Reading Proust (Part 2)

Orginally published by The English Teacher on September 30th 2006

"Energy is Eternal Delight."

--William Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"

On page 765 of the first volume of the silver Moncrieff edition, we read another instance of Marcel catching sight of a beautiful girl—only this time it's from Mme de Villeparisis's carriage. As in the passage I previously discussed, Marcel again yearns to be noticed by the girl, but to no avail. He muses:

Was it because I had caught but a momentary glimpse of her that I had found her so attractive? It may have been. In the first place, the impossibility of stopping when we meet a woman, the risk of not meeting her again another day, give her at once the same charm as a place derives from the illness or poverty that prevents us from visiting it, or the lustreless days which remain to us to live from the battle in which we shall doubtless fall. So that, if there were no such thing as habit, life must appear delightful to those of us who are continually under the threat of death—that is to say, to all mankind.

When I first read this passage, I lightly laughed for reasons I'm not entirely sure of. The idea that, were there no habit, life would appear delightful to us while continually under the threat of death—that idea initially struck me as uncharacteristically simple and formulaic for Proust. Perhaps my sense of the sudden incongruity of that phrase made me laugh—I don't know. Yet, I find, upon further consideration, that it oddly resonates with the ending of my first meditation on Proust:

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.

Isn't this just a fancy way of saying that I'm feeling an increasing sense of mortality, and for that reason I want to break habit and live delightfully while there is still time? The association of death, habit and delight seems an inevitable one in Proust, especially if you've read Remembrance to the final volume. Why, at this point in Within a Budding Grove, does Proust suddenly spell it out for us?

I think of Chris' insight in his guest column: "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." I would add that one reason it can't sustain us is because, over the long haul, exhilaration is exhausting. Delightful as it may be to live continually under the threat of death, we eventually expend all the resources that once seemed so charged within us. Don't we have, for example, a whole body of World War I poetry to tell us that? I think of Giuseppe Ungaretti's minimalist masterpiece from the trenches:

M'illumino
d'immenso

Or:

Immensity
illumines me

The next piece in his book L'allegria is—not by coincidence, I take it—"To Sleep":

I would imitate
this country
lying down
in its gown
of snow

[translations mine]

In one transcendent moment Ungaretti—whom the poet calls elsewhere "man of pain" ("uomo di pena")—is filled with an immensity recalling Leopardi's "L'infinito." And on the next page he's exhausted unto death. ("To die—to sleep," says Hamlet.) In a sense, Ungaretti's great first book, which deserves a new translation in its entirety, dramatizes a poet-soldier's alternation between sudden revelatory insight and world-weary exhaustion of body and soul. The compact, minimalist style he invented is sometimes seen as necessity finding its virtue—that is, he wrote that way because he was under a continual threat of death, and he dashed off what he could when he could. Yet, I would also argue that his style is meant to sharpen the dramatic interplay between revelation and exhaustion.

In "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," William Blake famously said, "Exuberance is Beauty." Giuseppe Ungaretti, near contemporary of Marcel Proust, convinces us that, under pain of death, neither is long sustainable, however vital they may be to us.

The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

--Philip Larkin, "The Mower"