On Not Reading Like a Critic

It's so much more than a pond to me.

Reading Subjectively

 

When I wrote about a new book recently on this blog, I said explicitly, “This is not a book review.” Increasingly, I find myself reading more and more subjectively, zeroing in on passages and thoughts and events and images meaningful to me because I relate them to my own life. Characters in books don’t have to be “like me” for me to find connections with them, and neither does the setting or even the time period have to be my own. People, after all, are people, whoever and wherever and whenever they live -- and fictional characters do live in good books, as all readers know, so when we read a well-written novel, we enter into the lives of the characters.

 

Here is an example of what I mean by reading subjectively – first, the quote from Proust and then, the associations it brought up for me:

 

Thus, at every point in its existence the name of Guermantes, considered as a conglomerate of all the names it comprised within and around itself, suffered losses and enrolled new elements, like those gardens in which, in a continuous process, flowers scarcely in bud, ready to take the places of those which are beginning to fade, lose their identity in a mass that appears unchanged except to those persons who have not been witnessing the succession of new blooms and therefore have retained in their memories an exact picture of the flowers that have disappeared. 

- Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured

 

In the final volume of Proust’s epic, Marcel attends a reception at the home of the Princesse de Guermantes, where he encounters a number of old acquaintances so changed by Time that some at first he does not recognize at all. Gradually he is able to re-member them, as it were, comparing their present faces and bodies with young, fresh images recalled from years past. Along with physical changes, he notes how failing memories have allowed former acrimonious feelings to vanish, so that individuals once bitter enemies now meet on cordial terms as if they had never been at odds with one another. Newcomers, with no memory of relationships of former years or what place was held in society by various individuals twenty years or more before, take the present to be something that always was, more or less, while those who have not kept track of all the changes wrought by Time remember what used to be, “the flowers that have disappeared.”

 

I read and re-read the paragraph, substituting in my mind, for “Guermantes,” the name “Leland,” since it was in Leland — and specifically at the Blue Bird — that my Leelanau County memory first began to be formed. Many faces from those days have disappeared. (Most, I often think. If I were to go there some evening now, would I recognize a single person?) At the same time, I know that the names and faces I associate with those tables and that bar mean little or nothing to Leland’s young crowd today. The same, of course, is true of Northport, but in Northport my own memory goes back only to 1993, to Woody’s Settling Inn and my first, oh-so-modest little used bookstore in one of the sheds next door. I never even saw “the old school,” as it's called on sweatshirts worn proudly by those who attended and graduated from that old two-story brick building with its outdoor fire escape chute, yet I recall the happy feeling it gave me when one of that school’s graduates, himself a third-generation Northporter, told me I was “a Northport person.” 

David, my husband, was always a Leland person. Leland was where he established his reputation early on. My only identity in Leland was as his partner, whereas in Northport I was “the bookstore lady,” someone with an identity of my own. David and I settled in the country halfway between the two villages, with good friends in both.

Early on, David Grath in Leland, Michigan

Leland/Fishtown legend David Grath

Original Dog Ears Books, 1993, Northport

Time’s flight is inexorable. Artists, however, leave behind them work that never grows old, and in that way the garden, here in Leelanau as elsewhere, continues to grow in richness and complexity.

How Does My Garden Grow?

 

When it comes to literal gardening, my focus this past season was on flowers rather than vegetables. I needed flowers. I needed color in front of my house to welcome me home every day, since the Artist wouldn’t be waiting for me in the yard or on the porch, as he was last year. I planted annuals as well as perennials and recommend having both. Perennials mark the passing season for us as each blooms for its limited time, while annuals either flower continuously, such as pansies and begonias,  or repeatedly. Is my new favorite annual below bacopa? I forget. But I love it.

Next year I’ll have vegetables again.

 

But the glory of my home grounds for me is my meadow. Now cleared of autumn olive (temporarily, I know; the vigil will be lifelong!), the variety of its flora is a rich and diverse mix.

