My Years With Proust - Day 432

But the motor-car respects no mystery, and, having passed through Incarville, whose houses still danced before my eyes, as we were going down the by-road that leads to Parville (Paterni villa), catching sight of the sea from a natural terrace over which we were passing, I asked the name of the place, and before the chauffeur had time to reply recognised Beaumont, close by which I passed thus without knowing it whenever I took the little train, for it was within two minutes of Parville.  Like an officer in my regiment who might have struck me as someone special, too kindly and unassuming to be a nobleman, or altogether too remote and mysterious to be merely a nobleman, and whom I then might have discovered to be the brother-in-law or the cousin of people with whom I often dined, so Beaumont, suddenly linked with places from which I supposed it to be so distinct, lost its mystery and took its place in the district, making me think with terror that Madame Bovary and the Sanseverina might perhaps have seemed to me to be like ordinary people, had I met them elsewhere than in the closed atmosphere of a novel.  It may be thought that my love of enchanted journeys by train ought to have kept me from sharing Albertine's wonder at the motor-car which takes even an invalid whenever he wishes to go and prevents one from thinking - as I had done hitherto - of the actual site as the individual mark, the irreplaceable essence of irremovable beauties.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1037-1038

For some reason this section reminds me of my most excellent friend Sanford Zale, who will often opine that "everything was better in the past."  Actually, for the most part I don't think everything was better in the past.  Certainly, some things are.  You just have to read what passes for observation, analysis and argument in the vast majority of college papers to understand how the death of reading has led to the concomitant death, by intellectual strangulation, of thought.  Yes, we - and I do definitely include myself in this general condemnation - all have smart phones which allow us to access all the information in the world at any time, but, as I've opined before, it has taken away the mystery and I would argue the beauty from knowledge.  Now it is just a commodity, and like all commodities it must be delivered as cheaply and quickly as possible.  Proust is making a similar point in regards to the passing of the age of trains and the rise of automobiles has now made more and more places accessible, and thus more common and less unique and truly beautiful.  He regrets that the village of Beaumont was "suddenly linked with places from which I supposed it to be so distinct, lost its mystery and took its place in the district, making me think with terror that Madame Bovary and the Sanseverina might perhaps have seemed to me to be like ordinary people, had I met them elsewhere than in the closed atmosphere of a novel."  Once again, we are drawn back to perception and its domination over every aspect of our lives.

My Years With Proust - Day 431

   Every day I went out with Albertine.  She had decided to take up painting again and had chosen as the subject of her first attempts the church of Saint-Jean-de-la-Haise which nobody ever visited and very few had even heard of, which was difficult to get directions to, impossible to find without being guided, and laborious to reach in its isolation, more than half an hour from Epreville station, after one had long left behind the last houses of the villages of Quetteholme.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 1026

OK, on the surface this sounds like the very definition of another White Privilege problem, but nevertheless I was drawn to this particular passage.  For the first time in a while I felt myself being drawn to Albertine, mainly because of her desire to head off the beaten path and to explore new areas - and, yes, I am cognizant of the obvious sexual metaphor Proust is constructing.

Beauty

OK, it's not as if I haven't posted beautiful pictures from the deck of the St. John's Club before, and yet here's another one.  It really hit me last night how blessed I am, and what a beautiful life I lead.  This is something I meditate on when I'm praying because I want to keep it in my mind all the time.  Prayer is a tricky thing (at least for me) and it took me a long time to come to peace with it.  I don't think that God (He/She/It/They, depending upon your own belief system) is so vain and/or insecure that He/She/It/They needs you to tell Him/Her/It/Them how great they are all the time. Nor do I view God as my equivalent to Amazon.com, which runs the risk of turning prayer into an exchange - and we already commodify enough in our misguided and short-sighted lives.  Eventually I've reached the point where I view prayer as a meditative practice, and a big part of it for me is to focus on what I, personally, need to work on, but also to always take time to focus on what I have.  Marcus Aurelius pointed out that if everything in your stupid life disappeared tomorrow - the very things you gripe about on a regular basis - think how you would beg to have them all back again.  Not to sound too much like Lester Burnham from American Beauty, but the older I get, I guess naturally, I try and think more about the things in my stupid little life.  So, last night was just another night at the SJC, replete with old friends (Mike, Sanford, Debbie, Steve, Kerry, Kevin), new friends (Alice), good news (Andy and Heidi are coming back in August) and my son looking happier than I can remember (and not simply because I bought him a membership to the St. John's Club), and it all came together to remind me how lucky I am.

