A few notes on Swann’s Way:1
The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting? […] And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart to Penelope’s work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night was [sic] woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting.
– Walter Benjamin
(Illuminations
‘The Image of Proust’, p.202)
Our ancestors wrote prose in long, beautiful sentences, convoluted like curls; although we still learn to do it that way in school, we write in short sentences that cut more quickly to the heart of the matter; and no one in the world can free his thinking from the manner in which his time wears the cloak of language. Thus no man can know to what extent he actually means what he writes and in writing, it is far less that people twist words than it is that words twist people.
Robert Musil, ‘The Paintspreader’,
in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, p. 67
I remember being told by a
teacher not to read Jane Eyre, because I would be reading it in her class in the fall. Of course I read it that summer. Propped in bed, or curled in a corner, but finally finishing peripatetic. That’s how I remember it, anyway. I walked the three miles from Vineyard Haven to Oak Bluffs in the summer swelter. I walked slowly and slowly read, turning the thin foxed pages in their sweating dark green cloth, gravel underfoot. I walked and read and didn’t stop except for water and a bookstore. I walked until the road ended in a beach and then I sat on a stone and finished the last few pages. I remember looking at the sunburnt people ruddy against the white sand, the gray concrete, the gray ocean, the gray sky and feeling empty and complete and tired. I sat for some time. I remember looking at my watch. Then I stood and walked back to the ferry, scuffing my feet in the gravel and sand and thinking.
But memory’s sudden release of the genie held captive inside matter, like a spirit bottled by an evil witch, is much more often for me both generator and principle of a happy feverish fugue than the quietism of a Proustian illumination. Resparked, the precious images kept so long in darkness – all of them – ignite and set each other ablaze; a flaming line zig-zags across a dozing world and sows it with light as it travels the secret fissures – an experience, a reading, a decisive encounter that prompts another – that have, year after year, marked it with my initials. The virtue of genuine contact with something that had at one time captivated me is that it awakens, reanimates, and binds with streaks of lightning everything I have ever loved.
– Julien Graqc, The Narrow Waters, p. 33f.
We find under the weather a layer of sun, wrapped tidily around that parcel of time we call today.
The year therefore rounded itself as a receptacle of retarded knowledge – a cup brimming over with the sense that now at least she was learning.
– Henry James,
What Maisie Knew, ch. IX
fallen pears fermenting on the pavement
indecisive days too warm and too cold
leaden-eyed maidens drooping into evening
slouching easily on an afternoon bicycle
slumped down reading in a pillowed chair
At home in the evening, planning escapades. The books read and unread gathering coffee stains and toast crumbs. The at one time unimaginable, commonplace.
Things moving slowly. The sense of progress, though: gears turning, ticking well-oiled shiny. Intangible, unavoidable, inescapable. Backed into imagined corners that flatten and fade and open onto unexpected vantages.
Yet continuance – a stay or mainstay. Listening to Brahms again. Offering avoidances, but acting anyhow.
The way the light comes in through the window is soothing and satisfying. The nightclub pulsing somnolent below. And everywhere are bridges connecting to the known and unknown and unknowable. And I am sleepy.
The way they look and see and go. Unable to slip a word in edgewise. Everything all at once but different times; missed tones in the afternoon. Expecting all receiving naught. Or aught. But chancing not to see.
Finding out after the fact. A decade or so. Time not wasted, trim-waisted, but lost. Everywhere a door slightly slammed or a future’s paths uncrossed.
Peregrinations. Relative importunities. Imputed fragilities, and frailties. Ah so.
Apartment building, SE PDX.
These days I spend a lot of time crossing bridges. Partly because we moved across the river from practically everything we are interested in; partly because, well because my feet are getting itchy again.
It’s amazing how deadlines work – one puts things off, doesn’t think about them, and then the time creeps up when one either does or one doesn’t and usually one does.
And still one does not, no one does not in one’s heart believe in mute inglorious Miltons. If one has succeeded in doing anything one is certain that anybody who really has it in them to really do anything will really do that thing.
– Gertrude Stein
(Everybody’s Autobiography, p. 9).
Cataloguing one’s home library has its good points. Entering in ISBNs and publication information is a wonderful way to devour time. One also gets a chance really to look at one’s books; one so seldom has the opportunity. One buys the book, sometimes one even reads it,* and then it goes on the shelf, jumbled with books both near and far to it in manner or content.
It was with some pleasure today that I found, tucked between a fat burgundy Faulkner and a dour blue history of England in the 18th century, the Letters of Sir Thomas Browne. More than two years ago I’d bought it, read a quarter of it, then packed it away and gave it no more thought.† As I flipped through to find the publication information, I saw the following on the back of the title page:
This edition of Sir Thomas Browne’s Letters was originally issured in 1931 as volume six of The Works edited in six volumes by Geoffrey Keynes.
The unsold remaining stock of the sheets of volumes one to four was destroyed by enemy action in 1941, and the survivors, the two volumes entitled five and six, are now reissued separately with the addition of a few errata. Each volume is complete in itself.
So there it is.
* Lately I’ve been leaning heavily on the library for my browsing needs, so I am, happily, even more likely to read in its entirety a book I’ve purchased, which is, I think, a change for the better.
† By this afternoon I’ll probably have forgotten it again; certainly it will go in the stack of ‘books to read’, one of the many graveyards for good intentions.
To move away from one thing is not necessarily to approach another, though this may be the unintended consequence; to move towards an object does not require departing from another – but this, too, often happens. Few can observe their impulses with perspicacity.
It is the lot of the fool to wait another’s pleasure.
I grow tired of waiting.