Just now the asters are stealing the show (bees are busy in them all day long), and yesterday I saw the first of what will be hundreds of milkweed pods releasing their seeds to the wind, while butterflies continue to flit about among the grasses and flowers. There are wild roses and an enormous colony of blackberries. So much that it’s hard to have a “favorite” plant, but I was thrilled to find not one but two hawthorns this year, one to the east, the other to the south. 

The summer I fell in love with Proust I was obsessed with hawthorns, and however thrilling the landscape that met my eyes when we went out on evening rides through the countryside, I could not get hawthorns out of my mind and looked for hawthorns everywhere, just as I used to make mental notes of blooming asters, always meaning to go back to collect seeds and never following through. Then one year the wildflower seed mix I’d sown in my meadow began producing asters. Now it seems I have hawthorns, also, and I find their presence immensely satisfying. No, more than that. Comforting. Don't ask me why. Although in some way, I suppose, just as I am struck by associations to my life in books, I also value associations to books in my life.

 

Not everything I read gives me comfort. Some re-open springs of grief. Others stretch my mind. The one thing they have in common these days is that, while still aware of quality in writing and the skill of writers, I am reading more and more for myself, gathering in as much as possible in these harvest years, as I look back to put it all together. At least, to try.

 

Alone and Not Alone, Each and Every One of Us

Sunshine and shadows

 

...Brown eyes stared back at her bleakly. A serviceable, capable person with a heart like a volcano, one that was spewing out a lava of rage and confusion and grief. Oh, no one would ever guess it. Her customers would never believe her capable of such fury and desolation, the unending baffled confusion she felt…. 

-      Ellen Airgood, South of Superior

 

Our little reading circle, that long-standing, intrepid band that formed lo these many years ago to read James Joyce’s Ulysses together, has chosen Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! as November’s discussion group book (meeting via Zoom), so I’ve been plowing, dragging, trudging – picture a tired old mule, legs shaking with fatigue – through that depressing American classic. But last night, the night before Election Day, I needed a break, I needed comfort. And I needed to feel close to my friend, the author. So I fled, in spirit, to the U.P. before falling asleep (and waking at 3 a.m. to read some more, but that’s another story).

Toggling between the near and dear familiar and the difficult long-ago

The thing is (as another friend and I touched on earlier last night, during a phone conversation that we agreed at the beginning could not be long but which somehow kept going irresistibly once underway), we have all endured long years already of painful political and social division in our country, and on top of that came and still continue long months of pandemic restrictions and isolation. And still, on top of all the unusual, long-drawn-out, seemingly endless daily stresses of political and social strife and pandemic, the usual crises and disasters that life brings every year keep coming, too: accidents, unexpected expenses, job losses and business failures, fires, hurricanes, power outages, serious illnesses and hospitalizations and deaths – in other words, trials and losses of all kinds. Even happy events such as weddings and births cannot be celebrated as they would have been in normal times. It’s overwhelming and exhausting, the cumulative toll.

 

So no one is not exhausted. Which is why the long slog with Faulkner through the South, before, during, and after the Civil War, as we continue to feel nightmare reverberations today from that long-ago time, is not something I can handle nonstop.

 

Are Faulkner’s long sentences Proustian? One member of the reading circle thinks so, but I’m finding them very different, both in form and mood. A Faulknerian sentence, interrupting itself over and over on the way to each delayed and long-desired period, strikes me as an articulation of bottomless anger and frustration and regret and pain, while Proust’s sentences -- for me -- unfurl voluptuously in slow, bright, festooning ribbons of sensuous detail. Proust wraps a reader in long, luxurious moments, Faulkner withholds and torments. Of course, the respective content of these two brilliant writers cannot be separated from form, and the very different content undoubtedly colors my impressions….

