoy their dejeuner sur l'herbe."

Proust quotes a Victor Hugo's line, "Il faut que l'herbe pousse et que les enfants meurent," which translates out as (and thanks for my excellent friend Sanford Zale for the translation) "grass has to grow and children have to die."  It's from a long poem that Hugo wrote on the banks of the Seine where his nineteen year old daughter had drown.  I was quite taken by the beauty, and sadness, of the poem so I transcribed the first half:

Now that Paris, its cobblestones and marble,
and its mists and its roofs are quite far from my eyes;
now that I am under tree branches,
and can daydream of the beauty of the skies;

Now that I am coming out, pale but victorious,
from the mourning that made my soul dark,
and I feel the peace of great Nature
entering my heart;

Now that, seated at the edge of the waves,
moved by this superb and tranquil horizon,
I can examine deep truths inside me
and look at the flowers that are on the lawn;

Now, O God! that I have the somber calm
to be able from now
to look with eyes on the stone where I know in the shadow
she is sleeping forever;

Now that, touched by these divine sights,
Plains, forests, rocks, little valleys, silvery river,
seeing my smallness and seeing your miracles,
I come back to my senses before their immensity;

I came to you, Lord, father who must be believed in;
peaceful now, I bring you
the pieces of my heart all full of your glory
that you broke;

I came to you, Lord! confessing that you are
good, merciful, indulgent and kind, O living God!
I admit that you alone know what you do.
And that man is nothing but a reed that quivers in the wind;

I say that the tomb that closes upon the dead
opens the heavens;
and that what we here below take for the end
is the beginning;

I acknowledge on my knees that you alone, awesome father,
own the infinite, the real, the absolute;
I acknowledge that it is good, that it is right
that my heart had bled, since god willed it!

I resist no more whatever happens to me
by your will.
The soul from grief to grief, Man from shore to shore,
rolls to eternity.

We never see but a single side of things;
the other plunges into the night of frightening mystery.
Man bears the yoke without knowing why.
All he sees is short, useless and fleeting.

You make loneliness return always
around all his footsteps.
You did not want him to have certainty
nor joy here below!

As soon as he owns something, fate takes it away.
Nothing is given to him, in his speedy days,
for him to make a home and say:
Here is my house, my field and my loved ones!

He must see for a short time all that his eyes see;
he grows old without support.
Since things are so, it's because they must be so;
I admit it, I admit it!

The world is dark, O God! the unchanging harmony
is wrought of tears as well as of songs;
Man Is but an atom in his infinite shadow,
night where the good rise, where the bad fall.

I know you have far more to do
than to feel sorry for us all,
and that a child who dies, to its mother's despair,
is nothing to you!

I know that fruit falls to the wind that shakes it,
that birds lose their feathers and flowers their fragrance,
that Creation is a great wheel
that cannot move without crushing someone;

months, days, billows of the sea, eyes that weep
pass under the sky;
grass must grow and children die;
I know it, O God! . . .

My Years With Proust - Day 726

   Thus it was that I envisaged the task before me, a task which would not end until I had achieved what I had so ardently desired in my walks on the Guermantes way and thought to be impossible, just as I had thought it impossible, as I came home at the end of those walks, that I should ever get used to going to bed without kissing my mother or, later, to the idea that Albertine loved women, though in the end I had grown to live with this idea without even being aware of its presence; for neither of our greatest fears nor our greatest hopes are beyond the limits of our strength - we are able in the end both to dominate the first and to achieve the second.

