It is easy to be humbled by a single page of Proust.
Days in the past cover up little by little those that preceded them and are themselves buried beneath those that follow them. But each past day has remained deposited in us, as in a vast library where, even of the oldest books, there is a copy which doubtless nobody will ever ask to see. And yet should this day from the past, traversing the translucency of the intervening epochs, rise to the surface and spread itself inside us until it covers us entirely, then for a moment names resume their former meaning, people their former aspect, we ourselves our state of mind at the time, and we feel, with a vague suffering which however is endurable and will not last for long, the problems which have long ago become insoluble and which caused us such anguish at the time.
–Marcel Proust
They just don’t write sentences like that anymore. Of course, even in Proust’s time, they usually didn’t write sentences like that, probably for good reasons. First, people just didn’t understand them. Second, those people weren’t Marcel Proust.
This is a set of three interlocking sentences that are constructed to fit each other so melodically. The first one is, relatively speaking, short. (In other words, it’s a normal-length modern sentence.) The second one is longer, but builds beautifully on the profoundness of what came before it. And the third is a story of its own, the main character created in the first sentence and narrowed to a particular one by the second rising above and spreading its wings over us, reminding us that this too shall pass, as it has and always will.
This is another selection, like the first one in this series, that makes me feel small, knowing that I didn’t come up with it.
It is also an example of why many avid readers, many of whom are writers themselves, avoid reading Proust. The size of his masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) is intimidating all by itself. Then there’s the humbling feeling of “why bother writing when it’s all been said better already by The Simpsons Marcel Proust?” Then there’s the dread of absorbing that style, thereby rendering oneself permanently unpublishable.
There’s the silver lining: absolutely nothing like this would ever get published today. (Of course, it wasn’t publishable even then: Proust had to pay the publisher’s costs for the first volume.) But since it was once, we can enjoy it forever.
Next week: Jorge Luis Borges on the beauty of a DIY soul.
See the index for what’s been posted and what’s to come.
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