 

These days many usually soft-spoken friends, feeling powerless and fearful despite their noble and tireless efforts to bring about better times for us all, express themselves privately in loud expletives. One dear friend, overcome by spells of panic that come without warning, bursts into uncontrollable sobs as we speak on the phone. Another loved one sadly expresses the feeling that he is alone in the world. Anger, panic, loneliness. Fear and sadness. Rage, confusion, grief, fury, desolation. Exhaustion.

 

Do I exaggerate? The basic condition of aloneness – that each of us is born alone, suffers alone, and dies alone – a truth that active, busy people generally manage to keep in the background of consciousness, is in our faces every day now. Giving up is not an option, however, and so we seek calm and comfort in prayer and meditation, long walks outdoors, playtime with children and pets, happy memories and current domestic joys, making art or baking pies -- and calling, texting, writing, making and maintaining connections, that is, to each other and to the precious ordinariness of life. Because joy is, we remind ourselves, as true as pain, loving connection as true as social isolation, every moment of life a precious gift not to be squandered.

Making connections

As Airgood’s character Madeline Stone realized about the U.P., life is “all mixed up, beautiful and bleak, both.” 

 

Will my friend Ellen be taken aback to find herself in company here with Marcel Proust and William Faulkner? Love you, Ellen and Rick!

 

I want to send a special “Hello and thank you!” to Margie Burns, also, up in Marquette, whose cheery note in the mail yesterday was such a lovely surprise. Warmest greetings to you and Jackie and all the members of your book club, Margie! I remember your visit to Dog Ears and am touched that you continue to follow my bookstore and life vicariously via this blog – and that you wrote to tell me so is a special gift.

 

In closing, on this long-awaited Election Day 2020: Better off than four years ago? Hardly! But not giving up, either, not by a long shot, whatever the results! It’s time to call on all our sisu and keep calling on it, daily, one day at a time, the only way life can ever be lived. That is today’s Upper Peninsula lesson, no less applicable here below the Bridge or in any other part of the world.

 

This tree has sisu!

The Interweaving of Books and Life

I have just finished reading the advance reading copy of a transporting book, found it deeply meaningful, and am now flailing around, mentally and emotionally, trying to find a way to write about it here. Every book is more than a description of it can ever be, but that truth seems particularly striking and poignant to me in this case.

She Read To Us In the Late Afternoons: A Life in Novels, by Kathleen Hill, takes its title from the author’s memory of her mother’s reading to her and her brother, one winter, A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. Years later, she recalls her mother’s inflections and tone when she herself is reading Proust one afternoon a week to an aging friend and realizing the importance of a reader’s voice and the intimate space created by sharing what is more often experienced in solitary fashion.

Although she has surely read thousands of books, only six are featured in this beautiful literary memoir. (I first wrote that sentence to say she had “chosen” only six, but does one choose the pieces of one’s life that make the deepest memories?) I have read all but the first mentioned, Lucy Gayheart; however, readers who have read fewer or even none of those that resonate so strongly in the author’s life – readers, that is: those who sometimes wonder if they are perhaps too involved in books, reading instead of living – should still find this book resonating in their own.

One of the reasons I am having such a difficult time finding a way to write about this book is that it did for me what I know it will do for others whose lives sometimes focus on books to the near-exclusion of world events or even family and friends. In each essay (they are chronologically arranged), Kathleen Hill writes not only of the novel important to her in that period of her life but also gives biographical details – where she was living, how she came to be there, what else was happening in her life and how she felt and responded. And so, while I was very much engrossed in her stories, I also found myself drifting off into my own memories and books I read in circumstances forever associated, for me, with the book then read – all of which has nothing to do with this particular book, only with my experience of it. But then, what Hill writes of is exactly that -- the experience of her readings of the six novels.

And so reading this book brings back to me some of my own reading memories....

