Frost, Emerson, and Proust

Originally published by The English Teacher in October 2006.

The English Teacher wrote, as an introduction to this piece:
The following guest column—a response to my post Reading Proust (Part I)—comes to us from A Reader.

Bringing Frost into a discussion of Proust: an inspired pairing. For both Proust and Frost, habit is an impediment to perceiving beauty, to looking behind the veil. Frost’s poems often speak of the necessity of working against it (a bit of irony, having to develop the habit of not being habitual). The speaker of “The Woodpile” considers returning home (a place of habit), but pushes on through the winter woods where he discovers the abandoned woodpile. What can account for someone abandoning this creation, 4X4X8 feet of split wood? Well, it’s the doing work that matters because the doing is a process of rediscovery. The woodcutter, “turning to fresh tasks,” may be simply starting a new woodpile. Isn’t that the implication? (I’m working my way to Proust.)

Frost likely assimilated from Emerson the idea of habit as a wall standing between us and Nature. And, of course, in Emerson Nature is God.

Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. Certain mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position, apprizes us of a dualism. We are strangely affected by seeing the shore from a moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an unusual sky. The least change in our point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air…. What new thoughts are suggest by seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid movement of the railroad car!
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In a higher manner the poet communicates the same pleasure… He unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew.

Proust read and admired Emerson’s essays. One is tempted, perhaps tempted too much, to see direct parallels. Alterations in the Proustian narrator’s local position lead to moments of insight. Marcel catching sight of the girl from the train is coincidentally similar to Emerson’s “mechanical changes.”

There is, however, a notable difference between Proust and Emerson. Proust views habit as a kind of negative virtue. While Emerson requires positive action to break from habitual ways of looking at the world, Proust often welcomes habit because, however much we value exhilarating experience, exhilaration cannot sustain us. “Habit!” the narrator declares in Swann’s Way

That skillful but very slow housekeeper who begins by letting our mind suffer for weeks in a temporary arrangement; but whom we are nevertheless truly happy to discover, for without habit our mind, reduced to no more than its own resources, would be powerless to make a lodging habitable.

Early in the novel, after attending Mass, the narrator (Proust has not yet named him) takes a late afternoon walk through Combray with his mother and father. The walk continues through nightfall, when moonlight “destroys” the village, transforming it into a work of classical art. Dragging his feet and exhausted, he walks on with concentrated effort: “the fragrance of the lindens that perfumed the air would seem to me a reward that one could win only at the cost of greatest fatigue.” Suddenly father, mother, and child are back at home, its back gate “having come… to wait for us at the end of these unfamiliar streets.” The transcendent experience having ended, he can happily fall back on habit.

And from that moment on, I would not have to take another step, the ground would walk for me through that garden where for so long now my actions had ceased to be accompanied by any deliberate attention: Habit had taken me in its arms, and it carried me all the way to my bed like a little child.

Changing jobs or careers to break out of a habitual work life (something I myself have done several times) reminds me of one of my favorite stories, which Sam Spade tells in The Maltese Falcon. A businessman named Flitcraft has disappeared, “like a fist when you open your hand.” His wife hires Spade to track Flitcraft down. When Spade finds him, Flitcraft has created the same life he had before the disappearance. He has remarried, has a family, manages a business, and goes to the country club as predictably as he did before.

Spade asks Flitcraft why he took off. Walking to lunch one day, Flitcraft explains, a safe being hoisted into an upper story window fell, missing him by inches. An exhilarating experience indeed. It caused Flitcraft to change his life. Or so he thought. Although he could shake up what was customary before the safe fell, Flitcraft could not change his habitude. As Frost, Emerson, and Proust show, exhilarating experiences, whether sought after or thrust upon us, pleasurable or frightening, can provide insights into this life, not create a radically new one.