...the famous Proustian sentence, whose syntactic cascades of independent and subordinate clauses were compared by Walter Benjamin... to the flowing of the Nile. The longest of those riverine sentences, at nine-hundred and fifty-eight words [previous post]...

No one, except perhaps the most gifted mnemonist, can retain so much information in their short-term memory. By the time anyone else comes to the end of a sentence of this length, having meanwhile pulled into the port of more than one semicolon for a pause, its subject has been long forgotten. To understand what has been written, the reader is sent back to the point of departure and this, in turn, causes the pages not to move, or to move in the wrong direction.

Reading and Time, Ryan Ruby. I am not the most gifted mnemonist, not even a gifted mnemonist, and I could retain the information in even the longest sentences of Remembrance of Things Past. True, Ruby is correct, that I did get stuck "in port" sometimes; I did have to go back to the beginning of the sentence--in order to experience the flow of the river. It does flow like a river, that sentence, Proust's other long sentences, and the whole work do flow like a river. The page does not "move in the wrong direction" when you do that, you appreciate the flow more. Imo to conjoin reading and time is to join things never meant to be joined. Is this a race? Beat the clock? It is not and if readability is delimited by time then you miss the flow of the river. The title in the original French, À la recherche du temps perdu, is, translated in English, "In Search of Lost Time". Proust wrote those sentences and wrote all of his sentences and wrote the whole book to make readers conscious of the futility of clock-watching. The search is the thing; give up time and immerse in the flow of the river.