And speaking of American Beauty, from the first time I saw it I always felt a greater kinship with the weird neighbor kid fixated on beauty than the middle-aged guy dreaming of cheating with the cheerleader.

My Years With Proust - Day 430

   One can of course maintain that there is but one time, for the futile reason that it is by looking at the clock that one established as being merely a quarter of an hour what one had supposed a day.  But at the moment of establishing this, one is precisely a man awake, immersed in the time of waking men, having deserted the other time.  Perhaps indeed more than another time: another life.  We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence.  To take only the most grossly sensual of them all, which of us, on waking, has not felt a certain irritation at having experienced in his sleep a pleasure which, if he is anxious not to tire himself, he is not, once he is awake, at liberty to repeated indefinitely during that day.  It seems a positive waste.  We have had pleasure in another life which is not ours.  If we enter up in a budget the pains and pleasures of dreams (which generally vanish soon enough after our waking), it is not in the current account of our everyday life.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 1015

Proust continues his discourse on sleep and the differences between the waking world and the sleeping world.  Included in this reflection is what may be the most gently evasive discussion of a wet dream one can imagine: "We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence.  To take only the most grossly sensual of them all, which of us, on waking, has not felt a certain irritation at having experienced in his sleep a pleasure which, if he is anxious not to tire himself, he is not, once he is awake, at liberty to repeated indefinitely during that day.  It seems a positive waste."  That said, it forms a nice metaphor for the separation between the two worlds, and our frustration at "wasting" beauty in a dream that we cannot produce in the waking world.  Of course, there's also a lesson here.  The most obvious reason why you might have a wet dream is that you're not having any sex in the waking world, and thus you should be trying to live your life more passionately and fully.  Is there a Walter Mitty-esque correlation between a tedious life and an extraordinary dream life (even a waking dream life)?  Maybe we should hope for a life where we have tedious dreams.

My Years With Proust - Day 429

   At all events, in these awakenings which I have just described, and which I experienced as a rule when I had been dining overnight at la Raspeliere, everything occurred as though by this process, and I can testify to it, I, the strange human who, while he waits for death to release him, lives behind closed shutters, knowing nothing of the world, sits motionless as an owl, and like that bird can only see things at all clearly in the darkness. Everything occurs as though by this process, but perhaps only a wad of cotton-wool has prevented the sleeper from taking in the internal dialogue of memories and the incessant verbiage of sleep. For (and this may be equally manifest in the other, vaster, more mysterious, more astral system) at the moment of his entering the waking state, the sleeper hears a voice inside him saying: "Will you come to this dinner to-night, it would be so nice?" and thinks: "Yes, how nice it would be, I shall go"; then, growing wider away, he suddenly remembers: "My grandmother has only a few weeks to live, so the doctor assures us." He rings, he weeps at the thought that it will not be, as in the past, his grandmother, his dying grandmother, but an indifferent valet that will come in answer to his summons.  Moreover, when sleep bore him so far away from the world inhabited by memory and thought, through an ether in which he was alone, more than alone, without even the companionship of self-perception, he was outside the range of time and its measurements.  But now the waiter is in the room, and he dares not ask him the time, for he does not know whether he has slept, for how many hours he has slept (he wonders whether it should not be how many days, with such a weary body, such a rested mind, such a homesick heart has he returned, as from a journey too distant not to have taken a long time).