…eorum virorum cogitata non solum ad mores corrigendos, sed etiam ad omnium utilitatem perpetuo sunt praeparata, athletarum autem nobilitates brevi spatio cum suis corporibus senescunt; itaque neque cum maxime sunt florentes neque posteritati hi, quemadmodum sapientium cogitata hominum vitae, prodesse possunt.
The researches of these men are an everlasting possession, not only for the improvement of character but also for general utility. Indeed, the fame of athletes soon wanes with their bodily powers; and neither when they are most vigorous, nor afterwards for posterity, can they do for human life what is done by the researches of the learned.
fragment of a dialogue
Is there a reason you haven’t bathed in almost a week?
Is there a reason you consider my personal hygiene to be of general interest?
Answer the question.
Yes. There is a reason.
Would you care to elaborate?
When have I ever cared to elaborate?
Let me rephrase: please share your reasons…
…for not bathing?
Quite.
I’m not sure I can be brief about about it…
I have as much time as you can spare.
I see. I am, as you know, attempting to work; by which I mean I am in the midst of intellection — not a sweaty business, though strenuous. Carefully I build up collections of thoughts, precariously balanced until mortared together with words. Through long days and longer nights I sort these thoughts. I cannot be swayed from my labor. I must work. Without distraction — which even you will have realized bathing must be.
· · · · ·
The act of bathing then becomes the ultimate act of poesis — until the process begins again.
Do you actually believe any of that?
Not really.
I have to remind myself it was only a book – mass-market paperback, pristine condition though bought used.
I lent it to an acquaintance; I do not say she was a friend, because she was
not. She was an acquaintance. At the time I would have compared her to a whirlwind, for wherever she went chaos and confusion invariably followed. She had a talent for capturing the affection, the admiration, perhaps even the love of other people. Though lacking beauty in any strict sense of the word, her energy and heedlessness – a sort of helplessness born of irresponsibility – drew people to her. In this sense, she was attractive.
She had no difficulty in asking favors, either, and people almost instinctively granted them. That, in fact, was how I met her. She asked if she could sleep in my room, because she had forgotten her key and needed a place to stay until her roommate returned to open the door. At the time, I shrugged, having no objections. That was the first favor she asked, and it seems to me there were so many others I cannot remember them all.
There was, for instance, the time she came to dinner, uninvited, with the latest young man in tow. An eager puppy of a fellow, he was embarrassed to intrude, but so besotted with her he could not help but follow withersoever she led. At the time, the sight amused. I fed them rice and other foods, made them tea, and chatted idly over the sound of Prokofiev.
She often called on me, after that, to accompany them, as chaperone, and prevent the young man from making a scene or asking too many questions. It would not do, you see, if he made a fuss when she asked him to drive her to Boston, to visit one of her lovers at MIT. It would not do at all. A third (or perhaps a fourth?) was needed to diffuse the tension; and such was I. How could I mind, though, when they were young and vivacious, and the boy had such a beautiful neck?
She wanted to borrow the book, to read over the weekend. She was not what I would call a reader, for she read neither widely nor disrciminately, but she liked to have read what her friends had read – if the title piqued her interest. With no misgivings, I lent her the book.
When she returned the book a month later, I didn’t recognize it. The cover was mangled and torn, the pages dog-eared, thumbed (was that a spider I see squashed there at the cover – oh, it is, how nice), and the spine broken. All the life had gone out of it; the very words on the page seemed weary and plaintive, their phosphorescence worn away. The book, in its mute injury, seemed nearly as bitter and exhausted as that young man, the boy with the beautiful neck, who hadn’t even lasted the winter at her heels.
I didn’t get a chance to finish it, she said, I didn’t have time.
I handed the book back to her. Take all the time you need. I’ve finished with it long ago.
Gainful toil + useful work = wasted time. No reading. Only joy in Monteverdi & a bit of Horace and Pindar and Epicurus (‘Send me a little pot of cheese so that I can indulge in extravagance when I wish’, as per Diogenes Laertius) and Epictetus (Τῶν ἡδέων τὰ σπανιώτατα γινόμενα μάλιστα τέρπει – Those of our pleasures which come most rarely are especially delightful).
The first day alone; on my own. Faded grandeur of a forgotten self. Searching for lost books. Remembering old friends, neglected, of course, as they too often are. Baking scones, making tea. Existence in fragments. One cannot expect more. Even so.
Just a note: I realized what it was, that most important thing that I’d forgotten. No pretences, the game is over, the summer’s done. The hope of youth’s but a fond dream, and suits lighter souls than mine. Let us pretend no more.
It all comes down to a matter of contrast (if one wishes to deal with certainties). This dislocation springs, no doubt, from the abrupt difference of colors, the infinite bright variety replaced by a limited palette of infinite subtlety; a harsh chalk (or pastel) quality to the lines converted to a skillful watercolor. Even so, one cannot judge, nor really make apt comparisons; the brilliance of each would be undisputed, but they are so different in kind. My poor brain has gone all addled: I look for things, for people, that simply cannot be there—yet, strangely, am not disappointed…. Is it possible for lives to run parallel, keeping even pace alongside each other and only through a trick of perspective brushing closer at some distant point? It seems to me a rather artful construct, which robs it of much of its potential value as an image.
Walked along the trail up Hunchback Mountain for half an hour or so, before turning ’round again, leisurely ducking spiders’ webs and stopping to watch the flight of birds. At last, a moment wholly familiar.
Piling pebbles upon the beach, the water laps against the sky, the low sound measuring time’s loss, the imponderable construction of a memory. Set one foot, then, in front of the other, and take no moment to look back, but continue — onward.
::
ego hoc feci mm–mmx
© 2000–10 M.F.C.