Reading Proust (Part 6)

On December 21, 2006, the English Teacher posted this, the sixth of his commentaries on Proust.


I've begun reading the opening paragraphs of The Guermantes Way, and I feel that sense of hopefulness I often feel when starting a new book. Everything is before me, and I can already anticipate Marcel's touching love for his grandmother, his odd infatuation with Mme de Guermantes, the reappearances of Françoise, Saint Loup, Albertine, and the inimitable Charlus. Here is an illustration of why I said in my previous piece that I'd once decided only to read books I'd already read: because reading the best books a second time is arguably more pleasurable than reading any book the first time.

Not that this has stopped me from, on occasion, lining up six or seven books I've never read and reading the first several pages of each. My ostensible purpose in doing so was to see which book hooked me, but I also think I just enjoyed repeating the ritual of new beginnings. I'm reminded of that well-known passage from Emerson's "Experience" in which he writes of "the mode of our illumination" as being like the approach of "a new and excellent region of life":

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.

We are entitled to wonder at this last puzzling sentence. Stanley Cavell has made more of it than I would have thought possible in his This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein. Lacking Cavell's talent for subtle distinctions and precise indecisions, I read the passage as illustrating how the illumination arising out of the "converse" with "a profound mind" is like the vision of a grand landscape always unfolding before us into the distance. There is a sense of "beginningness" in this beholding, and Emerson would die out of nature and live again in this great new American landscape of unapproachable anticipation. I put "die out of nature" in italics not only for the complications of what he means by "nature," but also for the suggestiveness of the inevitable association of "die out of" with the passing of his son Waldo.

For those of us who've already read Remembrance, we know that the first paragraph of Guermantes, in which Marcel describes the change of residence to the Hôtel de Guermantes, foreshadows the death of his beloved grandmother. In the meantime, it is also a beginning with a beginning:

The twittering of the birds at daybreak sounded insipid to Françoise.

The irony of daybreak marred by insipid twittering birds is soon explained by the change at work:

Every word uttered by the maids upstairs made her jump; disturbed by all their running about, she kept asking herself what they could be doing. In other words, we had moved.

Their new existence at the Hôtel de Guermantes, while marked with unsettling commotion, begins in sentences simple enough. But it isn't long before Proust draws us into this bit of syntax:

Hence, if I had been tempted to scoff at her when, in her misery at having to leave a house in which one was "so well respected by all and sundry," she had packed her trunks weeping, in accordance with the rites of Combray, and declaring superior to all possible houses that which had been ours, on the other hand, finding it as hard to assimilate the new as I found it easy to abandon the old, I felt myself drawn towards our old servant when I saw that moving into the building where she had not received from the hall-porter, who did not yet know us, the marks of respect necessary to her spiritual wellbeing, had brought her positively to the verge of prostration.

In my first article, I had described how one of the pleasures of reading Proust was that it provided me with rich distractions during my bouts of insomnia. In Proust, one of the modes of our distraction is his syntax, which fixes our attention with its labyrinthine reversals. These reversals come quickly in this first paragraph, in which Marcel laughs at Françoise's tears but goes to her for sympathy; in which Françoise shows icy indifference to Marcel's sorrow because she shares it; and in which Françoise, as soon as Marcel tries to speak of the new house, laments the disadvantages of the old and speaks well of the new. Marcel writes of Françoise's "true feminine inconstancy," but this paragraph is all inconstancy embodied in syntax.

In my last article, I claimed not to have cracked Paradise Lost in three decades, but I remember my Milton professor having said something to the effect that Miltonic syntax was designed to remind us that we're fallen. If Proust's is about the irony of new beginnings in reversals, is Milton's about bringing us down to hard earth every time we reach the end of a period and can't quite hold the whole sense of the sentence in our distracted minds? Or was he suggesting something much simpler, that if we undergraduates were less sinful, we would have an easier time reading Milton? If anything, I mourn that I hadn't been more sinful as an undergraduate, even if it had meant foregoing the pleasures of Paradise. Like Thoreau, I wonder:

What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

I have to say that I'm on the side of William Blake's ironic devil when he says "Exuberance is Beauty." This fall, I found graduate school to be a kind of new beginning for me, and I reached the end of the quarter feeling about as energetic and vigorous as I've felt in years. In a recent letter to an Italian friend, I apologized for not having responded sooner to his missives. He replied:

Anch'io sono lieto di sentirti dire che state bene. Essere occupati non è un delitto, bensì è sinonimo di vitalità.

Or in my translation:

I'm also happy to hear you say that you're well. To be busy is not a sin; rather, it's synonymous with vitality.