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1014-1015

I find the following passage heartbreaking: " . . . I can testify to it, I, the strange human who, while he waits for death to release him, lives behind closed shutters, knowing nothing of the world, sits motionless as an owl, and like that bird can only see things at all clearly in the darkness."  It's not that Proust didn't routinely write more beautiful or haunting lines, but it's difficult to imagine that he ever wrote one more true.  We all know the stories of Proust's final days, living as a recluse, writing continually, trying to finish Remembrance of Things Past before he died, and only venturing out in the middle of the night.  In an obviously much less profound, or tragic, way it reminded me of the Neil Young song Don't Be Denied, which is buried on the overlooked album Time Fades Away (mainly because Young refuses to release it to CD, his only album so abandoned).  Don't Be Denied is Young's most honest song, and I've often wondered if this helps explain why he hasn't released the album to CD; he claims it's because of the limitations of the recording, but, come on, this is the Godfather of Grunge, and he's made a career out of distortion and feedback.  Cycling back to Proust, certainly all of art is a personal reflection, but are there times when the artist is too honest and it just cuts too close to the bone?  One of the reasons why I love James Ellroy's My Dark Places is, beyond the fascinating and unsuccessful attempt to solve his mother's murder (another metaphor of how he failed her), his brutally honest reflection on his childhood (how many authors, especially in the macho genre of roman noire, would discuss their circle jerks?).   I'm over thirteen-hundred posts into this decade-long blog and I sometimes wonder if I've ever told the truth in any one of them?  Would it really be any different if I were writing in a journal buried in the bottom of the desk drawer in my office?  Maybe if we tell the entire truth we have completely lost control of the narrative, and for that matter our lives?
   

My Years With Proust - Day 428

   Perhaps every night we accept the risk of experiencing, while we are asleep, sufferings which we regard as null and void because they will be felt in the course of a sleep which we suppose to be unconscious.  And indeed on these evenings when I came back late from la Raspeliere I was very sleepy.  But after the weather turned cold I could not get to sleep at once, for the fire lights up the room as though there were a lamp burning in it.  Only it was nothing more than a brief blaze, and - like a lamp too, or like the daylight when night falls - its too bright light was not long in fading; and I entered the realm of sleep, which is like a second dwelling into which we move for that one purpose.  It has noises of its own and we are sometimes violently awakened by the sound of bells, perfectly heard by our ears, although nobody has run.  It has its servants, its special visitors who call to take us out, so that we are ready to get up when we are compelled to realise, by our almost immediate transmigration into the other dwelling, our waking one, that the room is empty, that nobody has called.  The face that inhabits it, like that of our first human ancestors, is androgynous.  A man in it appears a moment later in the form of a woman.  Things in it show a tendency to turn into men, men into friends and enemies.  The time that elapses for the sleeper, during these spells of slumber, is absolutely different from the time in which the life of the waking man is passed.  Sometimes its course is far more rapid - we think we have taken only a short nap, when we have slept through the day.  Then, in the chariot of sleep, we descend into depths in which memory can no longer keep up with it, and on the brink of which the mind has been obliged to retrace its steps.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 1013

" . . . I entered the realm of sleep, which is like a second dwelling into which we move for that one purpose.  It has noises of its own and we are sometimes violently awakened by the sound of bells, perfectly heard by our ears, although nobody has run.  It has its servants, its special visitors who call to take us out, so that we are ready to get up when we are compelled to realise, by our almost immediate transmigration into the other dwelling, our waking one, that the room is empty, that nobody has called." Proust reflects upon the world of dreams.  As much as dreams play such a central role in popular culture, and for that matter the popular imagination, I wonder if dreams will ever mean in the future what they meant for future generations?  We've long since left behind the belief that God or the Gods spoke to us in dreams.  Even Freud's belief in the Id and the Unconscious possessed a certain romantic charm, or at least a logic we could understand.  If the neuroscientists are correct and dreams are just one part of the brain shuffling memories and trying to create a narrative out of random sparks from another, more primitive, part of the brain then we've definitely dispensed with a lot of the magic.

