proust

Once again, I embark on Proust. This time, though, I hope to finish it. Why? As Louis Armstrong is said to have replied to someone who asked, what is jazz: If you have to ask, I can't explain. I guess that's really two questions. Why read Proust, and why finish it? In my youth, of course, it would have been only one, since I always (almost) finished everything I started to read. It's why I know so little today. But, there it sits like a doorway to the twentieth century which I never passed through. (I came in through an upstairs window.) Reading it seems like reviewing my life or checking to see what parts of it I missed. Little Marcel is a precious soul, to the point of annoyance, but then he can report that about himself, too. The quest embarked on seems almost heroic, to see how much can be remembered, sparing no detail. For that, however, there must be long hours, months and years of elegant boredom, spaces in a large house to which one can retreat and to which one is sent when one is an annoyance (which is often). Ah well, life has no single platform. But can I live the next few months tangled in the convoluted sentences of a narcissist, even one who knows he is one? Winter is coming on. It will help.