Reality and Realities, Close to Home and Faraway

Being Myself

It’s easy to tell when Bruce isn’t around. When I’m expecting him in for a spell at desk and counter, I have to clean up my act. He likes a neat desk, and if he comes in and finds a mess, he’ll clean it up himself, and then how will I find all my stuff? But Bruce is gone for the whole month of November, and I’ve been reveling in what looks like a complete letting-go of standards. Ah, but if you were to look under desk and counter, where messes usually get stashed “temporarily” and then end up accumulating for months on end, you’d see a much neater story. It's dark under there, though, so imagine it for yourself.

Dealing with the Onset of Winter

Does it look cold? It’s cold. Roads have been, in those immortal words of broadcasters, “ice-covered and slippery,” although we did not get anywhere near the two feet that dumped all at once on Lake Superior, far to our north. I wonder.... Sometimes it's easier to go into four-wheel-drive and get through deep snow than to stay on a slippery road and negotiate a thin, greasy skin of the white stuff. But we get what we get, and this past week we got slipper roads.

The Nineteenth Century Pulls Me In

Roads were so slippery, in fact, that our intrepid little band of readers, shrunk from nine down to six when Proust was selected for November, then to five when one of the six had a schedule conflict, numbered in the end only four around one of the round tables at Fischer’s Happy Hour Tavern. We were sorry not to have the others with us, but we were a congenial quartet nonetheless.

Quite honestly, if I had to choose between the 18^th and the 19^th century, without knowing what my place in society would be or even what country I’d land in, I think I’d take my chances with the 18^th century, or about a hundred years before la Belle  Époque in France or the Gilded Age in the United States. Those overblown years leading up to the First World War have little appeal to this country mouse. But then there’s Proust, isn’t there?

“What made him different from literature that came before?” our Fearless Leader asked. 

We four agreed that Proust’s long, sensuous, voluptuous descriptions and microscopic attention to details of nature and the slightest nuances of human gesture or glance was worlds away from Voltaire, the last French writer whose work we read. Remembrance of Things Past is almost the antithesis of Candide. In Voltaire the events come fast and furious, piling up one on top of the other, whereas in Proust very little happens at all, but the moments are examined and stretched out like hours. And that makes sense, since Proustian time is very much Bergsonian time:

And besides, even from this point of view, in mere quantity, in our lives the days are not all equal. As they travel through the days, temperaments that are slightly nervous, as mine was, have available to them, like automobiles, different “speeds.” There are arduous mountainous days which one spends an infinite time climbing, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full-tilt singing.

Now you know that’s true, whether or not you have a “nervous” temperament. You've experienced it yourself, time dragging or racing by.

We also addressed the question of the main theme of the work. It’s too easy to say (as I originally did) “time and memory,” though, and here I dug deep down to a Bergsonian and phenomenological conclusion that convinced me, whether or not my friends were convinced, but I probably won't lay that all out today.

Over and over, in the first section, “Combray,” young Marcel is hungry to get behind the world of his senses, to some deeper reality he believes is hidden.

...[S]uddenly a roof, a glimmer of sun on a stone, the smell of the road would stop me because of a particular pleasure they gave me, and also because they seemed to be concealing, beyond what I could see, something which they were inviting me to come take and which despite my efforts I could not manage to discover.

He believed that a “philosophical subject for a great literary work” would have to solve this mystery, but

...I would feel I did not have the tranquility I needed at the moment for pursuing my search in a useful way, and that it would be better not to think about it any more until I was back at home....

And then, back at home, he would think of other things, avoiding the “arduous task,” and so the images would accumulate, guarding their secrets, until one day on a drive he asks for a pencil and writes a description of the teasing images of the disappearing and reappearing church steeples marking the progress of the carriage drive. And

...at that moment, when ... I had finished writing it, I was so happy, I felt it had so perfectly relieved me of those steeples and what they had been hiding behind them, that, as I myself were a hen and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top of my voice.

So writing is a key – but not the complete answer.

In the central section of the volume, “Swann in Love,” Swann realizes that much of the value he places on Odette, as well as his interpretations of her actions and utterances, comes not from her but from himself. So what about her that he knows or believes is real? Again, is the real something hidden behind appearances?

All of us loved the final section, “Place-Names: The Name.” The first name we encounter here is that of Balbec. Nothing is less like his Combray bedroom in his grandmother’s house, the narrator tells us, than his hotel room at Balbec, and at the same time nothing is less like Balbec itself than the Balbec he pictured in imagination, long before seeing the place. The name ‘Balbec’ to him was a storm at sea plus Gothic architecture. He wanted to see a storm at sea because it would be pure nature, not fashioned by man, therefore “more real” than even he himself.