*  *  *

One summer in Barry County, Michigan, I read Moscow Farewell, by George Feifer, and the closer I got to the end of the book, the more carefully I rationed the remaining pages, so I recognized from my own life Hill’s report of doing the same with her listening friend, Diana Trilling, when they were reading Proust -- not wanting a book to end, not wanting to close the cover on the last page, because to do so is the closest experience a modern reader has to being ejected from the Garden of Eden. I can explain it no other way, though surely Proust’s vision of his friends growing old and unrecognizable, like the desperate, dysfunctional Moscow of the Soviet era, can hardly be called an Eden. It isn’t that the world of the book is idyllic but that we are living so fully in its world that leaving it is a little death, a bereavement in the midst of our own life.

I had a vegetable garden behind our old farmhouse that summer, and after reading a page or two, trying to read slowly, savoring every word, I would close the book, take a deep breath, and plunge outdoors to weed for a while. And as Kathleen did when reading aloud to Diana, I rationed myself to shorter and shorter bits as the remaining pages grew fewer. Outdoors there was a song sparrow that sang on the fencepost behind my garden, and I remember also a beautiful spotted salamander we found in the well pit, the breeze through sweet-smelling hay stacked in the barn, butterflies my little son and I lured to the driveway by filling holes with water from the hose, spittlebugs we discovered on weeds in the unmowed “side yard” (a.k.a. meadow on the other side of the drive), and the discouraging state of our kitchen floor, with its old linoleum torn up to reveal the hardwood boards underneath almost irremediably (though I’m sure they have been remediated by now) gunked up with old black tar – all are connected to my reading of Moscow Farewell. I could have spent every waking minute that summer scraping away at the tar on the kitchen floor, but instead I fled to Moscow and to my garden and to the fields. My son and I climbed a small rise we called “Mulberry Hill,” accompanied by our large dog and our feisty little tiger cat. The cat led the little parade, her waving tail in tall grasses showing us the way. Years later I would sometimes call another dog, Nikki, by love names inspired by Feifer’s book: Nikita, Nikitushka.

Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being I read in Paris, taking the Metro almost every day from the bustling 9^th arrondissement to the serene 8^th, trading commercial traffic and narrow pavement for the cool, verdant, peaceful atmosphere of the Parc Monceau. I would change my seat several times during each day’s reading, moving now into, now out of the sun, and taking the occasional turn around waters and “ruins” when tired of sitting. I lived inside that first Kundera novel (later I read several more, loving some and absolutely hating others, something that has never happened to me with any other author), though not always in the way the author could have foreseen. Reading it in French (L’insoutenable légerté de l’être – magic name!), I sometimes mistook the meaning of a word, and so for quite a while I envisioned the chapeau melon not as black but the color of a cantaloupe. I know, I know! But that’s how I saw it, day after day, for many chapters. Living those hours in Prague, however, barely conscious for long stretches of time of the city around me, when I looked up and rose from my seat and walked to a new one, somehow I felt I belonged in Paris and in the Parc Monceau more securely for having entered Kundera’s world in translation, through my own second language. Kundera gave me Prague, and Prague gave me entry to Paris.

As readers, we can be stubborn and prejudiced, and for years I took perverse pride in saying that life was too short to read Proust. It seemed such a clever thing to say, proving my independence from the canon. Then one summer, somehow, I fell into Combray.

Of everything described in this beginning of Remembrance of Things Past, it was the hawthornes that became my obsession. David and I would go for a drive in the summer evening, and my eyes searched roadsides and fields for hawthornes, wanting that tangible connection to my reading and nearly blind to everything else. But no, not blind. I did see what was there, but it was what I did not see that filled my mind, and this recalls Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and a section of a paper I wrote on that work, in which “Pierre’s dog” can see nothing in the cafe but the absence of Pierre. How much do we miss in each present moment because our minds are filled with what is not there? Well, I read the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past again and again, became bored with and laid aside the second, but at last, a few years back, leaped ahead to read The Past Recaptured. Wonderful, wonderful!

And now, searching Books in Northport for “hawthornes” (I know I did a post of them once), I find instead a post on books I lived, and there is one left out of this current post, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Yes, I remember, that summer I was reading Marquez I wanted nothing more than escape from what my own life had then become: hours in a windowless office, surrounded by tall file cabinets holding “history” I felt had no place in a university and yet for which I was responsible. How I mourned the erasure of the old Department of Agriculture, in one of the original ivy-covered buildings on the hill, and how I missed the green, humid world of its greenhouse!

