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 18th and the 19th 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 18th 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.