I guess this is speaking to me right now because I had the strangest dream last night and it woke me up and wouldn't let me get back to sleep, mainly because I immediately started trying to sort it out.  It wasn't disconcerting in the way that scary dreams are, and I have enough dreams with monsters or ghosts (too much imagination for my own good), but rather it didn't seem to make any sense, but yet hinted at the fact that it did make a lot of sense if I just looked closer.  My ex-wife and son and I had just moved to Vermont and couldn't find a place to live, which was actually true at the time.  In the dream we bought an old gas station because it was all we could afford and we were planning on living in it.  The upstairs of the gas station (illogically, but logically based on a David Lynch dream logic - as Proust reports: "The face that inhabits it, like that of our first human ancestors, is androgynous.  A man in it appears a moment later in the form of a woman.") was the second floor of the house in Barre which we did eventually move into all those years ago.  We never actually went up there, but I knew it to  be the case.  Repairmen were still converting the gas station into a living space, which included taking down signs and lights - and selling the last cases of beer to passers-by.  People were stopping to look in the windows, and we discussed the need to get curtains so we could have some privacy.  My old friends Bill and Kathy Farrington were there briefly, and they helped me clean off a couple large flat rocks that were on top of a dresser.  There was also an African-American man there that I didn't realize, who had stopped by to welcome us and lamented the fact that I had not accepted the job he offered, which led us into a friendly discussion where I reconsidered his offer (of what I don't know, but he was very friendly and excited that I was reconsidering).  I woke up, not with a sense of dread, but rather that I was missing something important that I could unlock if I just studied the dream.  Again, Proust - "Then, in the chariot of sleep, we descend into depths in which memory can no longer keep up with it, and on the brink of which the mind has been obliged to retrace its steps." When I woke up at 4:30 I began to retrace my steps, but the only greater truth I discovered is that I'm clearly a lunatic - and now a tired lunatic.

My Years With Proust - Day 427

"But it's a superb position.  If it wasn't for the travelling, it would be a dream.  I'm the only one still on the shelf.  But you never know.  We're a lucky family; perhaps one day I shall be President of the Republic.  But I'm keeping you babbling" (I had not uttered a single word and was beginning to fall asleep as I listened to the flow of his).  "Good-night, sir.  Oh! thank you, sir.  If everybody had as kind a heart as you, there wouldn't be any poor people left.  But, as my sisters says, 'there must always be poor people so that now that I'm rich I can shit on them.' You'll pardon the expression.  Good-night, sir."

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 1012

We've now moved into "Chapter Three" or "Part Two" or Cities of the Plain, which opens up with an odd exchange between a very sleepy Marcel and a page, and not the lift-boy, in the elevator.  The page explains his own family's aspirations, while also sharing his sister's theory on the need for the poor: "so that now that I'm rich I can shit on them." It is one of the peculiarities of history that the group which has traditionally shown the most disdain for the poor is the group which last climbed out of poverty itself.  At least in the US this might be nothing more than a perverse misreading of the Protestant work ethic, but my supposition is that it simply makes them feel better about themselves; we all need someone to shit on.  In the US the situation is made more complicated by the racism that links not very far beneath the surface at all times.  Just look at so many of the people who voted for Trump.  There lives have been destroyed by corporate greed and a the avarice of the 1%, and yet they are driven by an all-consuming hatred of blacks or Mexicans or Muslims; groups which have done essentially nothing to them.  On Twitter yesterday I was following a thread where an Islamic scholar, in response to questions about the faith, was suggesting a number of books about Islam.  Suddenly several trolls jumped in and posted pictures of bacon and called Muhammad a pedophile. Of course, they had pro-Trump statements on their home page.  Now, what exactly had any Muslim ever done to these people?  If they are poor folks in America their situation has doubtlessly been made worse by the actions of corporate America and the 1%, and their hero has been busy destroying the very social safety net that was allowing them to hang on - but they devote their time to savaging, and then essentially fist-bumping other Twitter racists, a scholar who was trying to do nothing more than answers questions about his faith.  Yes, it's Islamophobia and it's racism, but it's also something more.  Somehow they felt better about themselves based on their ability to shit on someone else.

My Years With Proust - Day 426

"Anyhow, you'll see that it will be one of my most successful Wednesdays.  I don't want to have any boring women. You mustn't judge by this evening, which has been a complete failure.  Don't try to be polite, you can't have been more bored that [sic] I was, I myself thought it was deadly.  It won't always be like to-night, you know!  I'm not thinking of the Cambremers, who are impossible, but I've known society people who were supposed to be agreeable, and compared with my little nucleus they didn't exist.  I heard you say that you thought Swann clever.  I must say, to my mind it's greatly exaggerated, but without even speaking of the character of the man, which I've always found fundamentally antipathetic, sly, underhand, I often had him to dinner on Wednesdays.  Well, you can ask the others, even compared with Brichot, who is far from being a genius, who's a good secondary schoolmaster whom I got into the Institute all the same, Swann was simply nowhere.  He was so dull!"  And as I expressed a contrary opinion: "It's the truth.  I don't want to say a word against him since he was your friend, indeed he was very fond of you, he spoke to me about you in the most charming way, but ask the others here if he ever said anything interesting, at our dinners.  That, after all, is the test.  Well, I don't know why it was, but Swann, in my house, never seemed to come off, one got nothing out of him.  And yet the little he had he picked up here." I assured her that he was highly intelligent. "No, you only thought that because you didn't know him as long as I did.  Really, one got to the end of him very soon.  I was always bored to death by him." (Translation: "He went to the la Tremoilles and the Guermantes and knew that I didn't.")  "And I can put up with anything except being bored.  That I cannot stand!"

