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A few things about this blog:

Specifically, about the title and the platform. There are a handful of folks who might remember the blog I kept when I studied abroad in Florence, Italy, six years ago; it carried the same title, “Petits reticules,” a moniker I have always found fitting when it comes to expressing myself to others via words, since I have a small life that holds little interest to others, since for whatever reason over the years I have felt some kind of urge to let people know about the very small, insignificant things that I am doing and feeling and saying and thinking.

The name comes from a passage in Demons, by Dostoevsky (an author who, outside of that novel and his story “The Double,” I really don’t care for), which I have always found particularly delightful: “He suddenly dropped a tiny bag, which he was holding in his left hand; though indeed it was not a bag, but rather a little box, or more probably some part of a pocket-book, or to be more accurate a little reticule, rather like an old-fashioned lady’s reticule, though I really don’t know what it was.” My blog is a reticule of much the same type, and in the end, I really don’t know what it is.

As for the platform, I spent some time researching blog providers, trying to come up with a name (the original idea was to call it “Recherche, Recherche,” because it’s the second time I’m reading Proust and it’s also a really bad Seinfeld pun), trying to figure out what it would look like. Those types of details are not my forte, and in the end, I decided that, in the spirit of the fourth dimension, I would revive my old blog, incredibly embarrassing posts from when I was 21 years old and all. It made sense to me to loop myself back to another time, to embrace another slice of myself rather than try to banish it.

But, some other Christine, somewhere along the way (probably deep in a drunken 2 am Sheryl Crow music video binge), decided that the evidence of her sophomoric musings was too damning, and deleted the whole thing outright. Another slice of myself. So, I started from scratch. You can probably tell that I really half-assed it in terms of setting this blog up and making it look pretty. But it’s not about the presentation, it’s about the thoughts and the words, both mine and Marcel’s. It’s about a continuation of sorts of the self that I present to others. In a few years, I’ll probably be as embarrassed by this blog as I was by the previous one; but I think I’ll let this one stay right where it is.

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Week 2: Initial Thoughts on “Swann in Love”

The following was written a week ago; I was so taken by this text that the only thing that could distract me from it was the inherent need to record how taken I was with it:

I have just finished reading the first 60 pages of “Swann in Love”; it only took about five pages before a little sob, an intake of breath that could just as easily been a cry of pleasure as one of pain, escaped my mouth, and a decent amount of tears followed in the next 50 pages. It should be noted that I’m a bleeding heart, a sucker for love, and a terrific crier. Every movie I go to see, sad or not, I’m more than likely bawling at some point—I don’t even know why; I don’t ever cry when watching movies at home (which I do most nights a week), but the second I get in the theater the flood lets loose. Still, I didn’t expect to be so affected. 

But a lot of my response to this, the most famed and well-known section of the novel, is highly personal in a way that won’t fade in a few days or a week. Because I read this thing when I was 20 years old, and then just two years later, I let myself fall into the same miserable trap that Swann does: Swann meets a woman who, while not necessarily attractive to him, is amenable to his desires; he spends time with her, while all the while entertaining other women and never thinking he could be attached to this one who holds so little charm for him; before long, habit has obliterated all he once identified himself as, and he plays the fool. It is a little startling to look back on my own experience, much the same, while rereading this section. It seems as impossible to me now that I should have fallen for it, as it would have seemed to Swann before he ever entered the household of the Verdurins.

I considered writing something about that relationship, my first serious one, in relation to my current reading experience, but the truth of it would come across as shit-talking. I’m not really bitter about it, and think of that person quite rarely. Suffice it to say that he did a number on me, and that his behavior was quite as crude as Odette de Crecy’s.

***

Since writing the above a week ago, I have read the majority of the rest of “Swann in Love”; I will complete it immediately after posting this—I would have finished sooner, but I have had some interesting developments in my life that I am trying to square. 

I wrote down one quote from this section: “How readily he would have sacrificed all his connections for no matter what person who was in the habit of seeing Odette, even if she were a manicurist or shop assistant! He would have put himself out for her, taken more trouble than he would have for a queen.”

Is this not the very definition of love? We can put it in lofty, lovely terms, but in the end, it is about effort, it is about obsession, it is about a degree of care that is reachable under only one circumstance. It is power and weakness at the same time. It is a show of force and a shying away. It is so easily taken advantage of. I am beginning to wonder what I hope to achieve with this project as I immerse myself again in this world; as I begin to remember that this theme of the deception and corruption of others’ most sincere emotions is a major theme of this work. But then, I recall the aspects of those “others” that were equally deplorable. Is this novel about the fruitlessness of love? The inherently amazing beauty of it? The crass reality of it? My suspicion is that it is a complex amalgamation of all those things and many others. A maze I am about to incontrovertibly enter as I begin volume two, Within A Budding Grove.

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Week 1: Combray

It’s been a week now since I picked up my copy of Swann’s Way at the library, and I have just finished the first section of the book, “Combray.” I’m disappointed in myself for reading so little in a week, but I am confident that I’ll have a better record to report next week. Anyway…

“Combray” is the part of the Recherche that is most familiar to myself and most likely to anyone reading this, as well, since it’s just the first 250 pages.

What struck me most, and what I’m most excited about (full disclosure: I only put the book down ten minutes ago) is the structure, which is meandering and seemingly structure-less and yet is constantly circling back on itself, every detour leading back to the source. This quality is something that really drew me to the work of Karl Ove Knausgaard last year (and has me freaking for the English translation of the sixth and final volume, due out in April!), but it makes a lot of sense that it’s present in the Norwegian’s prose, since he rather regularly mentions the Recherche in his Struggle. There’s something so effortless about this structure, something that feels like the natural flow of thought, and yet is it clearly quite carefully calculated.

