One of the few worthwhile things to have come out of lockdowns is the reminder that, in the same humble way as our grandparents, who spent goodness knows how much money on Time Life boxed sets of Wagner LPs and all those volumes of the Harvard Classics, many of us still take an old-fashioned aspirational interest in highbrow culture. While the reality of pandemic reading has doubtless fallen short of these ambitions, it is heartening to know that thousands of people last April at least thought to themselves, "This is my chance to read Proust.
Remembrance of Things Past as I prefer to think of it is probably the least read of all "Great Books," with the obvious exception of Finnegans Wake , which is neither great nor a book. Why this is the case is not entirely clear. It cannot be a simple question of length. At a few thousand pages and around 1,, words, Proust is only slightly longer than Harry Potter , which has been read by millions of children, and A Song of Ice and Fire , a novel cycle about hobbits who have sex, stands unfinished at more than 5, pages.
Both of these have sold many millions of copies. The latter has also taken much longer to write than Remembrance. If I had to guess, I would say that in the vast majority of cases the same handful of things prevent the average reader who is otherwise inclined to sit down with Proust from getting on. To begin at the beginning, the Combray overture at the outset of the first volume, Swann's Way, "For a long time I used to go to bed early" is the most pleasant description of sleepiness ever written.
It is also more or less the only feeling most people associate with the author who, they would be astonished to learn, wrote equally well about love, family, religion, art, music, politics, fashion, the beauty of the natural world, anti-Semitism, and the weather. For this reason, my first piece of advice for aspiring Proustians is not to read the book at night, which is when most people tend to enjoy novels. Instead, begin your reading in the morning, with a cup of coffee and a clear head.
For most people this will be the only path to the undiscovered country beyond Combray. It follows from here that Proust should be read slowly, 20 or so pages at a time.
When you are a thousand or so pages in and cannot help yourself from pressing on to learn what Brichot has to say about the death of Swann, you will have reached the stage at which it is probably acceptable to lie down with Proust. But by the end of the call, I had made a decision.
I ordered the Modern Library box set of the Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Mayor translation and prepared for the arrival of my ax. Proust was familiar with self-quarantine. Years of chronic asthma and a fragile physiognomy left him relatively limited in his physical activity. For the last three years of his life, he ensconced himself in his bedroom, blocking out light and sound from a bustling s Paris to try to finish his modernist masterpiece. Proust released me from the typical pressures of reading.
These sentences became a primer on the importance of contending with the inscrutability of the world. Read: The literature of the pandemic is already here. Yet beneath these lofty ambitions is the beauty of his descriptions. Characters, emotions, and ideas are all rendered with such precision that the reader never suspects a hierarchy.
I wondered about how quickly Proust intended for his readers to read if they intended to complete the entire cycle, if and how that informed his writing. I continued to feel unhurried, as I consumed passages that describe the most static of acts: seeing. Marcel, now in the throes of adolescence, finds himself beguiled by a coterie of girls on the esplanade one afternoon; he begins to contrive a way to insinuate himself with them. Soon, the imagistic quality of his writing began to seep into my own experience.
I felt as though an ocular dial had been tweaked and the details of my life—objects, surfaces, textures—began to intensify. In the middle of my ceaselessly repetitive pandemic existence, this novel made clear all that the familiar still had to disclose, if I was willing to look.
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