It’s been a long time since I experienced the Eternal Present of the Pandemic, if I ever did. These days when I read other writers talking about the great sprawling forever March of it all, eloquently and with pathos and depth and weight, well... I do believe they feel this way, I don’t think anyone’s lying, but their words don’t match my experience. The difference, I think, comes down to parenthood. We don’t have child care resources beyond ourselves right now; some people do, but we don’t. So whether it’s Tuesday or Thursday or Saturday matters, because it matters who’s on wake-up duty, who gets to spend the day catching up on work missed during child care, whose turn it is to cook on top of all that. Is it trash day? Which relative has a birthday coming? Will the playground be moshed with other families because it’s Saturday, or will we have free run of the sand pit? Christmas approaches, and it’s our job to make it magical, which takes at least a month of run-up. Do we have enough wine? Will there be enough sunlight this afternoon for a post-nap walk, for the first time in two months? Will the sidewalks be clear and usable again, after the thaw? Do we, for real, have enough wine?
Time matters. Where it goes, matters. We measure it, marshal it, store it up inside ourselves—we gather what solitude and rest we can in an unfriendly environment, like lizards set loose in winter.
But still, when I typed “Last March” as I wrote the original first line of this essay, I deleted it and wrote “March 2019,” because of course deep down in my head last March was March 2019. So maybe some trace of Eternity remains. At any rate, last March, March 2020, while the Culture came to understand that things were about to get weird and stay there, I joked on Twitter to our local bookshop, Porter Square Books, that I’d like to order the Modern Library boxed set of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I like to start big reading projects during calamities. After a call to confirm I was serious, they dropped off the books sometime in the first week of what at the time we were calling quarantine. “Lockdown” came later.
This morning (the morning of the day on which I’m writing this, that is, not the morning of the day on which I’m posting it and you’re reading it) I finished reading In Search of Lost Time. I read other books last year—more than I usually read, and I feel much better for it—but this has been the Project, and now it’s done. Close of an epoch. It’s been a constant and good companion for this year, harrowing and hallowing.
Someone without a toddler might at this point be able to spin up a few thousand word Comprehensive Grand Theory of Proust for you all, but if parenting has taught me anything it’s how things take their own time—novels, baths, Grand Theories of Proust—and we all muddle through as best we can. I expect that anything Grand I tried to say about this book within twenty four hours of reading it would be foolish, anyway. But a few thoughts do surface:
I picked this for quarantine reading half as a joke, and half because this did seem the ideal time to tackle such an involved and careful book—but I don’t think I could have possibly made a better choice. It’s funny how that works. About ten years back I read Infinite Jest during one of those once-a-century hurricanes we have so often nowadays, and something about the grand ratiocination of the storm crept into the novel, its constant reflexive curling-back, which could be profound or could be navel-gazing depending on the reader. In Search of Lost Time is a book about absence, memory, age, about the subtle connections and contexts and significances that weave through our lives. It’s about loss and the inevitable weight of Time, and it’s about what stands beyond and against Time. It’s about our responsibility to ourselves, and to our friends, to life and to art. And it’s about living in times of cataclysmic change.
It’s shocking how few people seem to have actually read this book, the whole book I mean, given how often it’s discussed. If you know anything about Proust, or if you’ve ever heard someone talk about Proust, you probably know about the madeleine: our narrator eats a madeleine soaked in herbal tea, and instantly experiences the vivid unfolding flashback of most of the novel. The madeleine episode, in the popular conversation, might well be Proust. It happens on page 30 or so. Of the first book. Of seven.
The popular image of In Search of Lost Time, then, doesn’t include the Dreyfus Case, it doesn’t include the Guermantes, or much of Swann beyond his name, or Baron de Charlus or the Verdurins or Morel the violinist or Marcel’s grandmother or the train schedule or Robert de Saint-Loup, it doesn’t include the book’s portrayal of vision or the military or aging or acting or queerness or the little phrase of Vinteuil. The popular image of In Search of Lost Time includes hardly anything, in fact, beyond the first brief section of the novel. I know for most people Hamlet is just “guy, graveyard, skull,” but at least the guy, the graveyard, and the skull show up in Act Five!
