367. Within a Budding Grove - Madame Swann at Home - Part 2

 

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Within a Budding Grove

Madame Swann At Home

P404 “...Sometimes, before going to dress, Mme. Swann would sit down at the piano... It was on one of those days that she happened to play me the part of Vinteuil’s sonata that contained the little phrase of which Swann had been so fond. But often one listens and hears nothing, if it is a piece of music at all complicated to which one is listening for the first time... Probably what is wanting, the first time, is not comprehension but memory... When the least obvious beauties of Venteuil’s sonata were revealed to me, already, borne by the force of habit beyond the reach of my sensibility, those that I had from the first distinguished and preferred in it were beginning to escape, to avoid me. Since I was able only in successive moments to enjoy all the pleasures that this sonata gave me, I never possessed it in its entirely; it was like life itself. But, less disappointing than life is, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best. In Vinteuil’s sonata the beauties that one discovers at once are those also of which one most soon grows tired, and for the same reason, no doubt, namely that they are less different from what one already knows. But when those first apparitions have withdrawn, there is left for our enjoyment some passage which its composition, too new and strange to offer anything but confusion to our minds, had made indistinguishable and so preserved intact; and this, which we have been meeting every day and have not guessed it, which has thus been kept in reserve for us, which by sheer force of its beauty has become invisible an remained unknown, this comes to us last of all. But this also must be the last that we shall relinquish. And we shall love it longer than the rest because we have taken longer to get to love it... The reason for which a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him...”

P406 “If I did not understand the sonata, it enchanted me to hear Mme Swann play. Her touch appeared to me (like her wrappers, like the scent of her staircase, her cloaks, her chrysanthemums) to form part of an individual and mysterious whole, in a world infinitely superior to that in which the mind is capable of analyzing talent.”

I include this to continue what he’s written about the “phrase” and also about the progression of art. But it seems to me that he is also talking about love. Romantic love but also the artful love of a courtesan. With that in mind it is probably a good thing that this passage, which starts with Odette “playing” for a smitten young Marcel, ends with M. Swann talking about the sonata and of those years of his life so that it is clear that Marcel is not alone with Odette.

Day 109 of pandemic. Also the 43rd anniversary of my arrival in San Francisco from Central Arizona. Still my only interstate move as an adult (my parents had moved three times by my age, not counting the war years.)

Restoration work has finally begun in my building so I was trapped on site waiting for contractors all day yesterday. Today all the scheduled work was completed so I was finally able to make my second, post lockdown, visit to Trader Joe’s supermarket. Once again everything has changed. I went once just before the official lockdown started and the shelves were virtually empty. Then a couple months ago, I stood in the over-a-block-long line to rush in and get a few essentials (microwave brown rice is as close as I’ve come to crack or meth. I don’t exactly approve of it but I can’t stop using). Today the line was half as long but now all the aisles are one way. That doesn’t sound too bad but it means there is one path you can, or are supposed to, take through the store. You can’t dart to the frozen section to check on the supply of organic brown rice before you start the rest of your shopping. Or see how much room is left in your basket after you get a six-pack of toilet paper. Yes, I did both of those things and then had to cut through the barriers to start again at the produce section.

Now I know that it is no longer enough, in this new normal, to have a detailed grocery list, you must also know where the items are so you don’t skip something and have to start all over again. And to tell you the truth, I don’t see the point of this but I’m not going to be more difficult than is necessary. I got everything I needed and I was able to pack it in my bags. But I will continue to shop at my local markets for everything they have. 

This is certainly not a way of life I foresaw 43 years ago when I arrived on a Greyhound bus. Though really I can’t complain. I’m in a better apartment. I have more money. I’m more physically fit. And there’s a decent chance that, a year from now, I will have access to the city again... or at least to what businesses still exist.

Day 115 of the zombie apocalypse... I’m tired of hearing about the pandemic. If someone would have predicted that I would go 115 days without eating anywhere but in my apartment I would have laughed. But here we are. Tonight I had my favorite veggie chow fun from the local Chinese place and a glass or two of cheap Chardonnay, but I enjoyed it at the little counter in my kitchen that is also my desk.

The Eagles

Last night, just as I was about to go to bed, YouTube suggested a recent live performance of an Eagles song. “One Of These Nights,” to be specific. And this is where the addictive quality of YouTube kicks in because how can you listen to just one Eagles song? And after you’ve listened to several performances in recent decades you can’t help wondering, “But what about back in the ‘70s?” So I watched a couple of those videos too.

Even though the Eagles followed some of my favorite musicians out of Laurel Canyon -- C,S,N & Y, Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa -- they came a little later and were never “my” band. I can’t tell you why.

Listening to them last night I noticed how they were really the descendants of the musical tradition that came out of Buffalo Springfield in the shape of Poco. There has always been a Country & Western aspect to Buffalo Springfield -- signified by Steven Still’s hats, if nothing else. Poco ran with it but were only a moderate success. The Eagles did much better. 

