A recent surge in Proust references, responding to the 100th anniversary of the writer’s death on 18th November 2022 has given me a moment to reflect on all the Proust studies I have led – and all the wonderful minds (more than 70!) that have joined along the way. Some have stayed for the whole two-and-a-half-years/seven volumes, some for just parts of that, some returning to revisit, some expanding into other literary realms. All of you have moved the discussion forward, giving me so much richness in my own grappling with our Marcel. Along the way I have peeled back layers in my own mind about the mind and memory, prejudice, the aquarium of social relationships, social power, the space between sleep and waking, the unknowable, multiple self, the unfathomable beloved . . . and I have become more attentive to the wonder of the world (and hawthorns).
I am currently running two Proust cycles. The Proust 5s are in the agonising pages of The Captive, we are at the Verdurins’ and Morel has just finished playing Vinteuil’s unknown Septet . . . Proust 6 have just started The Guermantes Way and we are alive to the sound of the fire, the stimulus of a soldier’s life in Doncieres. I am hoping to host a Salon special with Lucy Raitz whose new translation of Swann in Love as a standalone novella has just been published. She is a friend of Salonista and facilitator Keith Fosbrook and we are lucky to have that connection!
My dear friend Sheila, who curates the wonderful Swimming by the Book posted this loveliness to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the passing of Marcel Proust, while current Proustians (thanks Kaye, Sue, Caroline, et al) alerted me to the following (thanks Kaye, Sue, Caroline…)
Please see below a piece on Proust being best left to ‘snobs’ – you will giggle, i think.
The Guardian had this lovely piece which includes:
Although Marcel – after four years I can call him that – and I are separated by a century and by nationality, class, sexuality and sensibility, and despite regularly finding him exasperatingly obsessive and neurotic, I did come to regard him as a friend, though not one I could open my heart to fully. He watched me too sharply for that. I was in awe of his unending desire and unmatched capacity to recreate each moment, each fluctuation of existence – I just wouldn’t trust him once I’d left the room.
The reading pleasure was not to do with the narrative, which despite being at times, mind-meltingly slow, did eventually form an intricate pattern, nor the fascinating and often hilariously repellant characters, it was the sudden moments of what I can only call “satori”, the Japanese word for a sudden jolt out of the mundane surface into a the bright clarity of awareness of being.
. . . As it is read aloud, every moment hangs in the air, an extraordinary architecture of light, always in flux but always precise . . .
Patti Miller, The Guardian
And for those with access to The Times online, there is this view on the centenary.
I hope that wherever you are, life is full of orangeade and hawthornes, madeleines and humming memories. I leave you with this last reflection from Nabokov on reading and re-reading.
See you in the pages…
Good Readers and Good Writers
Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.
Vladimir Nabokov, 1948
N.B. The complete essay is gorgeous, and it’s hard to just choose one passage or line!
