130. Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Previous - 129. Travelers

Link to Table of Contents

Call me Nostradamus...

Yes, I am sore today. Putting on and taking off my jacket now comes with sound effects. 

I compounded Having finally made it to the gym; Being sore the day after the gym; and Discovering that the local (Chinatown) branch library isn't open until 1pm on Fridays (noticed when I tried to open the door at Noon) to excuse my ignoring both my budget and diet for lunch. Since I needed to hang around for about an hour, I went to my usual North Beach haunt (Caffe Puccini) for something different (their eggplant sandwich) and a glass of red. Now I'm worried about the place as it was empty at the lunch hour.

Proust Was a Neuoscientist

By Jonah Lehrer - Houton Mifflin Company 2007

My reason for going to the library was to pick up a copy of our next book club book. I would have been happy if the book had only been about Proust, but in fact Proust is just one of the artists sampled for their contributions to neuroscience.

From the Prelude
The author writes about his days as a lab technician,

pix It was simple manual labor, but the work felt profound. Mysteries were distilled into minor questions, and if my experiments didn't fail, I ended up with an answer. The truth seemed to slowly accumulate, like dust.

At the same time, I began reading Proust. I would often bring my copy of Swann's Way into the lab and read a few pages while waiting for an experiment to finish. All I expected from Proust was a little entertainment, or perhaps an education in the art of constructing sentences. For me, his story about one man's memory was simply that: a story. It was a work of fiction, the opposite of scientific fact.

But... I began to see a surprising convergence. The novelist had predicted my experiments. Proust and neuroscience shared a vision of how our memory works. If you listened closely, they were actually saying the same thing.
...

pxi We now know that Proust was right about memory, Cezanne was uncannily accurate about the visual cortex, Stein anticipated Chomsky, and Woolf pierced the mystery of consciousness; modern neuroscience has confirmed these artistic intuitions...

pxii The moral of this book is that we are made of art and science. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff.... 


Walt Whitman
I learned two interesting things reading this first section: The phrase "Leaves of Grass" is a printing term where "leaves" are pages and "grass" is "compositions of little value." The other interesting thing is that Whitman continued to revise both his poems and his book (adding more to it) from 1855 until just before his death in 1891. When his body was examined after his death it was discovered that nearly every organ in his body was ravaged my tuberculosis.

So what I now want to know is how does what he wants to say in 1891 differ from what he wanted to say in 1855, and how much of the change is a result of age and illness? Has anyone published an edition that includes both versions so you can see the young and old poet juxtaposed?

This would be interesting for any writer, but the reason he is included in this book is because he is "a self-described poet of the body..." who argued that "... the soul is made of flesh." To the extent that this is true, the soul -- and thus the poetry -- of a young and healthy man must vary a great deal from the soul of an old and very ill man. How could it be otherwise? 

Vertigo

Have I mentioned how interminable Sebald's paragraphs are? They sometimes go on for pages. And they may cover a number of subjects and include what could be many transitions. You come to a point that should be a good place to stop and resume later, but there is no paragraph break to make it easy to relocate your place. It occurs to me now that I just need a post-it to use to mark where I'm stopping. 

We just came to the point where he finally makes his way to Verona and checks into a hotel under the name of someone from the 19th century, Jakob Philipp Fullmerayer. Fullmerayer was from a town on the other side of the Alps (and Austria) from Sebald's hometown in Bavaria. They certainly have something in common, though I'm not sure what Sebald is getting out here. (As usual.) Fullmerayer is an interesting character but Sebald merely adopts his name for a moment. He doesn't say any more about him.

Candide

P109 ...He [Voltaire] has been inspecting his new estate at Ferney and finding that there is more involved than the cultivation of plants. He has acquired peasants who depend on him. What is the state of the community? Half the land lies fallow, the curé has celebrated no marriages in seven years, the countryside is depopulated as people rush to nearby Geneva. Taxation (especially the salt-tax) destroys those who remain; either the peasants pay and are reduced to abject poverty, of they evade payment and are clapped in jail. ‘It is heartbreaking to witness so many misfortunes. I am buying the Ferney property simply in order to do a little good there. . . . The prince who will be my liege lord should rather help me to drag his subjects out of the abyss of poverty, than profit from his ancient feudal rights....

P110 This is a new voice in Voltaire’s letters. We have seen how many times he had sought to intervene on the social or political scene and been frustrated. Here at last the right opportunity in time and place comes to hand. By acquiring seigneurial rights he is freer, he says, than when he possessed only his home in Lausanne and his ‘country cottage {guinguette}’ in Geneva, where the people were ‘a little arrogant’ and the priest ‘a little dangerous’... Already before he is even installed at Ferney he has taken up the cudgels against the curé of Moens, who is the malefactor extorting money from Voltaire’s peasants and forcing them to sell their own lands...

P111 At the end of 1758, Voltaire tells d’Argental with pride that he has created for himself ‘a rather nice kingdom’ (D7988). At last he has his new principality: he is now both roi and philosophe. His installation at Tournay on Christmas Eve 1758 was of fitting dignity and pomp,with sound of cannon, fife and drum, all the peasants bearing arms and girls presenting flowers to his two diamond-bedecked nieces. ‘M. de Voltaire’, writes a spectator, ‘was very pleased and full of joy . . . He was, believe me, very flattered’... As Candide begins to enjoy, a few weeks later, the success which has never deserted it, so too does Voltaire enter at last into his kingdom. In his sixty-fifth year, François-Marie Arouet has finally realized himself as M. de Voltaire. [Footnote: François-Marie Arouet is the name of an insignificant Paris bourgeois; M. de Voltaire (wherever his name comes from) is a gentleman, a seigneur, a person of European repute.]

So when Candide speaks of cultivating his garden he really does have in mind a good Tory existence. And I suppose Ford Madox Ford’s having Christopher turn his back on Groby is to make his point that, in the bourgeois age of the Great War, there is no longer a place for the seigneur. In the 20th century one can only cultivate a very small, private garden and even then it must be supported by trade (the antique business).


But now I must turn to the other book that shares the name of its protagonist: Faust. You can see Goethe ending his book with Faust also cultivating his garden -- ripped from the sea and funded by piracy. What I haven’t repeated above are the passages about how Voltaire disliked the British Navy because they were interfering with his trade -- capturing and selling either ships he had an interest in or ships carrying cargo he had an interest in. I also skipped the passage about his attack on the slave trade (and the sugar trade) which was inserted in Candide at the last moment. Ferney wasn’t ripped from the sea, but I suspect Voltaire’s wealth (all wealth) came with some unsavory write-offs. Mephisto’s Violent Men always have a hand in these transactions. Still, to give Faust his due, his intention was similar to Voltaire’s. But just as Voltaire was participating in the economic system that would soon lead to the French Revolution, Faust’s efforts caused as much harm as they offered future promise. Faust really is Goethe’s Candide in some ways.

Next - 131. Walt Whitman