the excerpt from "remembrance of things past" in the preceding post is one of those rare "impressions" that will stay with me for the rest of my life, like when i first heard bach's brandenburgs, the first time i heard sarah vaughns singing, when i first tasted uesquebach scotch on my first night in cambridge at a restaurant in harvard square, when i had a particular cake with successive layers of chocolate, raspberries, and almonds at dinner at the rose inn in upstate new york one christmas vacation many years ago.

i read that excerpt this afternoon and immediately knew that i had to post it as one of the most profound things i'd ever read. although "remembrance" is a novel, that excerpt is philosophy. as i typed it a little while ago i was reminded, in its wisdom, economy and especially tone, of "desiderata,"--you know "go placidly...", etc.--that was so popular in the 1970's and was actually put to song. i'm sure "desiderata" is scoffed at by others and the comparison to proust considered outrageous but to this lump of mediocrity "desiderata" was beautiful, instructive and wise.

a more well-received comparison would be with marcus auerilius' "meditations." i remember prof michael sugrue's lecture on the "meditations" in one of the teaching company's tapes. he said that there has never been any book like it, so measured, reflective, spiritually generous, practical, instructive and wise, AND that was written by the most powerful man in the world at the time.

as it turns out, prof sugrue was also the teaching company's lecturer on "remembrance." he said that of all the world's literary masterpieces it is probably the least read. i am on page 924, and am less than one-third the way through it. that's undoubtedly the most important reason. too, proust wrote in hegelian-length sentences with so many clauses and parentheticals that you have to read many of the sentence three times, once straight through as you come onto it, another skipping the parentheticals so that you can get the primary import, and then again straight through.

third, it is a translation from the french. i have written here previously on the hazards of reading translations (see "lost in translation" from the summer of '03). there is just no way that something, especially a work of literature with its nuances of tone and emotion, can be translated with 100% fidelity into a different language even though the translation that i'm reading, by moncrieff and kilmartin is almost miraculous. now, i don't read french but i've read enough translated books to know, or at least sense, that this translation could not possibly have been done better.

fourth, however transcendent the message, a 3,000 page novel written by a "foreigner," and set in a foreign culture is a distancing piece of work. the places are not familiar, the names don't have familiar sounds, there is far less of the congruity of shared history and experience that reader and author have than in a work of american fiction.

finally, proust was just an odd guy, a confessed and obvious neurotic who literally saw nerve-fraying complexity in the physics of the kiss.

the mind tends to wander when reading this book.

but the mind wanders at its peril because there are so many, and so frequently occurring , passages of INSIGHT comparable to the excerpt that i posted, that you want to go back and re-read because of the chance that you glossed over something great.

there's no point in someone like me trying to sum up the novel, hell i'm only 1/3 of the way through it, and i won't be capable of doing that when i'm done either. even for sugrue, it must have been embarrasing for him to be given the job of summarizing the book in two 45 minute lectures.

but there are many passages similar to the above and most importantly for me personally "remembrance" has given me, in the section "swann in love," a start at understanding the great love of my life, and the loss of that love. as proust says at one point, sometimes when we understand something intellectually we can put it in a place in our brain that the rest of us is safe from. we can contain it.

i never went through anything as hard as i did last summer and fall in trying to understand my own situation and i failed. proust's section on charles swann's relationship with odette de crecy gave me an intellectual archetechtonicus to begin to understand it. an emotional and spiritual resolution may or may not follow. i always think about the writings of nietzsche, kirkegaard and proust on the seperation of intellect and soul and the impossiblity, sometimes, of understanding to overcome or salve an unwell soul.

but i've got 2,000 pages to go and proust has already given me reason to believe that "we must not repudiate" any of the "lives," however difficult, that we have lived because they are part of our individual journey, "proof that we have really lived," and in the end we may have "extracted something that transcends them."


-benjamin harris