When I realized how much of Proust had nothing to do with What We Talk About When We Talk About Proust, I could read in freedom and ease. Reading a text that Means Something gives me the itchy sense that I’m under surveillance. Do you Agree with The Narrative? Do you subscribe to one of the two or three popular “readings-against”? It’s sort of like cliques in a high school movie: if you’re reading Thoreau, are you at the lunch table with the kids in flannel nodding along about, like, the pond, and nature, and trees, maaan, or are you at the other lunch table with the kids who rant about how his mom did his laundry? Or some third table? No table is necessarily right or wrong, but they’re all in the high school lunch room and that place smells funny.
Reading past the opening sections of the book had the thrill of exploring. We say a book teaches you how to read itself, and I can’t think of a book for which this is more true. It wanders, it avers, it jumps. It never lies to you, at least I don’t think it does, but it plays such games. Halfway through the first book of In Search of Lost Time I suddenly felt like I understood, on a deeper level than ever before, what Gene Wolfe is up to—or, some of the things he’s up to! Characters transmute, transform. Themes rise and fall like themes in a symphony. We read one word at a time, but a structure assembles itself in our head.
The popular image of In Search of Lost Time carries with it a general sense of wordy literariness, and while I can’t say that’s wrong exactly—many sentences are very long, many ideas are investigated in Marianas Trench depth—it also discounts the breathtaking reveals and reversals, the twists of the narrative. A page turner? Well, sometimes! There are fifty or sixty page essays here that I found riveting. There are also beautiful sparely told little vignettes and jokes, twists and turns of phrase, and one or two moments of unexpected breathtaking heroism. It’s a series that’s happy to end a book with a twenty page rumination on a sunrise, or on the way a particular woman walks down the street—or with (the Proustian equivalent of) a brutal cliffhanger.
Proust’s technique is stunning—the way he sets up scenes, the extreme care with which he handles the reader’s attention. For example: one bit of writing class advice I think I encountered for the first time in Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is “don’t set scenes at a party,” and in general this is good advice. A reader cannot see the scenes and people in the author’s head. They have to make do with the text. On film, the ten-character scenes in Knives Out are riveting, and parse clearly, because our brains are extremely good at interpreting the words spoken by charismatic, emotive humans who we can see. In prose… let’s just say that portraying more than three characters in conversation, and keeping their voices distinct, and keeping the scene legible, is an extreme challenge.
But Proust loves party scenes! Three-hundred-page party scenes! And they work, because he has a trick for them: he’s not trying to write the novelization of the movie in his head. What would, on screen or stage, be staccato witty line-capping conversations, become long speeches by whatever character Proust cares to highlight in that moment. If another character’s reaction to these speeches matters, we turn to them when the time comes, and discuss the overall shape of their reaction, their contributions or lack thereof to the discussion—and, while we’re at it, why not their childhood and their life history? Our first person narrator, Marcel, hardly ever speaks—which feels strange at first, as if he’s the protagonist in a JRPG, but then, he’s always speaking, that is, to us! And we can construct his conversations based on how others respond to him.
Marcel’s such an odd duck narrator, too.
Marcel: Eighty pages of detailed and complex discussion of male homosexuality and male queer society in late 19th/early 20th century France, rooted in the author’s own experiences of same, using dated terminology and concepts because, you know, Proust was writing a hundred years ago, but nonetheless careful and compassionate and alert.
Marcel, twenty pages later: “But then I learned that she was—” shock, horror, vapors, le gasp “—a LESBIAN.”