   Yes, upon this task the idea of Time which I had formed to-day told me that it was time to set to work.  It was high time.  But - and this was the reason for the anxiety which had gripped me as soon as I entered the drawing-room, when the theatrical disguises of the faces around me had first given me the notion of Lost Time - was there still time and was I still in a fit condition to undertake the task?  For one thing, a necessary condition of my work as I had conceived it just now in the library was a profound study of impressions which had first to be re-created through the memory. But my memory was old and tired.  The mind has landscapes which it is allowed to contemplate only for a certain space of time.  In my life I had been like a painter climbing a road high above a lake, a view of which is denied to him by a curtain of rocks and trees.  Suddenly through a gap in the curtain he sees the lake, its whole expanse is before him, he takes up his brushes.  But already the night is at hand, the night which will put an end to his painting and which no dawn will follow.  How could I not be anxious, seeing that nothing was yet begun and that though on the ground of age I could still hope that I had some years to live, my hour might on the other hand strike almost at once? For the fundamental fact was that I had a body, and this meant that I was perpetually threatened by a double danger, internal and external, though to speak thus was merely a matter of linguistic convenience, the truth being that the internal danger - the risk, for instance, of a cerebral haemorrhage - is also external, since it is the body that it threatens.  Indeed it is the possession of a body that is the great danger to the mind, to our human and thinking life, which is is surely less correct to describe as a miraculous entelechy of animal and physical life than as an imperfect essay - as rudimentary in this sphere as the communal existence of protozoa attached to this polyparies or as the body of the whale - in the organisation of the spiritual life.  The body immures the mind within a fortress; presently on all sides the fortress is besieged and in the end, inevitably, the mind has to surrender.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1091-1092

Proust has reached the point where he knows he has to write his book, but he also begins to understand the incredible challenge awaiting him. He tells us that he fully understands both the vision and the challenge,  " . . . for neither of our greatest fears nor our greatest hopes are beyond the limits of our strength - we are able in the end both to dominate the first and to achieve the second."

But how does one handle both the vision and the challenge?  Proust tells us, "The mind has landscapes which it is allowed to contemplate only for a certain space of time.  In my life I had been like a painter climbing a road high above a lake, a view of which is denied to him by a curtain of rocks and trees.  Suddenly through a gap in the curtain he sees the lake, its whole expanse is before him, he takes up his brushes.  But already the night is at hand, the night which will put an end to his painting and which no dawn will follow."  As I've shared before, my friend Steve will often mock me when I come up with my routine Lawrence of Arabia-esque comments, which usually run something like this: "My brother, we are going to start our own tour company - and as part of it we're going to buy a house in Zanzibar as a base.  I have envisioned it which means it's already real.  All that remains are details."  That inevitably leads him to say something like, "Thank you, Lawrence."  However, I think once you have seen it, truly seen it in its beautiful dream-like immediacy, then everything else truly is details.  I'm not having a Proustian moment because, well, Proust was a genius and I'm more than a bit of a total dope, but I think he's saying something similar here.  It is at the party that he has that moment where he has seen the lake through the trees, and he witnesses beauty but he also understands true beauty. But, as he fears, "the night is at hand," and there may be obstacles that he simply cannot overcome.  We've talked many times about Proust's failing health, and about the devil's bargain he happily made where he worked his self to an early grave (or at least earlier grave) to finish his epic dream (or at least get desperately close to finishing it).  I think about my own failure to accomplish more, and the sense that, as another birthday has passed and sixty approaches and "the night is at hand," and the need to work.  While we can fail because we don't dream big enough and lack courage, we can also fail because the body gives out on us.  We only have so much time.  Proust writes: "For the fundamental fact was that I had a body, and this meant that I was perpetually threatened by a double danger, internal and external, though to speak thus was merely a matter of linguistic convenience, the truth being that the internal danger - the risk, for instance, of a cerebral haemorrhage - is also external, since it is the body that it threatens.  Indeed it is the possession of a body that is the great danger to the mind, to our human and thinking life, which is is surely less correct to describe as a miraculous entelechy of animal and physical life than as an imperfect essay - as rudimentary in this sphere as the communal existence of protozoa attached to this polyparies or as the body of the whale - in the organisation of the spiritual life.  The body immures the mind within a fortress; presently on all sides the fortress is besieged and in the end, inevitably, the mind has to surrender."  I've said several times that Remembrance of Things Past is one of several books that I think have made, and will continue to make, me a better person.  One of the reasons why is that it inspires me to keep pushing and try to try to achieve these dreams I have.