*  *  *

If I seem to have digressed egregiously from the task at hand, it is my way of telling you that you will do the same in the intervals when you put Kathleen Hill’s book aside. You will enter her reading worlds eagerly and be enchanted by their variety and depth, and you will follow the threads weaving together the books she was reading to the life she was living at the same time and her later reflections on those connections. You will be at times astonished at her candor, for she does not spare herself or hide her shortcomings or failures, whether telling of a schoolmate abandoned to his lonely fate, acceptance of social hierarchy in Nigeria, or loneliness in a French village, where for week after week she and her husband somehow could not connect with the world around them. And then when you put the book down to change your seat or return to the demands of your own life, you will recall, because you are a reader, too, those books in whose worlds you lived and also the world that surrounded you at the time of those readings, and so your experience of this book will add to all those other weavings and layers of memory that are your life.

Does a reader, “nose buried in a book,” miss life while turning pages, eyes following lines of print? If it is life, is it a bizarre way to live?

Hill’s answer to the question comes at last in her final essay. Between Hill and her friend Diana Trilling, there is a 20-year age difference, and when Diana speaks of her failing eyesight and her regret that she will not, because of it, be able to re-read Proust, Hill quickly offers to come one afternoon a week to read aloud from Remembrance of Things Past, a project that takes the two women six years to complete. Naturally, there is conversation as well as reading during those afternoons, but that is all I am going to say. No description, no preview. You must read that essay for yourself, and you must read the preceding essays first, in order. I am sorry to tell you that She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons will not be released until mid-autumn, but I will tell you that it deserves your anticipation. As a reader, you will not want to miss this experience.

She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons: A Life in Novels

by Kathleen Hill
Encino, CA: Delphinium Books, October 24, 2017

Busy Life, Desultory Reading

des-ul-to-ry: adj. [from L. leap down from]

1.  passing from one thing to another in an aimless way; disconnected; not methodical;

2.  lacking direct relevancy; random; incidental

That definition is taken (though modified) from The New World Dictionary of the American Language, Second College Edition, 1974. I looked the word up because I don’t trust myself with a word I never use in conversation, only in writing. It looks like de-SUL-tery, but the dictionary says the strongest stress is on the first syllable, with a minor stress on the third: Dessle-tory. Yet I’ve also heard educated people pronounce it as Dessletry, i.e., as only three syllables and only the first one stressed. I play it safe and keep my mouth shut. But the word did come to mind the other morning.

Recent activities at home have not desultory: packing, organizing, cleaning. I may look aimless, especially in those moments when I pause to wait for my brain to kick back into gear, but everything I’m doing is connected, if not thoroughly methodical, all actions (except for episodes of escape reading) aimed at a single end: departure! Sarah knows something is up but little does she ken what it is. No matter. Sarah is always willing.

What has been desultory of late in my busy life is that reading I mentioned parenthetically above, episodic escapes to rest a fevered brain. It doesn’t matter much what the book is, so the first one on my Books Read 2015 list is a book on grammar. Why? It came to hand, that’s all. Focused on an imminent road trip, I don’t need thrilling bodice-rippers: anything with printed words and pages to turn is an escape from bags and boxes and scribbled lists.

And so, in the search for self-soothing comfort, I skipped ahead to the last episode in the last section of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, those final pages of Time Regained in which the mature Marcel, arriving at a reception given by the Princesse de Guermantes, enters her house in the middle of a musical piece and must wait in the library until the next intermission, which gives him time to reflect on a small but crucial incident that occurred between his carriage and the house.