Before I blame Marcel’s discomfort with women who love women on Proust’s own prejudice, I want to allow for the possibility—while making clear that I don’t know much about Proust’s biography or personal opinions—that Proust has tongue firmly in cheek here. Marcel’s shock is so over the top. And while Marcel, the narrator, clearly springs from Proust, the author, there are sharp differences. For example, Marcel does not, on the page, have sexual relationships with other men, while Proust did. Marcel just has an odd habit of just stumbling into gay sex clubs as he takes shelter from bombing raids, you know, like one does. And while Marcel has an exaggerated discomfort with women who love women, this discomfort weaves around and through his jealousy of his own lovers’ women paramours. If you peer around the edges of Marcel’s jealousy, you glimpse plenty of women we’d now read as lesbians, bisexual, and/or genderqueer just living their lives and getting by in this novel, and not thinking about Marcel at all—my favorite example might be the moment when a handsome man Marcel sees walking with his girlfriend Gilberte in book one is revealed, several thousand pages later, to be the actress Lea dressed up in male drag. And one of the greatest moments of love in the novel, one of its brightest triumphs, comes through a loving lesbian relationship.
Marcel also wins the Ishmael Award for “narrator who leaves interesting stuff in the margins.” Marcel, like Proust, is severely asthmatic. He spends much of the narrative in treatment of one form or another for his disability, or just plain bedridden. And then—well, we need some background first. Book 3 details, among many other things, the Dreyfus Affair. I’m not a good source on the Dreyfus Affair—most of what I know I learned from Proust. A court case splits French society into, roughly speaking, an ultranationalist and antisemitic faction, and a… “y’all are ultranationalists and antisemites” faction. It felt, let’s say, familiar. Marcel enters French high society in the midst of these convulsions. Children aren’t speaking to parents who are on the other side of the divide, etc etc. In the following book, we get this line: “I had, by this point, fought and won many duels connected with the Dreyfus Affair.” No description of these duels, who they were with, or what happened… but I just love the image of Marcel, disabled idler not-quite-novelist, also somehow a swashbuckling duelist? Only off the page? I love a good fight scene, but I love this more: a single line that changes your whole picture of a character, if you’re paying attention.
And then there’s this section from Time Regained that I can’t get out of my head, and that seems extremely relevant for genre fiction and fantasy especially:
…I would need many nights (ed: to finish writing my book), a hundred perhaps, or even a thousand. And I should live in the anxiety of not knowing whether the master of my destiny might not prove less indulgent than the Sultan Shahriyar, whether in the morning, when I broke off my story, he would consent to a further reprieve and permit me to resume my narrative the following evening. Not that I had the slightest pretension to be writing a new version, in any way, of the Arabian Nights, or of that other book written by night, Saint-Simon’s Memoirs, or of any of those books which I had loved with a child’s simplicity and to which I had been a superstitiously attached as later to my loves, so that I could not imagine without horror any work which should be unlike them. But--as Elstir had found with Chardin--you can make a new version of what you love only by first renouncing it. So my book, though it might be as long as the Arabian Nights, would be entirely different. True, when you are in love with some particular book, you would like yourself to write something that closely resembles it, but this love of the moment must be sacrificed, you must think not of your own taste but of a truth which far from asking you what your preferences are forbids you to pay attention to them. And only if you have stumbled again upon what you renounced, find that, by forgetting these works themselves, you have written the Arabian Nights or the Memoirs of Saint-Simon of another age. But for me was there still time? Was it not too late?
In writing this book about time, this book so specifically of a time—a time that, in the moments of the project’s earliest conception Proust already understood would soon come to an end, marked forever by the words “before the war” as a brand and a bookend, as we may say “before the pandemic” or “before 2016” or just, so often now, “before”—in writing this book in which human beings grow and flower and die, in this book so bound up in the passage of time, Proust reaches beyond time. His narrative voice does not admit of great enemies—it is too open, too considered in its perspective—but if Proust has a great enemy it is habit, the slow callus process through which we dull ourselves to our own lives. We blunt our memories in the handling. Certain vivid moments of our childhood become anecdotes. We bleed them by using them, and when the husks are dry we stack them into towers we call personality. We go to sleep in the pandemic and we wake up, still, in the pandemic, and we grow hard from the outside in, and tell ourselves that growing hard will save us.
