In September 2018, my reader, Anthony, opened Swann’s Way, the first book of In Search of Lost Time, on our front veranda and read aloud the seemingly innocent opening line: “I used to go to bed early”. From that moment – and almost every evening for the next four years – I was lost in a rarefied parallel reality created more than 100 years ago on the other side of the world. Marcel Proust, that neurotic frail Frenchman from the late nineteenth century, became my daily companion.
Anthony took up the challenge of entering Proust’s sentences, gliding through the infinite subordinate clauses with graceful ease. He read, I listened. Before Covid, we travelled and read in bars, gîtes, and village squares and then, during lockdowns, at home. I discovered how being read to lifted the words off the page so that they created a vast, suspended architecture of sound and rhythm. It was as if Proust’s words only reached their full three dimensional extension when they were read aloud. I watched them unfold like little scraps of paper in a porcelain bowl, becoming detailed and enduring characters, villages, cities, just like the famous moment in Swann’s Way when the madeleine cake dunked in his cup of tea begins to do its work of unfolding a vast maquette of houses, individuals, a society and a period of history:
And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.
Every time I read this sentence I feel the moment of creativity springing into being, the seed stirring, the embryonic heart beginning to flutter into a beat, the overwhelming humility and terror of a new thing coming into existence. How can it be that deeply flawed and terrible humans have the capacity to create? That sense of awe came to me time and again in the four years that I listened to his words take form in the air around me, the stilled, but enormously rich sensation that enfolds us when something is about to stir into being.
Proust was born in 1871 into an upper-middle-class French family. He was considered sickly as a child and was closely watched – an observant gaze which he returned a thousand-fold. As a young man he mixed with aristocrats and artists in Parisian high society, maintaining his often amused and caustic eye on those around him. He wrote the seven books which make up In Search of Lost Time, and died young – he was only 51 – a hundred years ago this month. After spending the last four years lost in his finely attenuated world, I am trying to remember how our realties became so entwined that now I hardly know what a life without him would have been like.
Although Marcel – after four years I can call him that – and I are separated by a century and by nationality, class, sexuality and sensibility, and despite regularly finding him exasperatingly obsessive and neurotic, I did come to regard him as a friend, though not one I could open my heart to fully. He watched me too sharply for that. I was in awe of his unending desire and unmatched capacity to recreate each moment, each fluctuation of existence – I just wouldn’t trust him once I’d left the room.
The reading pleasure was not to do with the narrative, which despite being at times, mind-meltingly slow, did eventually form an intricate pattern, nor the fascinating and often hilariously repellant characters, it was the sudden moments of what I can only call “satori”, the Japanese word for a sudden jolt out of the mundane surface into a the bright clarity of awareness of being.
Near the beginning, Proust describes three steeples appearing and disappearing as he rides home in a cart and I knew immediately that I would never forget those steeples – they had somehow sprung into a deep, mysterious reality. The boy Marcel writes about the steeples and it is the first piece of writing that he is happy with:
I found such a sense of happiness, felt that it had so entirely relieved my mind of the obsession of the steeples, and of the mystery which they concealed, that, as though I myself were a hen and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top of my voice.
I was so bowled over by the ordinary image of a chook laying an egg being employed to convey the joy of creativity, that a million words and nearly four years later when Proust mentions the steeples again, my own heart sang in recognition.
There are endless moments like this. Scattered like jewels across an infinitely rumpled fabric. Then there is Proust’s laugh-out-loud humour, his brilliant comic timing when the reader is least expecting it, nearly always based on sending someone up. Many times just as I was about to walk out on the tedium of an endlessly parsed society party, he would make me laugh and draw me back to his side.
More than his astute observations of society, of character, of politics – or of frocks – is his contemplation of the nature of memory and consciousness itself. Once, I asked my reader why he reads, and he answered: “For the hum of human consciousness. So that I know I am not alone.” And that is the real brilliance of Proust – that he is one of the very few writers who are able to create that endless hum on the page. He spreads a seemingly infinite web of words and in it he captures the endless vexing mystery of being human. This is what nourishes the reader’s heart and mind – and soul. It is a rich and at times overwhelming potion that gives us access to the otherwise unknowable mystery of another human universe.
To be honest, Proust’s sentences – and his sensibility – are at times trying. They demand attention to the infinite examination of a moment, its history and its psychological construction. My mind blurs, I drift off. But that is only on the page. As it is read aloud, every moment hangs in the air, an extraordinary architecture of light, always in flux but always precise, a glorious reality made of spells.
A million and a quarter words later, Anthony and I have emerged, blinking and disoriented from that vast architecture. It’s not that we have been absent, but the world is changed, sliding further and further down the hill, pandemics and climate and threats of war pummelling us from all sides. Our reading has not saved us from anything, and yet, I feel stronger for my lengthy sojourn with Proust. It’s not just that he has shown me over and over again the passionate complexity of being human, it’s the fact of In Search of Lost Time existing at all, the fact humans can make something utterly extraordinary. It affirms that we absurd creatures can create, not just destroy.
Patti Miller is the author of True Friends, published by UQP.