It’s worth noting that Gram Parsons, and then Emmylou Harris, were also working this C&W crossover terrain. Emmylou Harris’s band, after Parsons’ death, was actually more Country and she stayed on that, and finally the Bluegrass, side of music.

The Eagles went mainstream but their songs, mostly story songs, are very Country. It’s hard to be less of a one-hit-wonder band than the Eagles, and yet I think some of my problem with them is because of “Hotel California.” It’s a great song, but not really a typical Eagles song, and yet it’s great success may have distorted the image of the band. Just speculation here. But it doesn’t give me a peaceful easy feeling.

Hitchhiking in Colorado in the ‘70s I got a long ride with a guy who played nothing but the Doors. I carpooled to Yosemite at the end of the ‘80s with a guy who played nothing but the Eagles. This may have been what Hesiod had in mind when he said, “moderation is best in all things.” Though I guess he could also have just said, take it easy.

One of my favorite people died yesterday. She was 85 and it wasn’t COVID-19, but it still deserves a mention. She could be annoying. She imposed our alley garden on the neighboring properties. I will end with my favorite Janet story, but she was the spirit and story teller of our little building. When she was forced to leave, three years ago, the building suffered.

She died early in the afternoon of Bastille Day, though, because of the zombie apocalypse I hadn’t realized that it was Bastille Day -- normally I would be greening the local Bastille Day event. I only talked to her twice, on the phone, after she received her fatal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. We didn’t have the opportunity to talk things out over the building’s house (cheap) wine and local (not very good) pizza the way we would have if she had still been in residence. Their “real” home was way out in the country and with the zombie apocalypse and all, getting out there was next to impossible. 

I would have liked to have visited one last time, with our common friend who is currently holed up in Sweden. It wouldn’t have made any difference, but it would have been worth the trouble. She was fortunate enough to have home hospice care at the end and her hospice care providers were two of her granddaughters. Life doesn’t get much better than that. As is often the case, death most disadvantages the survivor. This couple has been together since high school and now he is alone. 

Now for that story: When she was in residence she would water the garden in our alley. I try to waste as little water as possible when I water but after Janet watered it always looked like a main had burst. One day she got a little carried away and, since she had a good hose in her hand, started washing down the windows of the building next door to us. She went from window to window until there was a scream from inside the unit... the window had been open and she blasted the inside of the apartment with a strong spray of water.

I’ve been busy with HOA work again, but am caught up again. It is now 140 days into the zombie apocalypse. Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, my favorite event of the year has been officially cancelled for 2020. We’re now past the time for the big Art & Soul Festival in Oakland -- one of my favorite East Bay events. Also for the Berkeley Kite Festival that usually happens the same weekend.

Last week I walked a record eight blocks from my apartment to buy a new laptop. My old one was so slow it was only semi-functional. I’m still fully in social distancing mode.

Recently there was a train derailment and fire followed by a partial collapse of the railroad bridge over Tempe Town Lake, the old Salt River bed. On YouTube tonight I saw a video of the explosion of part of the bridge as they continue clearing away the debris so that they can rebuild the bridge and restore service. This drove me to Google Map and a survey of my old neighborhood. Almost nothing remains of what I knew back in the mid-’70s. 

At that time I lived in the Casa Loma apartment building with a shared shower and only a half bath in my unit. The kitchen and dining room was in what had been the sleeping balcony, since enclosed. It was a delight in Spring when the citrus trees were in bloom and much less of a delight in summer when the little AC unit mounted on the wall struggled to control the temperature as I tried to sleep days while driving a taxi at night.

Most of downtown Tempe was very old. Mill Ave was lined by decent sized masonry buildings while, closer to the tracks, there were old detached houses. The old highway bridge still existed back then and you could walk out on it but not cross to the other side -- or at least not safely. The old highway landed on a raised strip of land that also formed the left side of the local baseball field. I seem to recall some small stands and lights at night. The tar divided, concrete squares of the old paving continued through the residential neighborhood. I’m not entirely sure of it’s complete path, but I found another abandoned bit of it over near the Orange Julius stand on Rural. It was a hobby of mine to trace the old highways through Phoenix and Tempe, almost nothing remains of them now though I did find the strip along the baseball field though I think the paving is gone.

Back then the Sunset Limited train still passed that way and I liked to watch it pass almost as much as I liked riding on it. There was a small rail yard closer to the Casa Loma that smelled perpetually of citrus -- not the blooms of spring but the smell of juice from cars loaded with citrus that must have set in the sun there waiting to move on down the line. It was a sweet, not entirely unpleasant scent.

The Casa Loma, too, remains, though it looks completely different. Aside from the remains of the old Mill on the other side of Mill Ave, I’m not sure there’s a single additional brick or patch of pavement from when I lived there. I think more people now live there, which is good, but their experience is generic suburban. It has lost the character it had.

Our dating system is confusing. We are, technically, still in the 2nd decade of the 21st century but we are also out of the teens and into the twenties. Did anyone consider having a year zero? Wouldn’t that have been better? And it’s not like anyone would have had to deal with a year zero, it would only have been called that after the fact.