When his parents began planning a trip to northern Italy and said that he might go, too, for Easter holidays, his dreams altered.

From then on only sunlight, perfumes, colors seemed to me of any value, for this alternation of images had brought about a change of direction in my desire, and ... a complete change of tone in my sensibility.

To ‘Balbec’ were added the magical names of ‘Venice’ and ‘Florence,’ brought forth out of abstract Space to become specific places, determinately situated, and differentiated from abstract Time, in that days passed in one could be passed nowhere else. – That is, if one were to go to Balbec, Venice, Florence, or anywhere else. But the young, nervous boy who was the narrator in childhood becomes ill from overexcitement and cannot leave Paris. His excursions will be limited to the public garden on the Champs-Élysées, too well known to contain magic. Until he hears 

"Good-bye, Gilberte, I’m going home, don’t forget we’re coming to your house tomorrow after dinner.” The name Gilberte passed close by me, evoking all the more forcefully the existence of the girl it designated in that it ... addressed her directly; thus it passed close by me, in action so to speak....

The name called through the air is described as a “cloud of precious color,” Proust going so far as to name the color – heliotrope – and now young Marcel’s life takes on a new focus. Away from Gilberte, he can think only of seeing her again, but in her company he is frustrated, feeling that the Gilberte he plays with in the park, with other children, is not the Gilberte he loves, the one of his dreams.

He becomes obsessed with everything relating to her hidden life, the life she lives away from him – the name of the street where she lives, the name of her father, Swann, the old woman in the park (whose name for a long time he does not know) to whom the girl speaks in so friendly a manner. But eventually he realizes that Gilberte feels no answering concern or need for him, that he is “the only one who loved.” His love is not a reality they share. 

Since Swann’s Way is only the first volume of Proust’s multi-volume work, it is not to be supposed that even the last achingly poetic page of this book will completely answer the question of theme. What we do find there is the narrator, visiting the Bois de Boulogne years later and finding it so changed – the women’s hats and dresses all different, automobiles in place of horse-drawn carriages -- as to be meaningless to him, saying: “The reality I had known no longer existed.” The time he had known is now lost, le temps perdu, but we know that the final volume of the work is called in English, Time Regained, so this is not the end of the story.

The story is – forgive the term – intensely metaphysical. What is reality? What is the relationship of names to reality? Where does the real exist? And does it pass out of existence with the passing of time? If not, how can it be accessed?

But by now I fear I’ve lost not only time but readers. Time to stop. Past time to stop.

Other Books

I'm posting this on a cold Saturday afternoon, the happy, laughing morning crowd all dispersed now. The sun is not present peeking out, either, so to close on a warm note I'll include photos of a few new books.

No Purer Love

You needn't be rich to collect books. These are from the Peter Pauper Press.

A recent post and comments on Books in Northport (don't miss the comments!) focused on the effect of rising real estate values on urban bookstores, a topic raised by Andrew Laties. Everyone knows, however—and I mean everyone in this country, not just everyone in the business--that rent is only one of many concerns facing bricks-and-mortar booksellers, as those of us with a physical street presence are called. The rapidly changing environment of publishing and bookselling, including online publishing, online buying and selling, e-books, e-readers, “clouds” and all the rest, has got everyone guessing and no one knowing for sure which way to jump.

I’m not alone in my love for printed books, and I’m far from alone in having expressed the reasons I remain loyalty to the old form but today I want to take another look at e-books, from a different and narrower perspective, because while advocates for and defenders of their respective preferences have advanced arguments in the e-book vs. print book debate dealing with issues of convenience, cost (both personal and environmental), and readability, Tim Parks has turned the debate in a new direction. His claim, the one I want to examine, is that that e-book offers a purer literary experience.

Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.

Leatherbound Jane Austen with ribbon bookmark

This is a serious point of view, and it cannot be dismissed out of hand. As for the obvious counter-argument in favor of what Parks calls “fetishistic gratification,” he anticipates and meets it head-on.

Weren’t there perhaps specific pleasures when reading on parchment scroll that we know nothing of and have lived happily without? Certainly there were those who lamented the loss of calligraphy when the printing press made type impersonal. There were some who believed that serious readers would always prefer serious books to be copied by hand.

Indeed, says Parks, until e-books came along, every age--with each successive “word-delivery system,” if you will--offered different sorts of “fetishistic gratification” (the former phrase in quotation marks is not one Parks uses; the latter is), and only now can we free ourselves from these physical distractions to meet literature in pure form. As I say, this is a serious argument, deserving of serious consideration. If you have the time and inclination, follow the link and read his position in full. It’s worth the time.