My friend had it right. Like Whitman and Montaigne—who share in common the invention of distinct literary personalities of seeming flesh and blood ("Cut these words, and they would bleed," writes Emerson of Montaigne)—I'd been feeling the busy vitality of bodily health. Naturally, this feeling couldn't last.

We Americans love new beginnings, the ready approach of the unapproachable. But as in "Othello," that other great work of jealously, Shakespeare reminds us that all beginnings start in mid-sentence. Roderigo starts the play with:

Tush, never tell me, I take it much unkindly
That thou, Iago, who hast had my purse
As if the strings were thine, shouldst know of this.

What, we're left to wonder, is "this," which Iago does not illuminate by calling it "such a matter?" "Desdemona's elopement" will do as a provisional answer, but the initial indefiniteness of the conversation between Iago and Roderigo throws us off, forcing us to strain at what they're talking about. The disorienting effect is but prelude to the much greater disorientations Iago insinuates into Othello's elusive consciousness. Othello, whose voice bespeaks a larger-than-life bodily command and presence, is undone not only mentally but physically. Iago's feat is to accomplish in the court what no one had ever accomplished on the battlefield: his mind's fear of betrayal betraying his body's sanity.

"Sanity," of course, derives from the Latin sanus or "healthy." A doctor's bad news always comes as a betrayal, though our first inclination is often to attribute the betrayal to the doctor instead of our own bodies. A health scare is just as good a way to end a year and begin a new one as any, but I find it ironic, to say the least, that at a time when I was enjoying the illusion that my middle-aged body might just keep going forever—I can still run a treadmill four-mile in under thirty minutes!—my urologist thinks I should get a biopsy of my prostate. That pesky persistent nub on the left side has not gone away, and while my PSA hasn't gone up—in fact, oddly, it went down over the last six months—there are those infrequent cases of men who have prostate cancer and low PSAs. The verbiage on the box of my "Prostate Ultrasound and Biopsy Prep Kit" (don't ask) says not-so reassuringly that approximately "50% of lumps found turn out to be non-cancerous." I flip a coin, heads cancer, tails not-cancer. Not-cancer! I flip again. Not cancer again! I flip again. Cancer. Shit.

While it may be a matter of luck how we die, it's not a matter of luck that we will die. I should qualify this overly confident statement by saying that after reading Robert Nozick's "Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?" in Philosophical Explanations, I'm half-convinced that the existence of existence is itself a matter of luck and therefore, by extension, so is non-existence. Be that as it may be, I take more comfort in the eminently sane Michel de Montaigne, who wrote in "Of Experience":

This ordinary expression "pastime" or "pass the time" represents the habit of those wise folk who think they can make no better use of their life than to let it slip by and escape it, pass it by, sidestep it, and, as far as in them lies, ignore it and run away from it, as something irksome and contemptible. But I know it to be otherwise and find it both agreeable and worth prizing, even in its last decline, in which I now possess it; and nature has placed it in our hands adorned with such favorable conditions that we have only ourselves to blame if it weighs on us and if it escapes us unprofitably. The life of the fool is joyless, full of trepidation, given over wholly to the future [Seneca]. However, I am reconciling myself to the thought of losing it, without regret, but as something that by its nature must be lost; not as something annoying and troublesome. Then too, not to dislike dying is properly becoming only to those who like living. It takes management to enjoy life. I enjoy it twice as much as others, for the measure of enjoyment depends on the greater or lesser attention that we lend it. Especially at this moment, when I perceive that mine is so brief in time, I try to increase it in weight; I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it, and to compensate for the haste of its ebb by my vigor in using it. The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it.

In a recent conversation with a friend, we talked ironically about how much of literature is just too depressing to read during winter, and I remarked, too easily, that it's depressing because the human condition is tragic. He asked me why I thought so, and I replied that one of the few things we have in common is that we're all going to die, and we're unable to celebrate it. Instead, he added, we go around killing each other. It passes the time, I said.

Charles Simic has described that type of poem made up out of thin air as possessing the beauty of religions made the same way. We have created elaborate structures of thought and feeling that seem designed to blunt the fact of our mortality. I understand the fear at work in such structures, but I see wisdom in Montaigne's determination not to live what life he has left with "trepidation," but with determination to make it "deeper and fuller." As I suggested to my friend, Montaigne's essays are one of those works of literature not depressing, because what we behold over the course of hundreds of pages of his musings is the wondrous growth of his own consciousness—a consciousness at once expansive and humane. We witness the creation of a self aware of its own character and accepting of its limitations. If, at the end of Remembrance, Proust shows us astonishing impressions of declining old age, Montaigne, at the end of the essays, leaves us with the hope that we can achieve our humanity nearly to the very end.