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1003-1004

Mme Verdurin launches a long screed on her hatred of boredom, and in the process manages to insult Marcel's late friend Charles Swann (who dominated so much of the early stages of Remembrance of Things Past; I found it oddly sad to hear him described in the past tense).  Boredom is something I've thought about a lot over the years, not because I'm often bored but because I seldom bored.  First off, what does boredom even mean?  If you think about it, a protestation of boredom is in many the very definition of White Privilege, both from Mme Verdurin and from petulant teenagers (and petulant not-quite teenagers and, even worse, petulant post-teenagers and petulant dramatically post-teenagers).  The vast majority of people who ever lived didn't have time to be bored because too much of their time was devoted to surviving.  Plus, it can, obviously, be pretty subjective.  Years ago when my wife Brenda and I lived in Cincinnati during graduate school there was this, even then, fairly dilapidated little theater, which I'm sure was demolished or re-purposed years ago.  It would often show that rarity of rarities in today's world, the double feature.  Since we were poor as church mice we would occasionally go, and one time they had the odd double feature of Top Gun and Witness.  They made sense on a timeline of 1980s movies, but could not be more different thematically.  I remember being bored stupid by the Tom Cruise movie featuring fighter jets and liking every moment of Harrison Ford helping the Amish to build a barn. When I was a teenager I remember my Mom telling me quite clearly that it was not her job to entertain me, which should have elicited the appropriate teenage eye roll but somehow resonated with me.  Now, that may have made sense because I grew up in a different age, and in the middle of a cornfield, and was a voracious reader, so turning inside myself was a very easy and natural option, and I think even today I live inside myself to an extraordinary degree.  So could the issue of boredom can be something as simple as whether one lives more externally or internally?  I have a marked tendency, which my girlfriend (and doubtless every girlfriend I've ever had or will ever have) can attest, to "disappear," although as I think of it is less a case of trying to removing myself from the presence of someone I find boring or distasteful but rather my own natural inclination to retreat into my own mind.  I'm talking about this because it makes me think of Mme Verdurin's critique of Swann: "Really, one got to the end of him very soon."  Of course, people's perceptions of you can be odd if not comically incorrect.  Jo Ames, one of my students, happens to know a couple who are old friends with my girlfriend, which surprised her (I suspect because students assume that we actually only exist in our office or classrooms, or in her case, the streets of Madrid and Lisbon).  They told her that they considered me a very quiet and humble man, which she found pretty hysterical; in turn, this led to me explaining to her that maybe in their presence I was that way, not that it is my natural state of affairs, but because they weren't my students and thus I wasn't in my Scudder performance piece mode.  In regards to Swann, my supposition is that he found her crowd tedious and hence didn't interact and instead retreated into his own mind, or maybe he just turned into a mirror and reflected back whatever he saw.  Either way, Swann is the character I've always felt the most affinity for as the novel has unfolded.

Another?

Yes, another silly picture of me featuring my Rising Sun, Indiana shirt in some exotic locale, this time on the beach at the Yala Nature Preserve in southern Sri Lanka.  My student John Van Egas sent it along, and hence I'm putting it up on the blog.  Someday I'll actually collect them all in one blog post, or maybe even send it to the small hometown newspaper of Rising Sun.

I think that's also my Savannah Sand Gnats baseball hat, which is getting pretty ratty but nevertheless always ends up tossed into the suitcase.

My Years With Proust - Day 425

   "Do you intend to remain long on this coast?" Mme Verdurin asked M. de Charlus, in whom she foresaw an addition to the faithful and trembled lest he should be returning too soon to Paris.

   "Goodness me, one never knows," replied M. de Charlus in a nasal drawl.  "I should like to stay until the end of September."

