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105th book of 2020.

I first attempted to read Proust in Paris, December last year, 2019. On the Eurostar, feeling sick and giddy from the early morning rise, I read it slowly. There had been some problem with the seating; my father, mother, brother and I found a young man sat in one of the four seats we had booked around a table. When we suggested he was in the wrong seat he denied it, assured us it was the seat marked on his ticket, but did not show his ticket. I offered to sit down the carriage in a vacant seat on a table of four with a woman and her son and daughter. They were American. The only thing I remember about them is that the daughter had a University of Boston phone case. That is all. And despite wandering out of Gard du Nord and spending the successive days wandering along the Seine, trying grappa as Hemingway once did, buying a copy of ‘The Outsider� in French, I could not urge myself to continue with Proust. I was bored. The language didn’t interest me, or impress me. Instead, I read Satori In Paris, and by the final day, had moved onto The War of the Worlds, which I started on a stool in a café not far from the Eiffel Tower.

It is now June, six months later. For less reason than anyone does anything, I took Proust off my bookcase and continued reading where I had left off. I hadn’t got far, I remembered what had happened, which frankly, wasn’t a lot. Swann mentions something about the “hierarchy of the arts,� which is an interesting concept, so I write it down as a potential quote to use in my coming dissertation. From then, I keep reading, and I find that in six months something had changed in Proust, or something had changed in me. It is the latter, of course. But what, I don’t know.

Because now I am enchanted. Reading Proust has become like finding a pool of water in a cave, which one imagines isn’t very deep, but once submerged, one realises the pool tunnels endlessly downwards. I am submerged; and, as I propel myself deeper, deeper still, it occurs to me that the water is becoming thicker, and by that, the water I have already passed through above me is weighing down on me too. Still, there is no bottom to speak of.

Recently I have become more irritated by noise. The solace and quiet of Proust, descending the silent pool of water, makes reality too noisy, too shallow. The characters� thoughts lap against my mind, as if soothing it. Half way through I think that Proust tells us how to live, that Swann’s Way is a book on how to live. I later discover that I was wrong � Proust does not teach us how to live, Proust illuminates how we live. He dissects living, all living; the memories of the narrator, the jealousy and love Swann feels, they are all things we have felt ourselves. And Proust’s tender voice turns a light to them, no brighter than moonlight and no louder than an evening’s waves, to show us.

I have written down on one page, “The steeples of Martinville allow me to picture the spire of Chichester Cathedral once more, it allows me to be younger. Happier, maybe.� I have noticed recently that when one is sad, one looks into the past at happier times, which in turn, makes one believe that they are only ever happier in the past. Nowadays, I spend my time pondering the past and aching, for I am tired of being happier then. I wish to be happier now. Proust has prompted me to explode, to look for beauty, in the ordinary. The way the moonlight lights the raindrops left on my bedroom windows. The perfect globe of shadow on my bed. I imagine Proust has made me question the familiar � that the brain closes its eyes to the familiar. That every night I lie in bed and forget that the moonlight cradles the raindrops above me as if a baby’s head. That the sounds of cats and foxes, the rattling windows, are all signs that the world is greater, that the world continues to exist, even when I am not conscious of it. The only world that no longer exists is the world of memory � it has died, and one remembers it, the same way one remembers the dead.

The streets are currently like memories. There are no cars on the road when I walk to the bakery; it is silent, save the birds, and occasionally the wailing of the level crossing, which has often found itself echoing in my dreams. Lockdown has settled on the town like slumber. When I am home again I sit with a cup of tea and continue to read, to circle deeper into the lives of the narrator, or Swann. I even admit to myself that Proust is boring by the common sense of the word, that nothing happens, but I cannot find myself from reading more, from falling in love with the endless reams of thought, of remembering, as if I need the narrator to remember his own life so I can remember my own.

The final pages of Combray make me want to weep. And later, everything Swann has felt I have felt before in damaged love. Some of the feelings and the dialogue so startlingly real, that I feel as if, sometimes, I am not reading, but looking into some sort of mirror. Proust slowly stuns one into silence, into melancholy and into reflection. The most real reflection comes from silence, maybe. I have identified one of the plants in our house as some ordinary fragment which I will hold onto in my memory. On certain occasions I find it sat in the bathtub, its giant stalk trailing out over the rim and onto the floor, like a giant twisting knot of hair. I find the green of its leaves against the white of the bathtub oddly pleasing to look at. It is not only the plant though, it is how the plant finds itself in the bathtub. I never see it moved from the top of the cupboard (where its leaves hang down like rope) to the bathtub. It is a testament to my mother’s invisible work around the house, keeping it running, clean, watered, alive. It is also lonely in the bathtub. The pot sat in an ether of white, waiting to be lifted back to its home.

Sundays, for me, balance on the precipice which falls one of two ways: the first, forwards into Monday, and the week of work and responsibility; the second, simply in the moment: peaceful, rainy (Sundays, in my mind’s eye are always rainy) and thoughtful. It is apt that on this Sunday I finish Swann’s Way. It is not raining, no, but my windows continue to blow down whenever I open them. I have a lot more to say, but not the words in which to say them. The final lines of Swann’s Way I will hold to my chest, and re-enter the world after lockdown with some new-found knowledge, maybe, or understanding, at least, with new-found beauty.