My Years With Proust - Day 725

   The idea of Time was of value to me for yet another reason: it was a spur, it told me that it was time to begin if I wished to attain to what I had sometimes perceived in the course of my life, in brief lightning-flashes, on the Guermantes way and in my drives in the carriage of Mme de Villeparisis, at those moments of perception which had made me think that life was worth living.  How much more worth living did it appear to me now, now that I seemed to see that this life that we live in half-darkness can be restored to its true pristine shape, that a life, in short, can be realised within the confines of a book!  How happy would he be, I thought, the man who had the power to write such a book!  What a task awaited him! To give some idea of this task one would have to borrow comparisons from the loftiest and the most varied arts; for this writer - who, moreover, to indicate the mass, the solidarity of each one of his characters must find means to display that character's most opposite facets - would have to prepare his book with meticulous care, perpetually regrouping his forces like a general conducting an offensive, and he would have also to endure his book like a form of fatigue, to accept it like a discipline, build it up like a church, follow it like a medical regime, vanquish it like an obstacle, win it like a friendship, cosset it like a little child, create it like a new world without neglecting those mysteries whose explanation is to be found probably only in worlds other than our own and the presentiment of which is the thing that moves us most deeply in life and in art.  In long books of this kind there are parts which there has been time only to sketch, part which, because of the very amplitude of the architect's plan, will no doubt never be completed.  How many great cathedrals remain unfinished!  The writer feed his book, he strengthens the parts of it which are weak, he protects it, but afterwards it is the book that grows, the designates its author's tomb and defends it against the world's clamour and for a while against oblivion.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1088-1089

The appearance of Robert and Gilberte's daughter also inspired Marcel, once again, to hasten to the challenge of writing his book.  I think this passage is one of the best descriptions of the art, but also the brutally hard work, of writing, as each writer "would have to prepare his book with meticulous care, perpetually regrouping his forces like a general conducting an offensive, and he would have also to endure his book like a form of fatigue, to accept it like a discipline, build it up like a church, follow it like a medical regime, vanquish it like an obstacle, win it like a friendship, cosset it like a little child, create it like a new world . . ."  I've been flailing around for years on my book on the epics, and sometimes I feel that I am no closer to ever completing it.  Why?  Well, beyond the obvious fact that I have a very small, smooth brain, there is also the fact that I clearly lack the courage and the dedication and love of hard work to finish it.  All of the attributes that Proust mentions above I lack in abundance.  "How many great cathedrals remain unfinished!"  I don't think I have any "great cathedrals" inside me, but at this point I'd settle for a road side monument.

My Years With Proust - Day 724

   I saw Gilberte coming across the room towards me.  For me the marriage of Saint-Loup and the thoughts which filled my mind at that date - and which were still there, unchanged, this very morning - might have belonged to yesterday, so that I was astonished to see at her side a girl of about sixteen, whose tall figure was a measure of that distance which I had been reluctant to see.  Time, colourless and inapprehensible Time, so that I was almost able to see it and touch it, had materialised itself in this girl, moulding her into a masterpiece, while correspondingly, on me, alas! it had merely done its work.  And now Mlle de Saint-Loup was standing in front of me.  She had deep-set piercing eyes, and a charming nose thrust slightly forward in the form of a beak and curved, perhaps not in the least like that of Swann but like Saint-Loup's.  The soul of that particular Guermantes had fluttered away, but his charming head, as of a bird in flight, with its piercing eyes, had settled momentarily upon the shoulders of Mlle de Saint-Loup and the sight of it there aroused a train of memories and dreams in those who had known her father.  I was struck too by the way in which her nose, imitating in this the model of her mother's nose and her grandmother's, was cut off by just that absolutely horizontal line at its base, that same brilliant if slightly tardy stroke of design - a feature so individual that with its help, even without seeing anything else of a head, one could have recognised it out of thousands - and it seemed to me wonderful that at the critical moment nature should have returned, like a great and original sculptor, to give to the granddaughter, as she had given to her mother and her grandmother, that significant and decisive touch of the chisel.  I thought her very beautiful: still rich in hopes , full of laughter, formed from those very years which I myself had lost, she was like my own youth.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1087-1088