   "You are quite right," said Mme Verdurin; "that's when we get splendid storms at sea."

   "To tell you the truth, that is not what would influence me.  I have for some time past unduly neglected the Archangel Michael, my patron saint, and I should like to make amends to him by staying for his feast, on the 29th of September, at the Abbey on the Mount."

   "You take an interest in all that sort of thing?" asked Mme Verdurin, who might perhaps have succeeded in hushing the voice of her outraged anti-clericalism had she not been afraid that so long an expedition might make the violinist and the Barton "defect" for forty-eight hours.

   "You are perhaps afflicted with intermittent deafness," M. de Charlus replied insolently.  "I had told you that Saint Michael is one of my glorious patrons." Then, smiling with a benevolent ecstasy, his eyes gazing into the distance, his voice reinforced by an exaltation which seemed now to be not merely aesthetic but religious: "It is so beautiful at the Offertory when Michael stands erect by the altar, in a white robe, swinging a golden censer heaped so high with perfumes that the fragrance of them mounts up to God."

   "We might go there in a party," suggest Mme Verdurin, notwithstanding her horror of the clergy.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 989

M. de Charlus and Mme Verdurin are discussing his travel plans.  While I like the subtle Proustian ironic juxtoposition of M. de Charlus discussing his faith with moments such as Mme Verdurin considering M. de Charlus to be a member of "the faithful," although in this case a social one, and the mention of "splendid storms at sea," I think I mainly included this passage because it somehow seems to relate to my last post about the trip to the masjid.  When I was considering bringing the students I thought there might be two very different students who might kick back a bit - students who were remarkably religious but tied to a different faith or students who were passionately atheistic (and, truthfully, I was more worried about the latter than the former).  However, in some ways both ends of the spectrum can have something in common: intolerance of other ideas.  We discussed Nasr's idea of a "secular fundamentalist" before, and I figured this is what I might run into on the proposed masjid trip.  Happily, the students were excited, or at least accepting, of the opportunity, which I will attribute to the wonderfully tolerant nature of life in Vermont.

Visit to the Masjid

This semester for the first time I decided to take students for a visit to the Islamic Society of Vermont, which is essentially our only mosque in the state.  I've taught several classes dealing with Islam and the Islamic world, but had never considered arranging for a visit.  Truthfully, I think this had more to do with the logistics than their welcome at the mosque itself (the good folks at the ISVT are notoriously friendly).  Happily, two of my students, Logan Rice and Ryan McCarthy, are van certified (as am I), so we just reserved all three school vans, and it was so easy to pull off I'm already kicking myself for not doing it earlier.  The ISVT is very happy to have people swing by for the Friday communal prayer, and even join in the prayers if they want, and I since we've spent all semester discussing the faith in my Dar al-Islam: Yemen class I thought it would be a great way to end the class.  At this particular masjid the men pray downstairs and the women pray upstairs (at least until the latest building renovation is complete), which meant I'd be downstairs with the male students and the female students would have to go upstairs by themselves.  Now, I wasn't really worried about that because I  know that the Muslim women at the ISVT are remarkably welcoming, but I also wanted to make certain that the experience was as seamless and worry-free as possible so that the students could focus on the experience itself.  My colleagues (and friends) Kelly Thomas, Kristin Novotny and Miriam Horne volunteered to come along, which is deeply appreciated.  Because I have two large classes I split them up and brought one on one Friday and then the other the next Friday (including one student who enjoyed himself so much he went both times).  Plus, we ended up with other students who heard we were going and decided to tag along, which meant that we had two big crowds.  The Imam, Islam Hassan, graciously hung around on both days to talk to the students and answer their questions.  My students asked some great questions, mixing batting practice questions ("What's it like to be a Muslim in Vermont?" and "What's your relationship with the other religious organizations in the state?") with some high, inside fastballs ("In today's world is it still necessary to segregate the men and women during prayer?" or "Terrorists will often claim to act in the name of Islam.  How do they justify that?").  I gave them complete freedom to come up with the questions themselves, with my only rule being that they should ask them respectfully (we were visiting someone else's house of worship), and I'm very proud of how they handled themselves.  By all accounts (and I always press my students to tell me the good and the bad) the students had a very rewarding experience.  During the debrief one of the students said that she was surprised that the experience wasn't more "intense," which I think gets at the need for these type first-hand experiences.  We tend to exoticize the "other" (if not sadly demonizing them) and what really struck the students was what an absolutely normal, casual everyday experience it was.  The same student continued, "during the sermon the Imam just encouraged the congregation to be the best person they could be all day long with everyone they meet."

