My Year of Proust, part 2 - David Loftus

No question, the word for À la recherche du temps perdu is monumental.

Unlike other sprawling works that intimidate readers (say, Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow), Proust’s masterpiece does not range across vast fields of knowledge. You won’t encounter tons of geography, history, or the sciences (although there’s a bit about music, literature, and medicine, since Proust’s father was a renowned physician). The author’s not putting that kind of erudition on display.

Rather, Proust takes a microscope, in effect, to a particular era and place (Paris and the northwest coast of France -- Normandy, mostly) in the last few decades of the 19th century, and the mores and inner lives of mostly upper-middle-class and aristocratic folks in that milieu. He also gives us a vivid, specific, and detailed peek into the thoughts, judgments, fears, notions, and insecurities of his narrator -- a person very much like the author but not exactly him.

The narrator will take pages and pages to describe the delicate sparring of attendees at a cocktail party; his goofy relatives of a still earlier era; the time it takes him to make this or that decision, and all the thought processes that went into it; and above all, the excruciating jealousy he feels about the behavior of his lower-class mistress (and similarly painful affairs between other men and women -- and some men and men -- of his acquaintance). Proust takes you deeply into a different world, peopled by folks who nevertheless make the same mistakes of love, judgment, gossip, self-contradiction, and social insecurity that you do.

But you have to adjust to a different pace of reading: rich, luxuriant, and leisurely. It is as if Wagner’s Ring Cycle had been composed by Debussy. Even a reader like myself, who has never cracked a Tom Clancy, Danielle Steele, Dan Brown, or Twilight novel, can find his mind wandering if he doesn’t concentrate steadily on Proust’s complicated, meandering, digressive sentences.

I often catch myself having to back up to reread a long sentence, paragraph, even a whole page -- more than once. (Just so you know what you’re up against, I counted the words and punctuation marks in a sample sentence in vol. 3: with the help of 15 commas, 4 em-dashes, 1 semicolon, 1 colon, and 1 parenthetical, Proust rattles out a 338-word sentence … in English translation, of course, but I assume the translating team mimicked his style.)

Every once in a while, something crackles. It may be an Oscar Wilde- or Mark Twain-like maxim:

·      … the regularity of a habit is often in direct proportion to its absurdity.

·      Like everyone who is not in love, he imagined that one chooses the person that one loves after endless deliberation and on the strength of diverse qualities and advantages.

·      There is a special kind of look, apparently of recognition, which a young man receives from certain women—and from certain men—only until the day on which they have made his acquaintance and have learned that he is the friend of people with whom they too are intimate.

·      Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to kindness and wisdom we make promises only; pain we obey.

·      It would be untrue to say that she was a fool; she overflowed with a kind of intelligence that I had no use for.

·      One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.

·      Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art.

·      We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

·      … theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life.

·      … in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice: I preferred not to see them… .

·      “Love?” she had once replied to a pretentious lady who had asked for her views on love, “I make it often but I never talk about it.”

·      We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

Or it may be an extended passage that reminds me of a deeply emotional experience, or complex thought or desire, that I’ve had in my own life. The other day, I read a passage where the narrator says that once he suspected his lover had been physically intimate with a notorious lesbian, “I should have liked, not to tear off her dress to see her body, but through her body to see and read the whole diary of her memories and her future passionate assignations.”

Somehow, this reminded me of a similarly impossible wish; what might qualify as a Proustian desire: to go back and relive my first meeting with my future wife and the memorable women before her. Not to live in that time, but just to re-experience what I could not have known then was a momentous encounter in my life, and, this time, see what I can see in it, knowing what I would come to know and feel later. Could I perceive how vital this particular woman would come to be for me in time? Would I recognize certain deeply cherished tics in her (or in me) when things were still so casual and tentative? I think it would feel a little like the anticipatory joy one experiences when rereading the opening pages of a favorite book, or watching the first scenes of a beloved movie one has already seen many times.

I was also a little surprised, given my expectation that I would read about effete parties and passionate affairs and the behavior and furnishings of a distant time … how honestly and regularly Proust brings it all back to why he sought for decades to recapture the past, in memory and on the page: because he feared death, just as I do, and just as anyone who has any self-awareness should, in order to guide one’s choices during the brief time we are alive. Love, beauty, and memory make it almost bearable.

That’s what it’s all about, really.

See part 1, In Search of Proust Time