Marcel finally meets the daughter of Robert and Gilberte.  She is sixteen, which among other things, suddenly gives the reader a sense of the years Marcel lost to his poor health. Clearly, Marcel is happy to meet her and it brings him both happy and elegiac memories of her parents, but, as youth as a tendency to do, it reminded him, painfully, of its diminishing place in his own life: "Time, colourless and inapprehensible Time, so that I was almost able to see it and touch it, had materialised itself in this girl, moulding her into a masterpiece, while correspondingly, on me, alas! it had merely done its work."  He saw in her his own lost youth, but it also reminded him of his youth. "I thought her very beautiful: still rich in hopes , full of laughter, formed from those very years which I myself had lost, she was like my own youth." Rereading this passage reminds me of my recent trip to Zanzibar, for a fairly odd reason.  One of my students grew very sick and my colleague Steve and I did our best to look after her until we could get the doctors and the insurance company on the same page and she and I were evacuated to Nairobi for better care.  Until that moment we spent several days squirreled away in room 32 at the Karibu Inn.  During those stressful days I fretted over her frailty, but also marveled at her strength, and it was impossible to somehow not see the whole thing as some great metaphor for the victory of youth over age, and whereas her world would very soon expand exponentially while mine would continue to close in on me.  I also thought that I would happily never leave that room again if I could just get her back to her mother safe and sound. On the day that we were due to fly out to Nairobi I awoke to a text telling me that my dear friend Gary Beatrice had died.  I allowed myself a brief but intense crying jag, but then had to pull it together to finalize plans and get her on the plane.  Luckily, and happily, she is now doing much, much better and will be coming home very soon.

Here is the view out of my temporary prison at the Karibu Inn, looking out over the rusted tin roofs. You can just make out the beautiful Indian Ocean, which was my only glimpse of it on this trip.

My Years With Proust - Day 723

   I have said that it would be impossible to depict our relationship with anyone whom we have even slightly known without passing in review, one after another, the different settings of our life.  Each individual therefore - and I was myself one of those individuals - was a measure of duration for me, in virtue of the revolutions which like some heavenly body he had accomplished not only on his own axis but also round other bodies, in virtue, above all, of the successive positions which he had occupied in relation to myself.  And surely the awareness of all these different planes within which, since in this last hour, at this party, I had recaptured it, Time seemed to dispose the different elements of my life, had, by making me reflect that in a book which tried to tell the story of a life it would be necessary to use not the two-dimensional psychology which we normally use but a different sort of three-dimensional psychology, added a new beauty to those resurrections of the past which my memory had effected while I was following my thoughts alone in the library, since memory by itself, when it introduces the past, unmodified, into the present - the past just as it was at the moment when it was itself the present - suppress the mighty dimension of Time which is the dimension in which life is lived.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 1087

Everything is starting to come together for Marcel as he wades his way through the party that dominates the last hundred pages or so of the novel.  He begins to understand the complexity of the challenge ahead of him as he tries to regain Time: "And surely the awareness of all these different planes within which, since in this last hour, at this party, I had recaptured it, Time seemed to dispose the different elements of my life, had, by making me reflect that in a book which tried to tell the story of a life it would be necessary to use not the two-dimensional psychology which we normally use but a different sort of three-dimensional psychology . . ."  It's as if he's saying that understanding the present was complicated enough, and required a "two-dimensional psychology," but reclaiming the past required a "three-dimensional psychology."  Part of this, it seems to me, relates to the challenge of bringing the past to life again.  While you can dissect a corpse you can't psychoanalyze it.  As Proust shares, " . . . since memory by itself, when it introduces the past, unmodified, into the present - the past just as it was at the moment when it was itself the present - suppress the mighty dimension of Time which is the dimension in which life is lived." Now, how does one do this?  Or can one do this?  If we cannot actually make our way back to that pure, unsullied memory to live it again - because every time we've previously "relived" that memory we've also altered it - then can we ever truly understand the past because the past is perpetually being transformed into the present, just as the present was being transformed into the past.  Maybe the process of trying is as close as can get, and maybe that's enough.