Not surprisingly, there was immediate reaction. One bookstore owner, Bill Petrocelli, predictably (but is “predictably” always “wrongly”?) challenged the Parks view, reminding readers that the fact that e-books don’t burn (a point Parks had made) is not necessarily in their favor. He was quoted in the trade e-newsletter "Shelf Awareness" as follows:

The e-book burners of the future won't have to round up all of the copies and put on them on a big pyre. They could achieve the same thing with the push of a button.

I am more than sympathetic to Petrocelli’s concern. I certainly don’t want my books somewhere in a “cloud,” where they can be turned off by some remote master switch at any moment. He has much more to say, also, which you can read here. All of Petrocelli’s are serious concerns. He does not, however, provide a direct answer to the purity question posed by Tim Parks, so let’s go back to that and then afterward see whether the two concerns can be addressed together or whether they cancel each other out. 

First, I want to question the alleged “purity” of the e-book reading experience, and secondly I want to examine the general desirability of “pure” experience, divorced from sensual considerations.

The look of this shelf pleases my aesthetic sense, but there's more--.

Does reading a book on an electronic device, be it cell phone, tablet, or large computer screen, deliver an experience free of “fetishistic gratification”? After all, I can’t be trying to impress people by the dust jacket on my book if it isn’t a book I’m holding and they can’t see a title. There’s no way interior decorating can come into play, either: the books I read (were I to read on an e-reader, which I don’t) cannot be lined up on shelves to impress visitors to my home. So is Tim Parks correct in saying that we have left the distracting sensual element behind with with the "austerity" of e-readers?

Reports from the e-reading public seem to suggest otherwise. A more “’paperlike’ reading experience” is touted as a plus for some models. People with e-readers are eager to talk about the quality of the lighted screen, the background color, the “smoothness” of use. Two owners of the devices have insisted on showing me "books I've read," which they did by showing me a a lineup of titled book icons on their electronic screens. (I'm not making that up. Somehow they seemed to think the icons provided more evidence than if they had simply told me, in spoken words, what they'd been reading.) E-readers do not dispense with fonts, either; they simply make it possible (as Parks admits) for the reader to adjust and alter the font at will.  And what about all those distracting extras like hyperlinks and such? Don’t those rather leave the “pure” text behind? Isn’t it a bit like watching a movie on DVD with the director’s voice talking over the dialogue in every scene as he explains how the scene was shot and how he got the actors to give the performances as they did? Is that a purer film experience? The question I’m asking here, in line with the argument made by Parks, isn’t whether or not you should want or enjoy the extras (because they're a bit like footnotes, after all, and you don't have to bother with them) but if the e-reading experience is “purer,” as he claims. 

Isn’t it obvious that the sensuous has not been eliminated from the e-reading experience but only homogenized so that each book’s reading “feel” is like the one before and the one to follow? Haven't a series and variety of objects simply been replaced with one sleek, modern one? What would it mean to eliminate all material objects from the reading experience? If you could somehow “download” a “book” (text, if you will) directly into your brain, would that be a “pure experience”? Maybe it would be. Maybe that is the dream that many hope will be realized in the future of reading. I wonder how many old-fashioned booklovers feel the desire for such an experience.

I’d like to change the subject slightly, for reasons of analogy. For many people, “meeting” strangers on the Internet is a freeing experience, precisely because they can meet mind to mind and leave distracting bodies out of the equation. One could, I suppose, make the argument that a relationship thus formed provides—or at least has the potential to provide--pure interpersonal experience. Individuals can exchange opinions without even knowing one another’s gender, much less their respective ages or other physical qualities. If an exchange of views is conducted in such a manner, does it constitute a relationship? A pure relationship? The literary experience, says Parks, is purely mental and exists “in the movement of the mind through a sequence of words from beginning to end.” Nothing else. Is the experience of love or friendship, in its purest form, nothing more than the meeting of two minds?

More than decor--time travel and encounters with those no longer among us.

Denigration of the material world is at least as old as Plato, who divided existence into two realms and saw earthly objects as degraded versions of pure heavenly forms. To my way of thinking, such disdain for our material world, the only one we know and the one that is, therefore, the ground of our every experience, is nothing short of reprehensible ingratitude. I love to see a smile on a friend’s face or to take a friend’s hand in sympathy.

Beautiful new paperback

Okay, Tim, I gave it a whirl. I considered your position. But I’m not buying it. I don’t believe the e-reader experience is purer than the experience of reading from printed books. It’s just different. And pure experience isn’t what I’m looking for, anyway. What I want is real experience. I don’t need or desire the illusion of having left the earth. In fact, the books I love most, whether fiction or nonfiction, bind me more tightly to this earth and to those I love by evoking earthly experience. And for that I love them, the books, both what they say and for how they look and feel. I don't love books because I sell them. I am a reader and a bookseller because I love books--as literature and as objects.

Two new hardcover novels with dust jackets--beautiful in every way!