Time has been steadily passing. It is now day 155 of the zombie apocalypse and I am returning to blogging. I've been watching some health related videos on YouTube talking about plant based diets and the shortcomings of even a veggie diet. This has forced me to reevaluate my shelter in place diet.

I'm eating less sugar, which is good. And drinking less iced tea which I don't know how to judge. I'm eating more frozen and restaurant cooked food and a lot more bread, so more sodium. I'm eating fewer salads and more cheese and eggs. My diet is still much better than the average American, but that's a really low bar. It may be time to finally return to Whole Foods and stock up on some of my usual healthy staples.

I've decided to put off my optional dentist appointment but to see my eye doctor and probably my chiropractor for my usual six month adjustment. That will be strange as it will be like returning to normal times but, as a friend put it, while dressed up like a bandit.

It is now day 190 of the plague and, as you might guess, I’m having a hard time returning to this. I really wanted to wrap up my HOA project but that seems to be beyond my control. Since I last wrote we have undergone a new plague of wildfires and the resulting smoke. This should have given me more time to write, since I couldn’t leave my apartment for almost a week, but that’s not the way it worked.

Now, however, we are at what should be the peak of my greening season and I have to at least say something about that.

I continue to exercise, though the poor air quality has frequently curtailed my outside hikes/climbs. The social/political situation here in the USA continues to get more and more interesting -- from the perspective of a student of history. I continue to eat pretty well. In fact my diet has gotten much better with an emphasis on legumes and flaxseed and also a reduction in dairy.  

So let’s get to what is on my mind these fraught days: Greening and The Magic Mountain. Sorry.

The weekend coming up would have been the Northern California Dragon Boat Races at Lake Merritt in Oakland. Not only is this one of my favorite events (though diminished from what it was out on Treasure Island) but it is also the warm up (for me) to my favorite event, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival which is on the first weekend of October. HSB is being held this year, but it is an online event. Not at all the same thing.

I congratulate myself on being in decent shape so I probably could work the events if they happened. But, in fact, that is stretching the truth. I am in decent shape given the circumstances but working hard for eight plus hours on warm to hot days is my yearly fitness test that I only can pass after building up to it slowly over the greening season. I wouldn’t bet on my being able to stay on my feet for my normal twenty-four hours of HSB madness.

On the otherhand, I’m in a good position to get in shape for 2021, should the plague come to an end. 

The other day I found myself wondering what the current political/social craziness reminded me of, and it finally came to me. To summarize, on the right there are white supremacists who seem determined to provoke the insurrection they’ve longed for. On the left the anarchists think that we need to burn everything down so we can... I don’t know, start over again in a state of nature? At any rate, they hate each other but both are equally determined to destroy the status quo.

What all this reminds me of is “The Great Petulance” toward the end of The Magic Mountain. I understand Mann to be arguing that everyone in his microcosm for Europe was fed up and longed for some violent solution to all the disagreements. I think America is in the same state. We haven’t done anything as cathartic as the Civil War in almost 150 years and we are bored. Also, we don’t remember history well enough to understand how nasty something like that can get. Or maybe we just don’t care. We want to sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.

These are the times that remind me why I became a Burkian conservative in the first place. What saddens me is that it will probably take twenty years to get the good books on this history and that’s getting close to my Sell By date. I don’t fancy holding on that long just for this. (And two centuries might be more realistic.)

352. Reading Proust during a Pandemic

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Reading Proust during a Pandemic

Pvii “As early as 1890 (when he [Marcel Proust] was nineteen years old) he had also begun to take notes for an elaborate work which he was already projecting but none of his friends appears to have taken his literary pretension as anything more than the self-deception of a dilettante. He was universally liked because of a charm to which everyone who knew him has testified and because of a determination, carried to fantastic lengths, to do the considerate as well as the socially correct thing. He had not, however, written anything which displayed conspicuous talent and it was not thought likely that he would. Then, in 1905, his mother died and he began cutting himself more and more completely from the world which was to bring him at last to a strange self-imprisonment in the bedroom from which, after the most elaborate preparations, he only occasionally sallied forth in order to seek some bit of information from the head waiter at the Ritz or, as one lady remembers, to ask to see a hat worn some twenty years before.

“From childhood Proust had regarded himself as primarily a spectator. There were many things which he could know only by watching, and this fact doubtless encouraged him to make watching an end in itself. Nevertheless, contemplation became something much more than merely a substitute for the activities he could not indulge. His theory was that the quality of a direct experience always eluded one and that only in recollection could we grasp its real flavor. Now that the death of his mother had severed the only tie which bound him to the life of the world, he retired in order that he might discover and record what his experience had been...”

This is from the Introduction, written by Joseph Wood Krutch to the C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation of Remembrance of Things Past, or In Search of Lost Time, as it is more commonly called today. 

