Proust/Niedecker

I want to put two things side by side. I just finished Swann's Way, and I'm reading Lorine Niedecker's Collected Works. A sort of literary double-take.

"But when a belief vanishes, there survives it--more and more ardently, so as to cloak the absence of power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new phenomena--an idolatrous attachment to the old things which our belief in them did once animate, as if it was in that belief and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause--the death of the gods."

"The death of my poor father
leaves debts
and two small houses.

To settle this estate
a thousand fees arise--
I enrich the law.

Before my own death is certified,
recorded, final judgement
judged

taxes taxed
I shall own a book
of old Chinese poems

and binoculars
to probe the river
trees."

That two such writings can exist in the same world is, I suppose, cause for celebration. The long driven accuracy of the mourning Proust, trying to hold onto a dream. The short, uniflected, down-to-earth "poverty" of Niedecker. No superstructure of belief for her, things that can't be held still. Instead, glimpses of the natural world and poetry. One would have thought Proust would be the greater champion of art, which of course he does become, but it's all in the past, made out of memory. The world of the present has no value, is, with its automobiles, debased.