lost paws:

My roommate SW & I have been reading Remembrance of Things Past. Having both relocated to Portland OR, we have been experimenting with different levels of isolation -- the impetus for this experiment can be directly linked to the notably lower levels of intellectual substance in aforementioned metropolis. Everything moves at a snails pace here; I explained to one friend that it’s like the episode in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where Thompson reflects on the state of drug-culture: the high tide of Haight-Ashbury rolled back from Portland sometime in the 70s then two decades later the tide of Grunge rolled back from Seattle, and now all that’s left are the dead crustaceans and deep-sea fish stuck in the sand.

That said., this is the best possible time to beginning reading Remembrance, a novel, that I, like most of us, started at some point, put down at some point before the end of the introduction, then condemned as a waste of time like one of Proust’s perspective publishers (50 pages, and he’s still in bed – are you mad?). Well, the truth is, when you spend about as much time in bed as the invalid in the novel/Proust, and when your friends from far away call and ask you what your plans for the weekend are and you tell them: I plan on spending some time with Proust or could imagine yourself saying such a thing, then this is the best possible time to start reading… Having finished the first two books, I’m going to sit back and reflect on what it means to read Proust now, what it means to be alone when you’re doing that, and why Proust is sometimes your only friend.

Proust was a true original, and if you’re not convinced, he spells it out for you in the Guermantes Way when he describes his reaction to Berma’s performance in Phedre: “The talent of Berma, which had evaded me when I sought so greedily to seize its essential quality, now, after these years of oblivion, in this hour of indifference, imposed itself, with all the force of a thing directly seen, on my admiration. Formerly, in my attempts to isolate the talent, I deducted, so to speak, from what I heard the part itself, a part common to all the actresses who appeared as Phedre, which I had myself studied beforehand so that I might be capable of subtracting it, of receiving in the strained residue only the talent of Mme. Berma. But this talent which I sought to discover outside the part itself was indissolubly one with it.”

Proust may not have invented the practice of solitude in the novel, but he rarefied it to the point where he could extract its essential essence: memory. Few novels had successfully done it before Remembrance. Flaubert’s criminally underappreciated Temptation of St. Anthony, Huysmans’ Against Nature, and Dostoevsky all spring to mind. But solitude cultivated only madness and decay for these authors, not the sublime state of withdrawal that Proust cultivated. The excess of his reflection was not his downfall but his enlightenment.

Proust withdrew from society to write Remembrance; he rarely left his cork-lined room in the years of its production. It wasn’t just the feeling of having "already done it all" that drove him to do it, but also the desire to critique the society he once glamorized then frequented – at some point he discovered that these socialites did not even operate within the framework of their own social code. Throughout Remembrance Proust outlines the successive stages of appreciation, love, or whatever you want to call it. He knew that all names take on many disguises and meanings over time. They are glamorized (like the Balbec of his imagination), then they disappoint (like the Balbec of reality), then they build into something sublime (like the Balbec illuminated by Elstir & the his girlfriends), and then most of them crumble. The residue of this crumbling of signs allows Proust (and us) to evaluate these ruins: some are beautiful and some are only rubble. We rarely make these connections when we are wrapped up in the world they inhabit. Proust knew it took solitude to let these events fold out into memory proper.