...I had barely time to get out of the way and, in stepping back, struck my foot against some unevenly cut flagstones leading to a carriage house. In recovering my balance, I put my foot on a stone that was a little lower than the one next to it; immediately all my discouragement vanished before a feeling of happiness which I had experienced at different moments all my life, at the sight of trees I thought I recognized when driving around Balbec, or the church spires of Martinville, or the savour or a madeleine, dipped in herb tea, or from many other sensations I have mentioned....

Examining that sudden feeling of happiness, he realizes that the sensation delivered by the uneven paving stones has carried him back to Venice but brought to him much more than a mere “moment from the past,” and there in the library, reflecting on various similar moments of happiness, the character Marcel conceives the book he will write, the book that Proust has in fact written, the fictionalized memoir in which this last section shows the author before he has begun his great work. It will be a “solid” psychology, not “plane,” and he sees the challenge in all the demands it will make on his powers and remaining life.

To convey an idea of it, one would have to go to the noblest and most varied arts for comparisons; for this writer, who, moreover, would have to shew the most contradictory sides of each of his characters in order to give his volume the effect of a solid, would need to prepare it with minute care, constantly regrouping his forces as if for an attack, endure it like an exhausting task, accept it like a rule of conduct, build it like a church, follow it like a regimen, overcome it like an obstacle, win it like a friendship, feed it intensively like a child, create it like a world, without overlooking those mysteries whose explanation is probably to be found only in other worlds and the presentiment of which is the quality in life and art which moves us most deeply [my emphasis added].

Read again the task as he set himself to it: “build it like a church ... overcome it like an obstacle ... create it like a world....” That string of similes, all those strong verbs with their substantive objects! Doesn’t it make your heart beat faster and shivers run down your spine? Don’t you sit up straighter and want to cheer the author?

-- And yet, stirring and compelling and moving as I always find this section -- I must confess I would read a few pages and then pick up another book, and I have no way to explain my going back and forth, other than the general unsettled atmosphere that fills a house and pervades life itself in days preparatory to a long road trip. Desultory reading.

My other main reading during the same unsettled days (I must hunt up information on this book and author sometime) came to me at random, as had the grammar book, although no doubt the title was a strong attraction. The Lone Winter, by Anne Bosworth Greene, written in journal form, without any prologue, background, or introduction given, is an account, not surprisingly, of one writer’s winter, specifically in this case a winter on a farm in New England following World War I. A reader gathers snippets of the writer’s background as the journal goes along. (Not until over halfway through the book do I realize at last that the farm is in Vermont, a fact she had not mentioned earlier.) She is a single woman, with a grown daughter. The daughter now lives in the city, but before this season lived with her mother. The writer is also an artist, although she seems to be doing little or no drawing or painting this winter. (But what is this ‘frontispiece’ she keeps mentioning, without telling us any more about it?) There are no more chickens – all gone -- but numerous horses and ponies, one cow, and, in the house, one dog (a collie) and one cat. Essentially, hers is a pony farm.

[Oh, how my grandfather would have loved this book! When he retired from the Pennsylvaia Railroad and moved from Ohio to Florida, his dream was to establish a pony farm, a dream I encouraged with all the enthusiasm of the horse-crazy ten-year-old girl I then was. Alas, his second wife was working against me, and she had daily access 365 days a year. Don’t get me wrong: I loved her, too. But oh, how thrilled Grandpa and I would have been with a pony farm! I might even have moved to Florida to help him with it, and then the entire course of my life would have been different --. But there. I cannot regret the life that has brought me to where I am now, so be off with you, pony dreams!]

The author of The Lone Winter rides (horses, of course), skis, and snowshoes, besides regularly milking her cow and pitching hay to her “children,” i.e., the cow, horses, and ponies. When she drives, she is driving a horse, and the horse is pulling a sleigh. There is no plot, only life events  -- e.g., her daughter visits, ponies break through their fences, a pipe freezes. Mostly what happens is that the weather changes and changes and changes again.

Again the uncertain thirties have yielded to a solid zero, and the world is a-crack with cold. Even my bed seemed a shivery spot this morning; so by a pale, surreptitious sunrise I was already down, shuddering, and poking at the fire.