I don’t know that I’ve ever read this introduction. Usually I don’t read things like this until after I’ve read the book, and in this case by that time I’m a year on and putting down a different volume. So it’s quite possible I never have returned to it. But I think Mr Krutch did a commendable job here. This initial point is one of my favorite things about Proust. And maybe this time through I will remember to note the point in the work, around the time he first meets Saint-Loop I think, when Marcel reflects on how, while we long to share important moments with others, this would actually only detract -- distract us -- from appreciating the moment ourselves. It’s one of my favorite passages and I can never find it when I look.

I’m rereading this at an interesting time, and the paragraphs above remind me that it is in some ways a very appropriate time. Today is the first day of the fourth week we are Sheltering-in-Place due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike Proust, I have not chosen to isolate myself in my little studio, but the result is similar though far from the same. I go out walking every day. I occasionally put on my face mask and walk to one of the nearby markets for supplies or to restaurants for take-away food. I can’t wait to spend time in cafes and restaurants again. But for the moment I am forced into social distancing and this could be a perfect time to read Proust.

Pviii “...The first rule for reading him is... complete submission to an author who will certainly take you where you ought to go and who will give you, not only vivid descriptions, subtle analyses, precise portraits and full participation in a strange new sensibility, but also compose all these things into a vast symphonic structure which is probably the most amazing thing of its kind in literature...”

Yes, the connection with music is something that must be mentioned. There follows a sort of preview of what the work is about, precisely the thing I don’t want to read before, and don’t much care to read after, but this next part is interesting,

Px “...No one could possibly be more detached than he and no one could have less faith in anything. Indeed the story of the novel might with some justice be said to be the story of his disillusion with the only thing in which he made even an effort to believe -- namely, that tradition of noblesse oblige which the members of the aristocracy ought to follow but which, so obviously, they do not...” 

So this does go well with Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End. Last reading I went back and forth between these two authors and I think I probably will again.

“...Proust’s greatest invention was the invention of a form, of a method by means of which events could be arranged in a pattern having a formal beauty and a formal meaning capable of replacing the beauty and the meaning lost to those who, like himself, had no moral or religious faith capable of giving them any other kind.”

That reminds me of Adrian in Doctor Faustus.

“Externally the method is one in which the normal chronological order of narrative is often subordinated to a quasi-musical arrangement of material by means of which similar or antithetical persons, situations and moods are rhythmically balanced against one another so as to create a pattern which does not depend upon the order of time but the sense of recurrence. At the same time every presentation of material is dominated by the author’s obsession with Time and the need of the artist to escape it’s tyranny. The past must be recovered; but that is not all. It must be made permanent, and it can become that only when grasped by the imagination in such a way that every moment implies the past and the future because its true significance lies in its being part of a pattern extending from the past into the future. Living experience cannot be fully significant because it is isolated and transitory; it becomes significant only when it is contemplated in connection with those parts of the pattern which Time separates but which really belong together...”

“Proust himself spoke of the various themes whose full significance would not be clear until, in the later volumes, they had begun to combine. This remark of his suggests the analogy with music...”

Thanks to having read Doctor Faustus since I last read Proust, I see a bit of a problem with this, as Adrian points out, the secret of most music is to begin by imperfectly suggesting the theme, but holding off until near the end, the full development of that theme. Marcel’s desperate need for his mother may be the first hint of that theme here, but it is quickly followed by ‘Swann In Love’ which is the full development, later echoed -- but less interestingly in my opinion -- by Marcel’s passions for Gilbert and the others. But this is a quibble. Our Mr Krutch really hits the nail on the head on the next page,

Pxi“...the escape from Time is alluded to on page four where it is immediately followed by the incident of the magic lantern, which, as the first work of art introduced, serves to suggest the technique by which Time is to be transcended. One result of this arrangement is to make the novel in another respect like a piece of music, for of it may be said, more truly even than of most great novels, that the second reading is more rewarding than the first. To know what is coming does not detract from the pleasure -- is indeed necessary to the full enjoyment of it -- since each incident is, like a musical theme, only enriched by a knowledge of the variations to follow.”

And this is why it is so hard to get people to read Proust. I always tell people if you plan on reading it, plan on reading it twice because it is at its best when revisited. And how appropriate to Proust’s purpose is that.

“In the pages of the novel the commonplace fact that faces grow old and characters change becomes... something to be analysed with a fascinated terror. But this change in faces is only trivially important in comparison with that change which takes place in character. Hence it came at last to seem to him that it was folly to speak of Albertine, or Charlus, of himself even, as though any one of them were an entity maintaining its identity while time flowed past; and he realized that if his novel was to attain the full significance which he wished, it must manage somehow, not only to attain timelessness itself, but also to suggest the triumph of Time over the persons and the experiences which the novel alone could rescue.”

Now this I’m not sure I agree with. Do any characters really change over the course of the books? Their status in society changes. I think of them as staying largely the same as their positions change. Marcel’s artistic tastes do change in the course of his education, but he seems to be the same in his relationship with Albertine as he was with Odette or Gilberte or his mother.