The students look slightly apprehensive here at the very beginning of the discussion, but they had a great visit and asked some thoughtful questions, and there was even a fair bit of laughter. The Imam had kindly given out short books on Islam to everyone of the first visit, which the students had heard about so they were determined to get theirs as well (which the Imam, typically, was more than happy to deliver).

My Years With Proust - Day 424

M. de Charlus was only a Guermantes when all was said.  But it had sufficed that nature should have upset the balance of his nervous system enough to make him prefer, to the woman his brother the Duke would have chosen, one of Virgil's shepherds or Plato's disciples, and at once qualities unknown to the Duc de Guermantes and often combined with this lack of equilibrium had made M. de Charlus an exquisite pianist, an amateur painter who was not devoid of taste, and an eloquent talker.  Who would ever have detected that the rapid, nervous, charming style with which M. de Charlus played the Schumannesque passage of Faure's sonata had its equivalent - one dare not say its cause - in elements entirely physical, in the Barton's nervous weaknesses? We shall explain later on what we mean by nervous weaknesses, and why it is that a Greek of the time of Socrates, a Roman of the time of Augustus, might be what we know them to have been and yet remain absolutely normal, not men-women such as we see around us to-day.  Just as he had real artistic aptitudes which had never come to fruition, so M. de Charlus, far more than the Duke, had loved their mother and loved his own wife, and indeed, years afterwards, if anyone spoke of them to him, would shed tears, but superficial tears, like the perspiration of an over-stout man, whose forehead will glisten with sweat at the slightest exertion.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 985-986

Proust returns to one of his favorite themes from Cities of the Plain: the sexual orientation of M. de Charlus.  He associates M. de Charlus's artistic desires and talents with the fact taht "nature should have upset the balance of his nervous system," which relates both to the old belief in the fragile artistic temperament as well as stereotypes about sexuality.  Proust throws in this foreshadowing: "We shall explain later on what we mean by nervous weaknesses, and why it is that a Greek of the time of Socrates, a Roman of the time of Augustus, might be what we know them to have been and yet remain absolutely normal, not men-women such as we see around us to-day."  It will be interesting to see how he spins the romanticizing of homosexuality of the ancient world with the deprecation of it in Proust's own age.

Oh, and here's a link to Gabriel Faure's Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1, which Proust references.  Well, he simply mentions a sonata, but I love this one so I'm assuming this was his intent.

Scudzilla

Clearly, some of my friends have way too much time on their hands.  And, equally clearly, I must be living my life in such a bizarre fashion that I manage to inspire these same friends to create memes in my honor/dishonor.  In this particular case, never, ever, leave Dave Mills alone with a picture and access to Photoshop.

This work of genius/madness began, innocently enough, with a picture of yours truly in front of the Dautalbad fortress in India.  I'm sure a student had made some idiotic statement and I was pantomiming their imminent demise.

My Years With Proust - Day 423

   Mme Verdurin came across to me to show me Elstir's flowers.  If the act of going out to dinner, to which I had grown so indifferent, by taking the form, which revivified it, of a journey along the coast followed by an ascent in a carriage to a point six hundred feet above the sea, had produced in me a sort of intoxication, this feeling had not been dispelled at la Raspeliere.  "Just look at this, now," said the Mistress, showing me some huge and splendid by Elstir, whose unctuous scarlet and rich whiteness stood out, however, with almost too creamy a relief from the flower-stand on which they were arranged. "Do you suppose he would still have the touch to achieve it?  Don't you call that striking?  And what marvelous texture!  One longs to feel it.  I can't tell you what fun it was to watch him painting them.  One could feel that he was interested in trying to get just that effect." And the Mistress's gaze rested musingly on this present from the artist which epitomised not merely his great talent by their long friendship which survived only in these mementoes of it that he had bequeathed to her; behind the flowers that long ago he had picked for her, she seemed to see the shapely hand that had painted them, in the course of a morning, in their freshness, so that, they on the table, it leaning against the back of a chair in the dining-room, had been able to meet face to face at the Mistress's lunch-party, the still living roses and their almost lifelike portrait. "Almost" only, for Elstir was unable to look at a flower without first transplanting it to that inner garden in which we are obliged always to remain.  He had shown in this water-color the appearance of the roses which he had seen, and which, but for him, no one would ever have known; so that one might say that they were a new variety with which this painter, like a skillful horticulturist, had enriched the rose family. "From the day he left the little nucleus, he was finished.  It seems my dinners made him waste his time, that I hindered the development of his genius," she said in a tone of irony. "As if the society of a woman like myself could fail to be beneficial to an artist!" she exclaimed with a burst of pride.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 974-975