Supplies run low, and the resourceful countrywoman attempts a sort of cowboy pan bread, flung into a hot, greased pan, coming out at last “toothsome” and “white as sea-foam under a somewhat charred exterior.” I imagine my far-flung blogger friend, Cherie, out on the Atlantic coast, enjoying this book. But would she chafe at its slow beginning and the many, many pages of chasing and feeding ponies? I think I would urge her to open right away to page 167 and read from there until she lost interest, if she were going to lose interest. If she didn’t, of course, she could go back to the beginning and start there. Cherie, shall I send you the book when I finish it? It’s in the car with me now!

Here at home in the Upper Midwest, while Arctic “clippers” made necessary errands and organizing and packing and everything more difficult– frigid dashes from house to car! – the weather also made sense of our winter change of venue. Not so long ago, back in the mild days of December leading up to the end of the past year, we were asking ourselves, “Why are we going away?” We’re not asking that in what must be nearly the hundredth hour straight of fierce winds with subzero chill coming off nearby Lake Michigan.

It’s really happening. The pony farm was only a dream, but the life of the artist and the bookstore were dreams we turned into reality and have kept afloat year after year. Well, now our winter sabbatical dream is becoming reality, too, so stay tuned for pictures of “elsewhere,” postcards from the road. The scenery will be changing, that I can promise.

Enlightenment vs. Proust – and Other Oppositions

Don’t allow events to leave impressions inside of you. -      Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself (New Harbinger/Noetic, 2007) 

Singer’s following sentence in the book reads, “If you find yourself thinking about them later on, just let go.” I’m reading these sentences early on Sunday morning, less than 24 hours after putting up a long post on Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (well, Swann’s Way, the first volume of RTP), and while much of what I’m reading in Singer’s book is a message coming to me at exactly the right time, just when I needed it, I can’t help pausing over certain bits and asking, Really? I mean, had Proust been enlightened throughout his entire life, we would not have his work at all, would we? Some people (and you know who you are, S.C.!) might think that a good thing, but others of us can imagine only deprivation, had Proust never written.

Singer’s basic message is that we human beings are all psychologically paralyzed by fear, by what we perceive as threats to our ability to control the world of our experience. We react by constructing what we think are protections, but those self-protective reactions actually function as walls requiring constant, vigilant monitoring, and thus we become our own prisoners. This is undeniable for most of us, I think, and I don’t fault the author for repeating his message in different form from page to page and chapter to chapter. I for one certainly need the repetition. It isn’t by hearing or reading this message once that I’ll see how to relax my guard and stop trying to control situations that threaten my sense of psychological well-being!

You will get to a point in your growth where you understand that if you protect yourself, you will never be free. It’s that simple. Because you’re scared, you have locked yourself within your house and pulled down all the shades. Now it’s dark and you want to feel the sunlight, but you can’t. It’s impossible. If you close and protect yourself, you are locking this scared, insecure person within your heart. You will never be free that way.

In our household, we refer to the constant, endless, sleepless chewing over of unresolved issues or fears for the future as “squirrel-caging.” It goes nowhere but around and around and around. It’s wildly counter-productive, and it’s painful, too – paradoxically, since its psychological object is to defend against pain. Let go of those thoughts? Escape the squirrel cage? Good idea!

Of social situations, Singer writes:

When you approach the edges [of the cage you have built to protect yourself] you feel insecurity, jealousy, fear, or self-consciousness. You pull back, and if you are like most people, you stop trying. Spirituality begins when you decide that you’ll never stop trying.

This can be interpreted also, I think, to say that “Freedom begins...” or “Growth begins....” Leave behind insecurity, jealousy, fear, and the kind of self-consciousness that stands in the way of forward movement and growth? Yes, I would like to do that, and this book has given me some tools with which to begin the task.

One thing I can’t help wondering, though, is where justice fits into all this.