Pxiii “Events become, even as he recounts them, already a part of legend and thus life is magically transmuted into art. He himself, as well as M. Swann and M. de Charlus, are no longer mere human beings but analogous to the figures painted upon the slides of the little magic lantern which had fascinated him so long ago... The suffering and the wickedness of his own characters have now ceased to have any significance except as parts of a formal design...”

Mr. Krutch contrasts Proust with Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser -- reminding us that the copyright for this edition is 1934.

“...it must be admitted that... the spiritual world of Proust has elements of charm lacking in most contemporary novels because of the fact that the sensibility everywhere exhibited is of an extraordinary sort. He was disillusioned enough with many things -- with morals, for example -- and he had neither any code nor any standards besides those which his taste supplied. [Is this a reference to homosexuality?] Yet in the midst of what might seem to be anarchy there were still capabilities and faiths which he retained... On the other hand, he never, like so many moderns, found himself in a universe limited and debased by the impossibility of escape from psychology, anthropology and Freudianism. The world was still absorbingly, still amazingly, interesting. Women -- most women -- were to him magical and mysterious...”

Pxiv “Most of the novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries felt constrained to take life seriously in a sense that Proust does not, since, and with a clear conscience, he permits himself to live the charmed life of a dilettante, not troubling himself much about the fate of civilization, acting as though there were nothing more important than the careful discrimination between shades of feeling, and devoting himself with the selfishness of the contemplative saint to the achievement of his own private salvation...”

And yet this reminds me of Montaigne and also, dare I say it, of Hans Castorp. This is precisely what Settembrini was always finding fault with. Also, isn’t 1934 rather early to be characterizing the novelists of the century?

“...Charlus, Saint-Loop, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Francoise and Madame Verdurin have definitely taken their places in the not very long list of characters who are more real than reality. Something -- both in the particular sense defined by Proust and in the more general sense in which the phrase is applicable to all great literature -- has been rescued from Time. It is not often that that can be said”

Curious that he leaves Swann off that list. I would add several other family members plus the wonderful M. Legrandin. I don’t imagine Proust and Jane Austen are often compared, but Legrandin ranks right up there with her finest minor characters. Forever captured in a single scene. 


I do believe I am ready to start reading.

251. Less by Andrew Sean Greer

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Less by Andrew Sean Greer

Little, Brown, and Company 2017

I'm reading this for book club. I don't expect to have much to say about it here, but I'm finding it a novelty (ha) to be reading a novel for a change. And not a novel of ideas like The Brothers K or The Magic Mountain. So far this book is like a mash up of Cherie and early David Lodge (Small World, for example). 

And so far -- just finished the first chapter -- the most interesting thing is a sudden change in the POV for a page towards the end of the chapter. I think I know who's POV that was -- Cherie -- but I'm not absolutely positive. 

Our protagonist is a writer, and there's that stuff about the life of a writer, but not really that much about writing. Not the way Martha Grimes's novels are so much about writing. More about aging (fun!). Only marginally more interesting a topic than Hamsun's "hunger." 

I do get an almost giddy feeling racing through the pages without feeling the need to copy out anything. 


Much later
This is really much better than I was expecting. on p95 we learn the term for what I've long speculated about. Less, the character, is trying to account for the disproportionate reputation and popularity of his novel in Italy,

Less begins to imagine... that he has been mistranslated, or -- what is the word? -- supertranslated, his novel given to an unacknowledged genius of a poet... who worked his mediocre English into breathtaking Italian...

And there is humor! After Italy he travels to Germany. He is under the impression that he speaks German quite well,

p101 ...How heartening it is to watch him speak; how disconcerting, however, to listen.

...What Less did not know was that the charming Fraulein [his German teacher] had never been to Germany, nor spoken German outside of Yorkville. She was ostensibly German speaking, just as seventeen-year-old Less was ostensibly gay. Both had the fantasy; neither had carried it out.

The grad student, Hans, assigned by the university to guide Less about, is preparing for a doctoral exam on Derrida. They meet some of Hans's friends when they go out to eat,

p105 ...it is a relief to have someone other than a Derridean to talk with...

And sometimes it's just wonderful,

p113 He [Less] kisses -- how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you...

And in his surprisingly (to him) popular class he teaches, in his bold but puzzling German, among other writers, both Proust and Ford Madox Ford! 

Trying desperately to dodge his 50th birthday, Less goes shopping in Paris. This results in,

p137 From Enrico [who's shop he is in]: "I have... no words..."
...

...He looks like a Fire Island supervillain rapper...


p191 Is there a term for a midlife crisis Bildungsroman? Surely the Germans have mashed together these words in just this way. 

The wonderful thing about this wandering novel structure Greer has chosen, is that he can constantly throw in new characters. The latest, the reason he is in Morocco, is a colorful woman a day older than Less, so that they are celebrating their 50th together. Her lover has just left her after "being struck by lightning" and she is still in shock. Her speculation about love is quite interesting, she doesn't believe -- hasn't experienced -- that kind of love, but is ready to believe it is something real.