That said, because of this structure, the plot is a little more obtuse than at other points in the larger narrative: while all of the action is taking place in Marcel’s childhood, that action jumps from place to place more recklessly than elsewhere in the novel, where we’ll find the action to follow a more recognizable pattern of time and setting.

I wrote down one quote from this section; I wrote it while on the bus to go see Jackie, a film I liked much more than I expected to, and my bumpy bus writing felt appropriate, just as the message of this one sentence seemed to fit in with what I am hoping to accomplish here, namely, something I do not yet know myself: “I seek my way again, I turn a corner.…but….the goal is in my heart.”

In the last week, I have received my first out-of-town visitor of the year, sweet Matt, who was on a brief leave from his Fulbright in Madrid—we had drinks, petted a bulldog, ate tater tots, looked at lots of art, and smiled very wide; I saw three films in the theater (my weekly average), the best of which was 20th Century Women; I made some interesting choices and then made some choices about the kind of interesting choices I will make in the future; I went on a disastrous first date; I listened mostly to Avalon by Roxy Music, Tusk by Fleetwood Mac, and Sheer Mag; I was pushed away by a friend who sought to devalue my giving nature, but I stuck up for myself and the inherent worth of the love I extend to others. In many ways, a fairly typical week.

Next up, the second half of the first volume, “Swann in Love.” It’s supposed to be 60 degrees and sunny in Chicago on Saturday!

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Recherche, recherche

The summer I was twenty, I read A la recherche du temps perdu in its entirety. I’m now nearly twenty-eight. My life is weird and empty in a lot of ways and I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve been going through a serious loss and I’m picking up and dusting off the pieces of myself I can still use. And I am feeling drawn to the Recherche again, and I follow my feelings these days, for better or for worse. This novel taught me a lot in my initial experience with it, and I think it probably has a lot more to say to me now.

Here is what I remember of that summer in 2009: I lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; it was the summer after my sophomore year at the town’s university, and the first summer I ever spent away from my hometown. I lived in a room in a house with people whom I did not know well and never tried to get to know; my inherent shyness kept me confined to my room or, better yet, out with friends or at my home-away-from-home, the Open Eye Café.  My room was barely furnished: a bed, a desk, a computer chair. No decoration. No personality. It was temporary housing, just for the summer.

My hair was long, long, long, and my heart was green.

I was reckless, wild. My legs stretched on forever from daringly short skirts, and I stood well over six feet in the heels I was always wearing. My hair reached past my waist, shiny and strong. I danced in bars and at house parties and at the many shows I saw at the Cat’s Cradle and Local 506. I drove a forest green minivan well stocked with Prince and Talking Heads cassettes. I went to summer school classes in the mornings and always stopped for an ice cream cone on my walk home from campus.

                                        The author at age 20, 4 July 2009

No man had ever given me his heart. My own heart had never truly been broken. I had not yet felt the slow, sad, unstoppable drift that pulls you away from a friend you thought would always be near to you. I felt so grown up then, but I didn’t understand anything.

That summer, I began work as a cashier at the grocery store where townies and students alike shopped. I read Proust on my fifteen- and thirty-minute breaks. Often, during a very long shift, the only thing that kept me going was that little bit of reading time.  I read Proust while sitting on my bed, listening to Grouper’s Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill over and over again on my laptop speakers; some days I could go as much as five or six hours without doing anything but reading, getting up only to replay the record. I read Proust at the coffeeshop, and I read it aloud at house parties to people who could barely even hold their cigarettes aloft. I read it in less than three months. The only other people I know who have read the whole thing are tenured professors at highly respected universities.

Now, as I approach the age of twenty-eight, I find myself thinking more and more that I want to reread Proust. Because I read voraciously in the last year and love myself for it, and love some of the things that it’s done for me. Because in reading a lot of Haruki Murakami and Karl Ove Knausgaard this year, Proust’s monumental work came up quite a bit. Because in 2009 I was a girl and now I am a woman. Because it’s an outlet for a voice I haven’t really used in a while. Because I want to reclaim and renew the meaning this book has for me. Because it’s about love and time and the way that every slice of ourselves adds up to something that we try to define as a self. Because something about it is just calling to me, and I heed myself. Just because. And that, in the end, is the only reason that ever really matters.

I keep thinking to myself, my god, this is the most pretentious thing I’ve ever publicly done. Who reads Proust? Who reads it twice? Who tries to write about self- and literary discovery and the fourth dimension and the mutability and immutability of time in relation to the Recherche? My answer to all those questions is: Haters go home. I’m doing this for me, for my heart, for my mind, the same damn way I did it the first time.

At twenty, I was checking out volumes of the Recherche from the university library without thought or care for the translation; this time, I’ve actually considered the issue, and have decided to read the Enright editions—originally translated by Moncrieff, updated by Kilpatrick, and then finally, updated again by Enright. I’m highly aware of the imperfections and problems posed by Moncrieff’s translation, but it is the one that introduced English speakers to Proust, and with two updates, it seems to remain the best out there.

                                        The author now, 31 December 2016

When I first read this book, I basically read it straight through, maybe giving myself a day or two between volumes. I don’t have a plan for this current endeavor, but I don’t see it looking like that. I definitely see myself reading plenty of other books alongside and in between the seven volumes. But I’m hoping to make a weekly update on my progress, along with general thoughts on the fourth dimension and its implications in my life—much more noticeable now than at twenty. I don’t really know what to expect of this, the same way I don’t know what to expect of the year. It’s a time for time, is the only way I can figure it.