Obviously, an acquaintance who hurts my feelings by failing to failing to grant me the attention I desire or feel I deserve is not doing me an “injustice,” and such an interpretation is clearly one I need to let go of, to let pass through me and evaporate in thin air, rather than clinging to it pointlessly. But what of true injustices that exist not only elsewhere on the globe, in far distant countries, but within our own communities? And what of very real and important issues threatening the future of the earth for generations to come? None of this, as far as I can see, is addressed  from the high spiritual ground of detachment and spiritual enlightenment. Seeing the world as nothing but energy and determining to “let it all go” – I can’t help thinking that while this might a sanity-saving strategy for people who feel absolutely powerless (cultural origins of religions and philosophies are always worth paying attention to: where did the idea of enlightenment arise, and what were the social circumstances surrounding it?), it can also be a convenient abdication of social responsibility on the part of materially comfortable, physically and politically safe Westerners whose only experiences of fear have been psychological and self-generated.

The emphasis on achieving endless, uninterrupted happiness strikes me as not only unrealistic but even a repulsive goal, given certain very real and horrible human (but inhumane) situations.

If they starve you and put you in solitary confinement, just have fun being like Gandhi. No matter what happens, just enjoy the life that comes to you.

When I reached these sentences, I wanted to ask the author: What if you’re not put in solitary confinement but thrown in among violent criminals and gang-raped, are you supposed to “have fun” with that? If not only your house but all your family are blown to smithereens by incendiary bombs, are you supposed to “have fun” with that? To my mind, this admonition to “have fun” with whatever happens is a slap in the face to those who suffer not through negative self-talk but through the violence of others. I would also argue that neither Jesus nor Gandhi nor Martin Luther King, Jr. practiced “nonresistance.” What they practiced and taught was “nonviolent resistance,” which is entirely different and which does address issues of justice.

And if everything in existence and process were already as it should be, what would be the point of changing even ourselves?

As a philosopher, argumentation is part of who I am, and critical thinking is not something I want to give up. While I can see that putting energy into defending my own poor little psyche is clearly a waste of time, I cannot and do not want to say the same of putting energy into opposing injustice, violence, and destruction of the natural world. “We must cultivate our gardens,” Candide says gently at the end of Voltaire’s tale. Indeed. Inconsequential as our tiny planet is in the midst of interstellar space (an image the book repeatedly asks us to contemplate), it is our only home, the nurturing environment in which our flesh and blood evolved, and it requires our active care.

Then there is art, and there is memory. Without memory, there is no art, and probably without art only very short-lived memories.

Our intrepid Ulysses group’s Fearless Leader feels that immortality consists in being remembered and that he, both as a lover of music and as a musician, participates in the immortality of Beethoven. In the same way, all of us who loved and read Swann’s Way may be said (if you accept our FL’s view) to participate in the immortality of Proust. What a privilege! To walk, in imagination, along that blossoming hawthorn hedge and tarry alongside the beautiful waterlilies in the private park of the Guermantes way! To feel in our own hearts, as we call up magical place names in our own lives, an echo of what the name ‘Balbec’ meant to young Marcel! I know that for several of my readers far from Leelanau County on this cold November morning, ‘Leelanau’ itself is one of those magic names.

“Don’t allow events to leave impressions inside of you”? Be empty of memories? Those beloved images of the past? Wouldn’t that truly be to lose time, to lose one’s very life?

I would be overjoyed to escape my foolish psychic walls but never to give up justice, art, and memory.

Doubtless, veteran seekers after enlightenment will tell me I’ve misinterpreted and misrepresented the practice. I’m open to that possibility. But I also reflect that no religion or philosophy or system of thought ever devised by mankind was completely free of contradiction, so even within my interpretation I can choose to embrace the contradiction in the idea of enlightenment, and I can let go of what I want to lose while holding onto what I value. It may not be everyone’s way, but it is mine, and I am free to choose.

The book, anyway, is worth reading and a potential springboard for wide-ranging discussion. I’d love to be a fly on the wall, listening to what other people would say!

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.