One of the (many) reasons I'm single is that I've known that, if I were in her romantic position, I would think my lover really must follow her heart. That is a romantic position for anyone but the lover. Seems rather bad form for the lover. Who wants a philosophical lover?


Much much later
The difference (for me) between good non-fiction and a good novel is that with the former, when it gets better I take even more notes, but with the latter I write less -- mostly.

p237 Arthur Less's life with Robert [the famous poet he was with for a long time when they were both much younger] ended around the time he finished reading Proust. It was one of the grandest and most dismaying experiences in Less's life -- Marcel Proust, that is -- and the three thousand pages of In Search of Lost Time took him five committed summers to finish. [*Sigh* Reading time-wise that's about right, but how do you wait so long? I can't imagine taking much over a year to finish Proust.] And on that fifth summer, when he was lying abed in a friend's Cape Cod house one afternoon, about two-thirds of the way through the last volume, suddenly, without any warning at all, he read the words The End. In his right hand he held perhaps two hundred pages more -- but they were not Proust; they were the cruel trick of some editor's notes and afterword. He felt cheated, swindled, denied a pleasure for which he had spent five years preparing. He went back twenty pages; he tried to build up the feeling again. But it was too late; that possible joy had departed forever.

p238 This was how he felt when Robert left him.

His point here is that Less, the character, had imagined a lengthy process of couple's counseling leading inevitably to an eventual parting of the ways. But Robert had already seen where their tale was tending and put a period to it. 

Why anyone would miss that breaking up process is a mystery to me (Mr. Single, never been married.) 

But let's return to Proust for a moment. When I first read this I thought he meant the book ended in fact before the end -- perhaps I thought this because I don't care for the way Proust dragged it on into and past the Great War when I feel the Dreyfus Affair is the natural heart of the work. But what he means -- of course -- is that you can be fooled by the physical size of a book when there's a great deal of supplemental material at the end. Arthur Less would hate the Norton Critical Editions. 

I'll give Greer credit, I've never heard this one before. It's more common to hear that the dwindling pages are giving away the approach of the novel's ending. 

And with Proust, especially when you've taken five fucking years to read him, the obvious, and natural solution to Arthur Less's disappointment is to instantly start again at the beginning. To dip your eyes into Proust's river of prose, ever changing and now informed by your First reading. 


A little later still, now in Japan
p247 Over the next three hours he [Less] is served grilled and simmered and raw plates of butter bean, mugwort, and sea bream. [For the second time that day and third time in two days.] He greets each dish with a mad smile, recognizing the spiral nature of being. Nietzsche's concept of eternal return. He murmurs quietly: You again.

Bravo. Though there are better ways to play with this concept. Getting your heart broken. Experiencing a hangover or food poisoning.

p248 ...his international driving permit, which looks to him like a flimsy phony, is taken very seriously and photocopied numerous times, as if to be handed out as keepsakes. He is shown to a car as small, bland, and white as a hospital dessert and enters to find the steering wheel missing -- then is shown to the driver's side, all the time merrily thinking: Oh, I guess they drive on the other side over here? Somehow he never thought of it; should they give out international driving permits to people who never think of it?...

...he takes the wheel of what basically feels like an enameled toaster and follows the clear, perfect signs out of Kyoto...

p251 The restaurant [for his third kaiseki meal of the day, he's supposed to be writing about them] sits on a rock above the river and is very old and water stained in ways that would delight a painter and trouble a contractor...

p252 ...The young woman [who guided him to his seat] exits through the little door [you have to crawl through]. He hears her struggling to close it behind her; it has clearly suffered for centuries and is ready to die.

And the ending is not a surprise, but so satisfying.

137. Proust!

Previous - 136. The wine-in-itself

Link to Table of Contents

Memory

Marcel Proust - The Method of Memory

p76 ... Proust knew that every time he lost himself in a recollection he also lost track of time, the tick-tock of the clock drowned out by the echoey murmurs of his mind. It was there, in his own memory, that he would live forever. His past would become a masterpiece.

... Proust used his intuition, his slavish devotion to himself and his art, to refine his faith in memory into an entire treatise. In the stuffy silence of his Parisian studio, he listened so intently to his sentimental brain that he discovered how it operated.
...

... As scientists dissect our remembrances into a list of molecules and brain regions, they fail to realize that they are channeling a reclusive French novelist. Proust may not have lived forever, but his theory of memory endures.

Intuitions
p77 ... He believed that while art and science both dealt in facts... only the artist was able to describe reality as it was actually experienced...

p78 Proust learned to believe in the strange power of art from the philosopher Henri Bergson. [Footnote: Proust... read Bergson's Matter and Memory in 1909, just as he was beginning to compose Swann's Way...] ... The laws of science were fine for inert matter, Bergson said, for discerning the relationships between atoms and cells, but us? We had a consciousness, a memory, a being. According to Bergson, this reality -- the reality of our self-consciousness -- could not be reduced or experimentally dissected. He believed that we could only understand ourselves through intuition, a process that required lots of introspection, lazy days contemplating our inner connections. Basically, it was bourgeois meditation. [Or "taking stock," regieren, from The Magic Mountain. And doesn't this recall Lin Yutang?]