My Years With Proust - Day 722

Certainly, if he was thinking purely of the human heart, the poet was right when he spoke of the "mysterious threads" which are broken by life.  But the truth, even more, is that life is perpetually weaving fresh threads which link one individual and one event to another, and that these threads are crossed and recrossed, doubled and redoubled to thicken the web, so that between any slightest point of our past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us an almost infinite variety of communicating paths to choose from.

   At every moment of our lives we are surrounded by things and people which once were endowed with a rich emotional significance that they no longer possess.  But let us cease to make use of them in an unconscious way, let us try to recall what they once were in our eyes, and how often do we not find that a thing later transformed into, as it were, mere raw material for our industrial use was once alive, and alive for us with a personal life of its own.  All round me on the walls were paintings by Elstir, that Elstir who had first introduced me to Albertine. And it was in the house of Mme Verdurin that I was about to be presented to Mlle de Saint-Loup whom I was going to ask to be Albertine's successor in my life, in the house of that very Mme Verdurin whom I had so often visited with Albertine - and how enchanting they seemed in my memory, all those journeys that we had made together in the little train on the way to Douville and la Raspeliere - and who had also schemed first to promote and then to break not only my own love for Albertine but, long before it, that of the grandfather of this same Mlle de Saint-Loup.  And to complete the process by which all my various pasts were fused into a single mass Mme Verdurin, like Gilberte, had married a Guermantes.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1086-1087

I've been thinking a lot about the threads that hold us together lately, which I guess is not surprising considering the end of the year, another birthday, the passing of my dear friend Gary Beatrice, and the birth of Heidi and Andy's daughter Sylvie (a happy event, but one that occurs in Michigan and not Vermont).  Sometimes it seems that the threads are perpetually, and lately more rapidly, unraveling.  That said, Proust opines, "But the truth, even more, is that life is perpetually weaving fresh threads which link one individual and one event to another, and that these threads are crossed and recrossed, doubled and redoubled to thicken the web, so that between any slightest point of our past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us an almost infinite variety of communicating paths to choose from." I think of my dear friend Dave Kelley and Jack Schultz, who have been mainstays in my life for decades now, and as we grow older we somehow find new ways to remain connected (it's funny how fantasy baseball and fantasy football and Twitter have allowed us to remain in daily contact) and if anything the threads that connect us have "doubled and redoubled."

The other line that really jumped out at me from this passage is the following:  "At every moment of our lives we are surrounded by things and people which once were endowed with a rich emotional significance that they no longer possess.  But let us cease to make use of them in an unconscious way, let us try to recall what they once were in our eyes, and how often do we not find that a thing later transformed into, as it were, mere raw material for our industrial use was once alive, and alive for us with a personal life of its own." Once (well, probably more than once) I wrote about how it's so odd that I ended up in Vermont, and followed so many professional and personal paths that I would have never encountered if I had stayed in Atlanta, mainly because my ex-wife wanted to move to Vermont.  Truthfully, I had no interest in moving up here, and despite the frustrations that every professor at a community college feels and the academic wanderlust that makes us dream of teaching at a two year school, I was quite happy in Atlanta.  So, where does that leave my ex-wife?  I truly loved her, and she wasn't just a convenient prop to move my life along, some interesting Dickensian side character who moved the story along.  I've learned many things from this now two year quest to read and comment on Remembrance of Things Past, and probably the biggest is what my own Past has meant.  I've remembered how happy we were, and also how unhappy we were, and how I meant it when I said that I wanted to stay with her for the rest of our lives, and maybe in the stress of starting a new life I had forgotten that, or at least walled it off because of the guilt I felt.

