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."

My Years With Proust - Day 720

"The truth is," she went on with a melancholy air, "that I have spent my life in cloistered seclusion because my great loves have all been for men who were horribly jealous.  I am not speaking of M. de Foncheville, who was at bottom a commonplace man - and I have never really been able to love anyone who was not intelligent.  But M. Swann for one was as jealous as the poor Duke here, for whose sake I renounce all enjoyment, because I know that he is so unhappy in his own home.  With M. Swann it was different, I was desperately in love with him and it seems to me only reasonable to sacrifice dancing and society and all the rest of it for a life which will give pleasure to a man who loves you, or will merely prevent him from suffering.  Poor Charles, how intelligent he was, how fascinating, just the type of man I liked." And perhaps this was true.  there had been a time when she had found Swann attractive, which had coincided with the time when she to him had been "not his type." The truth was that "his type" was something that, even later, she had never been. And yet how he had loved her and with what anguish of mind!  Ceasing to love her, he had been puzzled by this contradiction, which really is no contradiction at all, if we consider how large a proportion of the sufferings endured by men in their lives is caused to them by women who are "not their type"  Perhaps there are many reasons why this should be so: first, because a woman is "not your type" you let yourself, at the beginning, be loved by her without loving in return, and by doing this you allow your life to be gripped by a habit which would not have taken root in the same way with woman who was "your type," who, conscious of your desire, would have offered more resistance, would only rarely have consented to see you, would not have installed herself in every hour of your days with that familiarity which means that later, if you come to love her and then suddenly she is not there, because of a quarrel or because of a journey during which you are left without news of her, you are hurt by the severance not of one but of a thousand links.  And then this habit, not resting upon the foundation of strong physical desire, is a sentimental one, and once love is born the brain gets much more busily to work: you are plunged into romance, not plagued by a mere need.  We are not wary of women who are "not our type," we let them love us, and if, subsequently, we come to love them we love them a hundred times more than we love other women, without even enjoying in their arms the satisfaction of assuaged desire.  For these reasons and for many others the fact that our greatest unhappiness comes to us from women who are "not our type" is not simply an instance of that mockery of fate which never grants us out wishes except in the form which pleases us least.  A woman who is "our type" is seldom dangerous, she is not interested in us, she gives us a limited contentment and then quickly leaves us without establishing herself but her presence beside us every day and our curiosity about what she is doing every minute: not the beloved woman, but habit.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1075-1076

Proust, per usual, sharing some truth. As part of a discussion with Odette, who is reflecting up both M. de Guermantes and Charles Swann, Marcel thinks about the dangers posed and pleasures provided by women who are "not our type."  He writes:

"We are not wary of women who are "not our type," we let them love us, and if, subsequently, we come to love them we love them a hundred times more than we love other women, without even enjoying in their arms the satisfaction of assuaged desire."

I can only think of the LBG, who was definitely not my type, just as I was definitely not her type, and yet somehow we fell in love, and, as I've said, I think we were as generally serenely happy on a day to day basis as any relationship I've ever had; but in the end we could not get out of each other's way.  I think these loves do sneak up on you because you go into them not considering that you might actually fall in love with that person.  Actually, having nothing in common allows you to create an entirely new universe, as compared to relying upon what brought you together in the first place.  The LBG was (no doubt is) beautiful, but she wasn't the classic Scudder dark European actress with terrible secrets look that I love, and which is so famous/infamous.  What we had in common was that we desired/liked/loved each other, which, oddly, I guess did make each of us the other's type.  Oh, she did really like Neil Young and bad monster movies, so it's not as if we had nothing in common.