...Proust's thorough absorption of Bergson's philosophy led him to conclude that the nineteenth-century novel, with its privileging of things over thoughts, had everything exactly backwards. "The kind of literature which contents itself with 'describing things,' " Proust wrote, "with giving them merely a miserable abstract of lines an surfaces, is in fact, though it calls itself realist, the furthest removed from reality." As Bergson insisted, reality is best understood subjectively, its truths accessed intuitively.

p79 [Compare this passage with Moncrieff. Dodged a bullet there, Moncrieff's translation is at least as good.] 
...

... He actually intuited a lot about the structure of our brain. In 1911, the year of the madeleine, physiologists had no idea how the senses connected inside the skull. One of Proust's deep insights was that our senses of smell and taste bear a unique burden of memory:

p80 When from a long distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

...smell and taste are the only senses that connect directly to the hippocampus, the center of the brain's long-term memory. Their mark is indelible. All our other senses... are first processed by the thalamus, the source of language and the front door to consciousness. As a result, these senses are much less efficient at summoning up our past. [I wonder about this in the case of music (hearing) but only a little, smell really is more profound. It is interesting that hearing, sight, and touch are mediated by language. I suppose this is why it is so hard to describe smells.] ...

p81 Of course, once Proust began to remember his past, he lost all interest in the taste of the madeleine. Instead, he became obsessed with how he felt about the cookie, with what the cookie meant to him... 

In this Proustian vision, the cookie is worthy of philosophy because in the mind, everything is connected... Only by meticulously retracing the loom of our neural connections -- however nonsensical those connections may be -- can we understand ourselves, for we are the loom...

The Lie of Yesterday
..."It is a labor in vain to attempt to recapture memory: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile . . ." ...

p82 ... he believed that our recollections were phony. Although they felt real, they were actually elaborate fabrications. Take the madeleine. Proust realized that the moment we finish eating the cookie... we begin warping the memory of the cookie to fit our own personal narrative. We bend the facts to suit our story, as "our intelligence reworks the experience." Proust warns us to treat the reality of our memories carefully, and with a degree of skepticism...

The strange twist in the story is that science is discovering the molecular truth behind these Proustian theories. Memory is fallible. Our remembrance of things past is imperfect.

...Our recollections are cynical things, designed by the brain to always feel true, regardless of whether or not they actually occurred. 

[Santiago Ramon y Cajal determines that neurons are islands separated from each other by synaptic clefs. Making memories requires new proteins. "The moment in time is incorporated into the architecture of the brain." Other scientists show that memories can be altered, "...we like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them. But they aren't. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes." "...every time we remember anything, the neuronal structure of the memory is delicately transformed, a process called reconsolidation... The memory is altered in the absence of the original stimulus, becoming less about what you remember and more about you... The moment you remember the cookie's taste is the same moment you forget what it really tasted like."]

p85 Proust presciently anticipated the discovery of memory reconsolidation. For him, memories were like sentences: they were things you never stopped changing. As a result, Proust was not only an avid sentimentalist, he was also an insufferable rewriter... [Not unlike Walt Whitman.] Nothing he wrote was ever permanent...

p87 Clearly, Proust believed in the writing process. He never outlined his stories first. He thought that the novel, like the memories it unfaithfully described, must unfurl naturally... [The first draft may "unfurl naturally" but if you are constantly rewriting and editing aren't you imposing an order after that first draft? The musical structure of the work isn't really consistent with an automatic writing model. Now Martha Grimes novels do unfurl naturally, which I enjoy, but that's probably not the best way to create a symphonic epic like In Search of Lost Time.]

p87 For a novel about memory, the plasticity of the novel's narrative was one of its most realistic elements. Proust was always refining his fictional sentences in light of new knowledge, altering his past words to reflect his present circumstances. On the last night of his life, as he lay prostrate in bed, weakened by his diet of ice cream, beer, and barbituates, he summoned Celeste, his beloved maid, to take a little dictation. He wanted to change a section... that described the slow death of a character, since he now knew a little bit more about what dying was like.

...As long as we have memories to recall, the margins of those memories are being modified to fit what we know now. Synapses are crossed out, dendrites are tweaked, and the memorized moment that feels so honest is thoroughly revised...
...

p88 One of the morals of the Search is that every memory is inseparable from the moment of its recollection. This is why Proust devoted fifty-eight tedious pages to the mental state of the narrator before he ate a single madeleine. He wanted to show how his current condition distorted his sense of the past... Proustian nostalgia... remembers things as being far better than they actually were. But Proust... knew that the Combray he yearned for was not the Combray that was. (As Proust put it,"The only paradise is paradise lost.") ... there is no way to describe the past without lying. Our memories are not like fiction. They are fiction...
...

p89 ... memories do not directly represent reality. Instead, they are imperfect copies of what actually happened, a Xerox of a Xerox of a mimeograph of the original photograph. Proust intuitively knew that our memories required this transformative process. If you prevent the memory from changing, it ceases to exist. Combray is lost. This is Proust's guilty secret: we have to misremember something in order to remember it.

