As some of you may know, I have returned to graduate school. I don't have a lot of time for sustained reading outside of my classes, but in my spare moments—which often come about four AM, when I suddenly awake fully alert—I turn to Remembrance of Things Past. I chose the book for a specific reason. After a week's neglect, I can almost immediately pick up its thread again, and because Remembrance is so imbued with Proust's richly woven consciousness I'm soon distracted from whatever anxieties have awoken me unceremoniously in the wee hours.
By a happy coincidence, a close friend of mine is preparing to lead a book group on Swann's Way at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle. Whenever I can squeeze in a phone call to my friend, we discuss Proust in bits and pieces. He recently reminded me that a major theme of the novel revolves around habit, which, necessary as it is in Proust's view, has an inevitably dulling effect on attentiveness. In Within a Budding Grove, I recently came across a passage that speaks directly to my friend's observations.
On page 705 of the silver Moncrieff edition, young Marcel is taking the train for the first time to Balbec. The train stops at a little station between two mountains, and Marcel spots a tall girl emerging from the station house, carrying a jar of milk. She walks past the train windows and offers milk and coffee to the few awakened passengers. Marcel suddenly remarks:
Flushed with the glow of morning, her face was rosier than the sky. I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness.
To what should we attribute Marcel's sudden awakening to a renewed sense of life and beauty? Marcel analyzes it this way:
But in this again the temporary cessation of Habit played a great part. I was giving the milk-girl the benefit of the fact that it was the whole of my being, fit to taste the keenest joys, which confronted her. As a rule it is with our being reduced to a minimum that we live; most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services. But on the morning of travel, the interruption of the routine of my existence, the unfamiliar place and time, had made their presence indispensable. My habits, which were sedentary and not matutinal, for once were missing, and all my faculties came hurrying to take their place, vying with one another in their zeal, rising, each of them, like waves, to the same unaccustomed level, from the basest to the most exalted, from breath, appetite, the circulation of my blood to receptivity and imagination.
Marcel feels the need to be noticed by the milk-carrier, and he signals her and calls to her. However, he is too late, and she slips away from him in a kind of burning vision as the doors close and the train begins to move. Marcel is not sure whether his exaltation was produced by the girl or whether his exaltation produced the pleasure of being in the girl's presence, but, whatever the case, he yearns to hang onto his excitement and the girl associated with it. Yet, as Marcel all too quickly realizes, his life is speeding away from her, and his thoughts turn to a fantasy of one day arranging to meet up with her again. The final irony is that the fantasy itself becomes a kind of habit of mind, which replaces the effort needed to recreate within him the very exaltation he yearns to hold onto.
I have some practical reasons for attending graduate school, but I only acted on those reasons because I thought the experience would, in my middle age, be an invitation to a renewed attentiveness to life. In a way, it fits a pattern of mine. As soon as I find myself competent at some endeavor, surrounded by respectful colleagues, I feel seized by a desire to jump into fresh endeavors, which, because they are new to me, I'm incompetent at. As increasingly difficult as it is for me to accept newfound incompetence, I feel, in the present case, more than compensated by the falling away of habit that comes with novel challenges. The anxiety that wakes me at four AM also brings with it an alertness that had been so long lost to me that I find it both unnerving and exhilarating.
I do not, as Robert Frost's woodsman, live by "turning to fresh tasks"—at least not in the way that Frost meant it. But with my increasing sense of time swiftly carrying my body to the next sudden reversal, I find it more imperative than ever to live within a consciousness alert to itself and to the fleeting world it endeavors to hold.
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