My Years With Proust - Day 721

"Perhaps I shouldn't say it, because after all she is my niece and I have no absolute proof that she was unfaithful to him, but there were any number of stories.  Oh! yes, there were, and I know for a fact there was something between her and an officer at Meseglise.  Robert wanted to challenge him.  It was because of all this that Robert joined up - the war came to him as a deliverance from the misery of his family life: if you want my opinion, he wasn't killed, he got himself killed.  Do you think she felt any grief?  Not a scrap, she even astonished me by the extraordinary cynicism with which she displayed her indifference, and this distressed me very much, because I was really extremely fond of poor Robert.  Perhaps this will surprise you, because people have a wrong idea of my character, but even now I still think of him sometimes - I never forget anybody.  He never said a word to me, but he saw very clearly that I guessed everything.  Do you suppose, if she had loved her husband the least little bit, that she could stoically endure like this to be in the same drawing room as the woman with whom he was desperately in love for so many years - indeed one may say 'always,' for I am quite certain that he never gave her up, even during the war. Why, she would fly at her throat!" exclaimed the Duchess, forgetting that she herself, in arranging for Rachel to be invited and so setting the stage for the drama which she judged to be inevitable if it were true that Gilberte had loved Robert, had acted cruelly.  "No, in my opinion," the Duchess concluded, "she is a bitch." Such an expression on the lips of the Duchesse de Guermantes was rendered possible by the downward path which she was following, from the polished society of the Guermantes to that of her new actress friends, and came to her all the more easily because she grafted it on to an eighteenth century mode of speech which she thought of as broad and racy - and then had she not always believed that to her all things were permitted?  But the actual choice of the word was dictated by the hatred which she felt for Gilberte, by an irresistible wish to strike her at least in effigy if she could not attack her with physical blows.  And at the same time the Duchess thought that somehow the word justified the whole manner in which she conducted herself towards Gilberte, or rather conducted hostilities against Gilberte, in society and in the family and even where pecuniary interests were concerns such as the succession to Robert's estate.

   This savage attack on Gilberte struck me as quite unwarranted, but sometimes we pronounce a judgment which receives later from facts of which we were ignorant and which we could not have guessed an apparent justification, and Mme de Guermantes tirade perhaps belonged to this category.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1082-1083

Marcel is surprised by a vitriolic attack on Gilberte by Mme de Guermantes.  According to her Gilberte was completely unmoved by the death of her husband Robert in the war.  Not only that, but, at least in Mme de Guermantes's narrative, Robert had joined the war because of his unhappiness.  Again, in the words of Mme de Guermantes: "It was because of all this that Robert joined up - the war came to him as a deliverance from the misery of his family life: if you want my opinion, he wasn't killed, he got himself killed."  I don't know if I'm in the right frame of mind to dissect this passage.  I just got back from a trip to Africa where in the space of a few hours I found myself trying to process taking care of one of my students who had grown sick, the happy news that my great friends Heidi and Andy had third first child, the death of Gary Beatrice (one of my oldest and closest friends), and my own birthday.  It's left me more than a bit emotionally bruised.  Hell, I've been depressed all day over the passing of Dolores O'Riordan, although, to be fair, I was a big fan of the Cranberries (and this week's Discography post is writing itself; or rewriting itself because it's already finished).  A couple times in this Proustian quest I've raised the question of what we owe the dead.  Certainly, we owe them memory, even if the memories we carry with us are tainted by our own desire or vanity. Do we owe them decorum?  Do we owe them anger?  Was Mme de Guermantes so angry at Gilberte ("No, in my opinion," the Duchess concluded, "she is a bitch.") because she owed it to Robert to show anger at that moment, or was she showing him dishonor by venting her spleen at Gilberte?  Oddly, despite his love (or at least at this point friendship) for Gilberte, Marcel proposes that maybe the Duchess may simply know something he doesn't know: "This savage attack on Gilberte struck me as quite unwarranted, but sometimes we pronounce a judgment which receives later from facts of which we were ignorant and which we could not have guessed an apparent justification, and Mme de Guermantes tirade perhaps belonged to this category."