The opening passages of Marcel Proust's On Reading contain the most beautiful account of childhood reading that I've ever read. Originally serving as a preface to Proust's translation of Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, the essay begins this way:
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book. [translations throughout by Jean Autret and William Burford, found in On Reading (New York, 1971)]
His opening is deceptive in its simplicity, for Proust quickly complicates his first thought with his second sentence:
Everything that filled them for others, so it seemed, and that we dismissed as a vulgar obstacle to a divine pleasure: the game for which a friend would come to fetch us at the most interesting passage; the troublesome bee or sun ray that forced us to lift our eyes from the page or to change position; the provisions for the afternoon snack that we had been made to take along and that we left beside us on the bench without touching, while above our head the sun was diminishing in force in the blue sky; the dinner we had to return for, and during which we thought only of going up immediately afterward to finish the uninterrupted chapter, all those things with which reading should have kept us from feeling anything but annoyance, on the contrary they have engraved in us so sweet a memory (so much more precious to our present judgment than what we read then with such love), that if we still happen today to leaf through those books of another time, it is for no other reason than that they are the only calendars we have kept of days that have vanished, and we hope to see reflected on their pages the dwellings and the ponds which no longer exist.
While Proust was already thirty-four when he wrote this essay in 1905, it marks, as the translators put it, a "true beginning" for the writer. His second sentence contains, for example, a Proustian reversal in which the annoying distractions from his early reading turn out to be, years later, the primary pleasures recalled in memory. This reversal is embodied in syntax and capped off with the longing to recapture days long "vanished."
Proust continues in a Proustian vein as he describes, in a kind of drama of detail, the two rooms he read in: the dining room before lunch and his bedroom after lunch. In the case of the latter, Proust introduces another Proustian reversal: the abundance of ornamental objects in the room makes it difficult for him to find and employ the few useful ones there, but the ornamental objects provide him with the most pleasure while he's reading. He writes:
. . . [A]ll those things which not only could not answer any of my needs, but were even an impediment, however slight, to their satisfaction, which evidently had never been placed there for someone's use, people my room with thoughts somehow personal, with that air of predilection, of having chosen to live there and delighting in it, which often the trees in a clearing and the flowers on the road sides or on old walls have. They filled it with a silent and different life, with a mystery in which my person found itself lost and charmed at the same time . . .
In a recent article, Alex Ross compared Wallace Stevens' poem "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" to the opening passages of Brahms' fourth symphony. I associate the poem with Proust's "silent and different life"—a reading life that progresses through the day and late into the night, culminating with an inevitable Proustian disappointment when he finally finishes the book:
Then, what? This book, it was nothing but that? Those beings to whom one had given more of one's attention and tenderness than to people in real life, not always daring to admit how much one loved them, even when our parents found us reading and appeared to smile at our emotion, so that we closed the book with affected indifference or feigned ennui; those people, for whom one had panted and sobbed, one would never see again, one would no longer know anything about them.
Soon after this passage, he shifts to a more scholarly discussion of Ruskin, and we immediately feel the disappointment of losing our seemingly familiar Proust for an oddly academic one. Our disappointment is—dare I say it?—so Proustian.
My wife is currently reading Swann's Way, and she recently reminded me of a passage on pages 90-93 of the Moncrieff-Kilmartin edition in which Marcel describes how the people and landscapes in the novels he's reading are more real to him than actual people and landscapes. (With my wife, a close friend, and I all reading Remembrance at the same time, I'm beginning to feel part of something like the cult of Proust readers that Natalia Ginzberg describes with amusing irony in her novel Lessico Famigliare or Family Sayings). In Swann's Way, Proust carefully develops his aesthetic theory of "real" people versus "book" people, but for the moment I'm more intrigued with his discussion of "book" landscapes:
. . . [F]or the landscapes in the books I read were to me not merely landscapes more vividly portrayed in my imagination than any which Combray could spread before my eyes but otherwise of the same kind. Because of the choice that the author had made of them, because of the spirit of faith in which my mind would exceed and anticipate his printed word, as it might be interpreting a revelation, they seemed to me—an impression I hardly ever derived from the place where I happened to be, especially from our garden, that undistinguished product of the strictly conventional fantasy of the gardener whom my grandmother so despised—to be actually part of nature itself, and worthy to be studied and explored.
Had my parents allowed me, when I read a book, to pay a visit to the region it described, I should have felt that I was making an enormous advance towards the ultimate conquest of truth. . . .
Do I detect here a faint echo of Emerson? I'm thinking of the passage I cited in my previous piece on Proust:
By persisting to read or to think, this region gives further sign of itself, as it were in flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and repose, as if the clouds that covered it parted at intervals and showed the approaching traveler the inland mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows spread at their base, whereon flocks graze and shepherds pipe and dance. But every insight from this realm of thought is felt as initial, and promises a sequel. I do not make it; I arrive there, and behold what was there already. I make! O no! I clap my hands in infantine joy and amazement before the first opening to me of this august magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable ages, young with the life of life, the sunbright Mecca of the desert. And what a future it opens! I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new beauty. I am ready to die out of nature and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West.
The idea of advancing upon a landscape, the complicated association of literary landscapes with Nature, the imagination in action as a form of exploration—these motifs belong to both passages, and while the comparison might seemed far-fetched, I note that the scholarly Proust of On Reading writes about how there are writers "who liked to read a beautiful page before starting to work." "Emerson," he says, "would rarely begin to write without rereading some pages of Plato."
I don't know whose "beautiful page" Proust might have turned to before he took up Remembrance each day, but I understand the sentiment thoroughly. Much of what I'm reading these days—I'm thinking now of political blogs and academic articles—is atrociously written. Despite the demands on my time, I still aspire to string together some well-phrased sentences from time to time. But before I can take up that endless work one more time, I sometimes feel the need to refresh my eyes with a "beautiful page"—something neither political nor educational, but, as A Reader says in Unpacking My Library, something that "rekindles the imagination, and eases the way forward, if momentarily."
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