A habit can be a manner of speech. A habit can be a style. A habit can be a genre. It is anything we do because we know that it’s a thing we do, anything that is because we know this is how it is.
But there lives a dearest freshness deep down things, as Hopkins says. For Proust, there are moments when we catch something vivid out of the corner of our eye, when we remember not the story of our fall as we have told it a thousand times but the vivid blue of the wheeling sky as we fell and thought we might die. In these moments our own truths present themselves to us, and we meet that part of ourselves which is beyond time. In a science fiction story maybe here we would ask the future for stock tips, or the winner of next year’s Kentucky Derby. But what we do—what we can choose to do—is face and honor that thing beyond time, which does not so much deny the existence of death as make clear that death is irrelevant. We work that crystal and set it as a jeweler might set a gemstone in a ring, not so that others can say, yes, it is just like that, but so they can see how light works through its facets, and spy in there the piece of them that is immortal, too.
Children or no, eternal present or constant scramble, we do what we can with the time we have. Or the time we reclaim.
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Housekeeping time! First: thanks for joining me on this adventure!
I’m considering moving this newsletter to a different platform—Ghost, perhaps, or buttondown. For those of you who receive free emails, nothing would change. For those of you who are paid subscribers, the great challenge any navigation would present is that, of the various alternatives I’ve looked into, none feature, out of the box, an easy way to restrict comments to paid subscribers.
If you’re a paid subscriber, I’d love to hear how important you find the ability to comment on these essays in a direct and public way, or whether you’d be interested in other pathways for communication and community. For example: perhaps a subscriber-only questions email? Or the ability to send me questions or thoughts which I’d then respond to in a public post? Or something else?
A major challenge here is, as with Proust, time. As in: I have very little of it. Between child care and cooking and writing, my attention is spoken for from 6:30 am to 10 pm on an average day. Before I launched this project I decided I could commit to monitoring comments here without interrupting my other duties, but I don’t have the time to monitor a subscriber-only Slack or Discord, and any manual process or roll-your-own or “it would work with just a little coding” solution will not be viable. It took me about four months to find the roughly eight hours of work time required to put this channel together and launch it, for comparison. Any move here will take a while—investigating alternatives, determining whether they improve over the base case, taking required action, etc. So, thank you for your patience with this and any future developments. We’re working this out as we go. And thank you, as always, for reading.
> If you’re a paid subscriber, I’d love to hear how important you find the ability to comment on these essays in a direct and public way
It's something I value; I like the informal opportunity to potentially interact, both with you and potentially with other people in comments. (Let's be honest, I just desperately miss livejournal, and a tumblr-style question box is not something I would likely submit anything to.) That said, while I would *miss* that feature and it would move your newsletter out of my mental 'potentially social' bucket into my 'purely to be consumed as a relatively passive audience' bucket which would probably result in my reading it less often because often that feels like a chore (sorry, but being brutally honest about how my brain works here because you asked) and that would be a bit sad, a) that's a me problem and is not your problem, b) I am not settled into interacting with you and your other subscribers in this space since it's so new anyway, and most importantly c) I would not feel like I was somehow no longer receiving something of value in exchange for my subscription. I wish to support your writing monetarily, so I subscribed. Getting to comment on a blog-esque thing is entirely a bonus from my perspective.
And I certainly understand and support the substack exodus!!
Firstly I want to say that this newsletter made me reconsider my long-held determination to not read Proust (a result of frustration with his centrality to my particular branch of academia). Secondly, I'm paying because I want to read all the things you write. As long as I get to read all the things, I don't mind if other people get to comment, or also get to read the things! I'm just happy to be here.