Tuesday, January 19, 2010

on reading Proust






In Search of Lost Time


For Christmas I received the first 3 volumes of In Search Of Lost Time along with a readers guide...this from my son Aaron. I am not sure if he has great faith in me or thinks I need a challenge. So here I am on page 112 of Swann's Way and am starting to love it. Already I am making margin notes which I only occasionally do with a novel. Funny things are happening with this book. While I was reading a few days ago I picked up another book I own called defining moments in Books to see what may be mentioned on Proust. What I found was a key passage from Swann's Way "No sooner had the warm liquid and the crumbs with it, touched my palate"...etc. I then continued to read from Swann's way and 2 pages later came to the exact paragraph. Now in a book of 606 pages what are the chances of that!

Something else I found interesting was in a description of M. Legrandin  an engineeer who is also  a writer...this passage... He was one of that class of men who, apart from a scientific career in which they may well have proved brilliantly successful, have acquired an entirely diffenent kind of culture, literary or artistic, for which their professional specialisation has no use but by which their conversation profits. More lettered than many men of letters.....endowed of greater "facility" than many painters, they imagine that the life they are obliged to lead is not for which they are really fitted, and they bring to their regular occupations either an indifference tinged with fantasy, or a sustained and haughty application, scornful, bitter and conscientious.

That I found amazing in the sense that so many people throughout life are living a life that is not truly who they are...just a thought!

Well on with my mission....volume one of seven!





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