Reading Proust in Paris

Dears,

After a three or four hour ride on the TGV, I arrived in Montpellier from Paris this afternoon. I was originally hoping to take in all sorts of romantic scenery as it flew past along the way, but I pretty much passed out as soon as the train started moving. On arrival, the walk through what I think must be a very old and beautiful city center similarly passed by in the bewildering blur of two very cute and very energetic five year olds running ecstatic circles in and out of traffic and around me. And so here I am: in the South of France, in my room, writing with all of you, though many, many miles away.

I think the sleepy disorientation of the day has been the only constant of my past eight here in France-- in kind of a wondrous way, really. I read some of the Anne Fadiman essays you loaned me, Lili, my first morning on the Metropolitain. I began with that essay "You Are There" in which-- quite germane to the premise of this blog-- she describes the delicious phenomenon of reading books in the place they describe. It was a delightful eight-page prelude to tackling Proust's gargantuan In Search of Lost Time while I aimlessly wandered from one arrondissement to the next.

So I walked the Boulevard Haussmann and wondered with Marcel's great-aunt what it would be like for Swann to have had his mansion there instead of the Quai d'Orléans on the Île St-Louis. On Wednesday, I hunted down Proust's reassembled bedroom in the Carnavalet where most of the work was composed-- and where (it seems so far at least) the narration, the acts of recollection that form the seven-volume novel itself likewise occur. I took in the thin, fringed blue covelet draped over his bed, the cane perched on the small writing desk lacquered in black and gold, and I thought about how the "gusts of memory" that came to him in the one took on such an elegantly concrete form at the other.

But as nerdycool and exciting as it was to track these locations and material memorabilia, the project of "You-Are-There Reading" Proust resonated more as a place of mind and body than that of any map. The pseudo-delirium that fueled my first post here never quite faded; day by day, I set off to explore Paris almost entirely by foot after a spotty night of hostel sleep. No watch to tell time, no words to tell anyone else: I hardly spoke, I filled journal pages, I occasionally forgot to eat or drink anything but baguette bits and espresso until a clarifying dusk crept in around 10 or maybe 11. Wandering back to the hostel afterwards, I'd be exhausted but absolutely refused to let sleep in for another four or five hours because I craved the continuation of living alone outside of habit. Waking up each morning in an unfamiliar hostel bed, surrounded by unfamiliar people and sounds, the momentary dislocations of memory and time and even our very bodies that Proust describes so stunningly in the first few pages of Swann's Way registered immediately in a way that my own location couldn't. In my continued remove from any of a typical day's ordering principles like time or even other people, I felt a nearness to my thoughts and old memories and the new sights and sounds around me-- they drew together in moments like Proust's famous bite of madeleine or flooded my field of vision as I wandered Parisian cemeteries or sat dazed at some sidewalk cafe...

If any of you have read or plan to read Proust this summer too, I'd love to hear what you experience of reading it's like. A friend of a friend (who I hope I can now call my friend!) saw me lugging Swann's Way around the Jardin du Luxembourg, and he remarked that every bit of Proust bears re-reading two or three times and some dedicated pause for thought-- making the reading of the world's longest novel none the snappier. And it's true: I'm constantly amazed by how fantastically beautiful and complete (or perhaps contained?) each thought is on the level of the sentence. It's difficult for me at times to sustain my reading, as fascinating as I find it, precisely because of how it inspires my mind to wander. Sure, I could just have a short attention span as a result of a week's sleep deprivation, but I think there's also something to the way in which the novel seems to promote the slowness and expansiveness of thought and experience in the very experience of reading it.

But then again, I'm only 76 pages in.

From Montpellier with love,
Irene

PS Also, yay for *hearting* V. Woolf. I'll try to find a copy of The Waves at the English-language bookstore here. If I can find the English-language bookstore...