proust thread

The lie, the perfect lie, about people we know, about the relations we have had with them, about our motive for some action, formulated in totally different terms, the lie as to what we are, whom we love, what we feel with regard to people who love us and believe that they have fashioned us in their own image because they keep on kissing us morning, noon and night — that lie is one of the few things in the world that can open windows for us on to what is new and unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses for the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known.

Have y’all seen the doc about the Buenos Aires reading group, have I mentioned it before?

Haven't seen it yet. I want to find a group like that.

"Ah! The Hague! What a gallery!"

otm

But you don't even know what The Hague is.

Meh

Mlle Vinteuil acted as she did simply out of sadism, which does not excuse her, but comforted me a little when I thought about it afterward. She must have understood, I would say to myself, that all this was just an illness, a form of madness, and not the true delight in wickedness that she wanted it to be. But if she was able, later, to think of this for herself, it must have eased her suffering as it had formerly spoiled her pleasure. "That wasn't me," she must have said, "I was out of my mind. I can still pray for my father, and not despair of his goodness." However, it is possible that this idea, which must have come to her during her pleasure, did not occur to her during her suffering. I wished I could have put it into her mind.

lol "le roman d'albertine" is so diseased (slyly acknowledged by long woody allen style pontification to albertine about dostoevsky). get a grip marcel!! write the book already!!

Bergotte is one of a few characters who have a habit of dying and coming back to life in the unfinished novel... the narrator constantly multiplies the hypothetical explanations and motivations for any given event... the book has all these distorting layers

gasped at this (another de fourcheville dream!):

Two days later I was delighted to think that Bergotte must have greatly admired my article, which he could not have read without jealousy. Yet after a while my joy subsided. In fact Bergotte had not written me a word. I had simply wondered whether he would have liked the article, fearing that he had not. The question that I had asked myself was answered by Mme de Forcheville, who had replied that he admired it greatly, finding it worthy of a great writer. But she told me this while I was asleep: it was a dream. Almost all our dreams answer the questions that we have asked ourselves with complex affirmations and scenarios involving several characters, but they fade with the dawn.

irl lol @ all the tenses here:

I then came back to a Paris very different from the one to which I had already returned on an earlier occasion, as we shall see shortly,

Found this essay to be pretty terrible.

If you had the time and there was nothing stopping you would you read this book?

https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/reading-and-time/

that's paywalled but this line is very funny:

Thanks to a few features of Proust’s distinctive style, reading In Search of Lost Time inevitably takes at least twice or even three times as long as this.

"this" is three days. yes, nine days, that's about how long it takes to read Proust

i think the concept of "time poverty" is useful and important as a materialist element in cultural commentary and orientation: "time famine" less so tbh

however this essay tackles this area quite poorly -- not least by being far far longer than it needs to be for the various ideas it does little more than touch on, it could honestly have been a fifth the length without loss

i didn't know that marx and proust were distant cousins, so that's one small thing i guess (not consequential, but funny)

also it's extremely annoying stylistically

"that's paywalled but this line is very funny"

You can sign up to two free articles a month.

I think this essay (from an earlier issue of the same mag) on as a yet untranslated Dutch novel from the 90s (as big as Proust) tackles some of the issues of life spent in the office. Those modern drudgeries.

Anyone who can read German should do themselves the favor of getting this book. One of the great reading experiences of my life. Get a @readliberties account and you can read my essay on it: https://t.co/kKk2fr1vJw https://t.co/L7qwEYyxu5

— Adrian Nathan West (@a_nathanwest) December 26, 2023

iirc (maybe not so correctly) it compares it with Proust, makes args around how those eight hours in the office sap your strength.

In the end though people read Proust (I read a lot of Proust on the bus commute and lunch break when I was working the most dreary dead end job in my life) so work partitioned my time so I could engage with it. Not saying my experience would be richer if I didn't have to work but people manage. The question is: do you want to read it?

to me the relevant orientation is not so much office time vs empty time vs leisure time but how you parcel up reading time when available reading content is so colossally super-abundant

Read an interview with this philosopher on Hegel. Touched on Kant, Spinoza, various philosophers and systems.

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/hegel-stephen-houlgate/

At the end there is this:

"Not everyone is going to have the time to read Hegel and that’s a shame. It’s a shame, too, that most people won’t have the time or perhaps the energy to study Aristotle, Kant or Heidegger. Philosophers such as Kant and Hegel are hugely rewarding, but not everyone is going to be able to read them. You can’t just pick up Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or Hegel’s Logic in an evening after having spent all day at the office and think you’re going to make much headway with it. It’s hard. But if you have the time and are willing to make the effort, studying these works can be hugely rewarding."

I think certain works of philosophy suffer from the lack of time an office worker has to be able to give it.

But then again I have read very little philosophy and don't really know.

xp - yes that is an issue too. So I don't perhaps pick up philosophy because I can't quite see how that could be more rewarding than a novel. That's me making stuff up to parcel as the lack of time is an issue, but not in the way that essay talks about it

That essay also values finishing far too much. It's ok not to finish things even if you are enjoying it. I've seen three series of The Sopranos years ago abd stopped it. I read about the last scene last year and went on YT. Watched and enjoyed it. That's fine.

We should normalise picking things up and putting them down.

guardedly prepared to tone down my lifelong animus against jameson* if that's what he was getting at here: "the ‘mid-cult pride’, in the words of fredric jameson, felt by those who finish it"

*another author who invariably delivers at greater length than necessary

how you parcel up reading time when available reading content is so colossally super-abundant

I'm really grateful when I find a long work which seems so worth tackling that it kinda resolves this issue for me.

Proust has always done this for me. I think I'm getting a similar feeling from The Tale of Genji. Works that force me to read slowly, where I know I'm not going to be finishing any time soon, and where I just stop thinking about what else I might be reading.

Sunrise is a necessary concomitant of long railway journeys, just as are hard-boiled eggs, illustrated papers, packs of cards, rivers upon which boats strain but make no progress. At a certain moment,— when I was counting over the thoughts that had filled my mind, in the preceding minutes, so as to discover whether I had just been asleep or not (and when the very uncertainty which made me ask myself the question was to furnish me with an affirmative answer), in the pale square of the window, over a small black wood I saw some ragged clouds whose fleecy edges were of a fixed, dead pink, not liable to change, like the colour that dyes the wing which has grown to wear it, or the sketch upon which the artist’s fancy has washed it. But I felt that, unlike them, this colour was due neither to inertia nor to caprice but to necessity and life. Presently there gathered behind it reserves of light. It brightened; the sky turned to a crimson which I strove, gluing my eyes to the window, to see more clearly, for I felt that it was related somehow to the most intimate life of Nature, but, the course of the line altering, the train turned, the morning scene gave place in the frame of the window to a nocturnal village, its roofs still blue with moonlight, its pond encrusted with the opalescent nacre of night, beneath a firmament still powdered with all its stars, and I was lamenting the loss of my strip of pink sky when I caught sight of it afresh, but red this time, in the opposite window which it left at a second bend in the line, so that I spent my time running from one window to the other to reassemble, to collect oh a single canvas the intermittent, antipodean fragments of my fine, scarlet, ever-changing morning, and to obtain a comprehensive view of it and a continuous picture.

Elaine Scarry drills down on this passage here (this title could not be more perfectly pitched for me).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMAYbYWS3jM

I find it tempting to think that the passage is anticipating something about the aesthetics of colour film.