A thought here about the author's comment above that when we remember we lose track of time. I read something recently that claimed humans can't actually multitask. We can really only to one thing at a time, and if we try to do several things at once we are just switching back and forth and each switch requires a degree of re-orientation. The same is true of experiencing time. We can experience our present time or recall our past, but if we recall the past it is overlapping with the present. All your current sensory inputs (including some you may not be consciously aware of) are getting blended in with your memory. You can think of it like a multi-track recording where there's always an open mike in the studio. Playing something back also means recording the ambient sounds of the studio as a new track on the recording. And the memory of the time you were remembering is now a part of that previous memory.

I also need to add a few Wiki quotes about Bergson:

Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, not far from the Palais Garnier (the old Paris opera house) in 1859. His father, the pianist Michał Bergson, was of a Polish Jewish background (originally bearing the name Berekson). His great-grandmother, Temerl Bergson, was a well-known patroness and benefactor of Polish Jewry, especially those associated with the Hasidic movement.^[8][9] His mother, Katherine Levison, daughter of a Yorkshire doctor, was from an English and Irish Jewish background. The Bereksohns were a famous Jewish entrepreneurial family^[10] of Polish descent. Henri Bergson's great-great-grandfather, Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg, called Zbytkower, was a prominent banker and a protégé of Stanisław August Poniatowski,^[11][12] King of Poland from 1764 to 1795.
...

Bergson attended the Lycée Fontanes (known as the Lycée Condorcet 1870–1874 and 1883–present) in Paris from 1868 to 1878. He had previously received a Jewish religious education.^[14] Between 14 and 16, however, he lost his faith. According to Hude (1990), this moral crisis is tied to his discovery of the theory of evolution, according to which humanity shares common ancestry with modern primates, a process sometimes construed as not needing a creative deity.^[15]
...

Bergson traveled to London in 1908 and met there with William James, the  Harvard  philosopher who was Bergson's senior by seventeen years, and who was instrumental in calling the attention of the Anglo-American public to the work of the French professor. The two became great friends. James's impression of Bergson is given in his Letters under date of 4 October 1908:

"So modest and unpretending a man but such a genius intellectually! I have the strongest suspicions that the tendency which he has brought to a focus, will end by prevailing, and that the present epoch will be a sort of turning point in the history of philosophy."

...

The Roman Catholic Church however took the step of banning Bergson's three books, accused of pantheism (that is, of conceiving of God as immanent to his Creation and of being himself created in the process of the Creation)^[16] by placing them upon the Index of prohibited books (Decree of 1 June 1914).
...

The Creative Evolution in particular attempted to think through the continuous creation of life, and explicitly pitted itself against Herbert Spencer's evolutionary philosophy. Spencer had attempted to transpose Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in philosophy and to construct a cosmology based on this theory (Spencer also coined the expression "survival of the fittest"). Bergson disputed what he saw as Spencer's mechanistic philosophy.^[35]
...

The foundation of Henri Bergson’s philosophy, his theory of Duration, he discovered when trying to improve the inadequacies of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy.^[36] Bergson introduced Duration as a theory of time and  consciousness in his doctoral thesis Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness as a response to another of his influences: Immanuel Kant.^[37]

Kant believed that free will (better perceived as The Will) could only exist outside of time and space, indeed the only non-determined aspect of our private existence in the universe, separate to water cycles, mathematics and mortality. However, we could therefore not know whether or not it exists, and that it is nothing but a pragmatic faith.^[37] Bergson responded that Kant, along with many other philosophers, had confused time with its spatial representation.^[38] In reality, Bergson argued, Duration is unextended yet heterogeneous, and so its parts cannot be juxtaposed as a succession of distinct parts, with one causing the other. Based on this he concluded that determinism is an impossibility and free will pure mobility, which is what Bergson identified as being the Duration.^[39]

Random much?

Was in the middle of my gym routine when it occurred to me that I wasn't sure if I had left the lock securing the painter's stuff in our new little "room" locked or unlocked. I intended to leave it unlocked but in place, but had I? After going back and forth a few times and thinking what a disaster it would be if the painter couldn't get to work on what is supposed to be his last day on site, I decided to go check. This involves walking a total of 12 blocks and climbing the equivalent of a 15 story building... so not a trivial decision.

When I arrived in the laundry room I found the painter stumped by the unlocked lock. I removed it. We talked a little about what was left to do. And I returned to the gym. If I had been sure the lock was unlocked, I wouldn't have returned. Would he have eventually realized he could just turn the lock and remove it, or did I really need to be there? Who knows.

Next - 138. Good prions