Just finished reading Alain de Botton's charmingly intelligent HOW PROUST CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE. It's a series of essays on what Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME would boil down to if, improbably, the seven hefty volumes were a self-help book. Chapter titles include such topics as "How to Suffer Successfully" and "How to Take Your Time."
At the end there's a good piece of advice about the wrong way to wring wisdom out of a piece of art. I can tell you it's a path I've tried to take. This hopeless approach is to go to the places where the artist worked, where the story ostensibly unfolded. Example: to try to better know Monet's paintings and experience by going to Giverny (a dream of mine.) Or to go to Combray where Proust's boyhood summers are set and expect to see deeper into the books. Instead, says this guide: "It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not to look at his world through our eyes."
Some years ago I made an attempt to visit in a Paris museum the reassembled furniture of Proust's cork-lined bedroom where he wrote. I was about 8 minutes too late. The museum had closed; the guard would not listen to my pleas, though it truly was our last day there. Maybe it was for the best, and now I will have a look at my own bedroom with the kind of rich attention that Proust gave everything. I've certainly had the time to do it, having been sacked out all day. Two days up and one day down seems to be the current state of my convalescence. I am indeed following the Proustian advice of taking my time.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
i'm glad you're doing well, despite the ping pong pattern wellness wears. you picked a really great time to be able to just sit still and enjoy gorgeous days. it is a rich time of year, and a great time to be mending. all Nature supports you!
be well!
I always love to find someone who appreciates Proust. I thought that Botton's book was excellent.
Years ago I was a devoted reader of Joyce. But now, even though I'm still awestruck by Joyce's remarkable use of language, his prose rhythm, story-telling, & structure, he seems lacking in comparison to Proust. Ulysses has come to seem like a well-documented pub crawl.
Recently I posed this question to myself: What did Proust invent? Joyce is widely considered to have invented--or at least popularized--stream of consciouness. But Proust is doing something altogether different. His writing seems like a paradigm shift.
My answer at the moment is that Proust writes at a molecular level. He's intimate with the moment, with the slightest gesture, noise, or sight, and so he's intimate with and can convey the sublime.
To support this view & to conclude this ramble, here's one of my favorite Proust quotations "at the molecular level":
"After breathing a little sigh Mme de Guermantes contented herself with manifesting the nullity of the impression that had been made on her by the sight of the historian and myself by performing certain movements of her nostrils with a precision that testified to the absolute inertia of her unoccupied attention."
Sigh.
Post a Comment