Mme Verdurin is reflecting, somewhat bitterly, on the relationship that she once had with the artist Elstir.  We saw last time that he had eventually fled from the presence of her social web, it seems partially because Mme Verdurin had said horrible things about the woman he loved (and eventually married), but also maybe simply because he wanted freedom.  Mme Verdurin tells Marcel, "From the day he left the little nucleus, he was finished.  It seems my dinners made him waste his time, that I hindered the development of his genius," she said in a tone of irony. "As if the society of a woman like myself could fail to be beneficial to an artist!" she exclaimed with a burst of pride.  As we've discussed before, one of my favorite African proverbs is, if you have your hand in someone else's pocket and they move, you have to move.  The problem with having a patron is that you become a prisoner to their whims.  It's not always a horrible thing, as the increasingly secular world of northern Italian merchants freed Renaissance artists to pursue different and more varied and more unconventional themes.  Of course, there's a difference between a patron being fascinating in art, either for its inherent beauty or as an expression of their own faith, and a patron keeping an aspiring artist as some sort of pet for the amusement of her clique, and the latter seemed to be more the case with Mme Verdurin.

However, maybe we're being too hard on Mme Verdurin, and maybe I'm letting my general disgust with her husband to color my perception of her.  She does seem generally touched by the paintings that Elstir left for her, and Proust provides a moving description of one such work as well as the role of the artist in its creation.  Proust writes, "'Almost' only, for Elstir was unable to look at a flower without first transplanting it to that inner garden in which we are obliged always to remain." Earlier this year I read passages of Proust to my first year students (to their general amazement/horror) as a jumping off point to discuss issues of perception, and whether or not some people, in this case artists, actually see the world differently.  This brings us back to Elstir's "inner garden.  I'm sure Elstir, like many artists, doubtlessly saw beauty more clearly and richly and truly than the rest of us, and there must have been times when  he was frustrated by his own inability to convey that beauty; much like a person who has known God, but is unable to express that transcendent experience.

Finally, what must it be like to be an artist who can give one of their own works of art as a present?  Now, part of my amazement is based on the fact that, despite the best of intentions, I'm a fairly crappy gift giver, which may speak to my general weirdness ("seriously, I thought you would like a shatani from Dar Es Salaam; it contains evil spirits and everything . . .").  My ex-wife was/is the best gift giver I've ever known.  I would think that if you were an artist, especially a truly gifted artist, giving one of your works would be like giving a part of yourself to a person you loved, which would give the object a vitality and a currency.  I'm thinking of the Bill Evans (I've been listening to him non-stop lately) piece Waltz for Debbie, which he wrote for his niece.

My Years With Proust - Day 422

   "Will you mind what you're saying, please.  I don't open my doors to trollops, Monsieur le Professeur," said Mme Verdurin, who had, on the contrary, done everything in her power to make Elstir return, even with his wife.  But before they were married she had tried to separate them, had told Elstir that the woman he loved was stupid, dirty, immoral, a thief.  For once in a way she had failed to effect a breach.  It was with the Verdurin salon that Elstir had broken; and he was glad of it, as converts bless the illness or misfortune that has caused them to withdraw from the world and has shown them the way of salvation.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 971-972

The Verdurins, and their class, are revealed to be more and more, at the least unpleasant, but more generally abhorrent.  Elstir was the artist who played a much more central role earlier in Remembrance of Things Past.  Marcel reflects on how Mme Verdurin had done everything in her power to convince Elstir not to marry his future-wife, including calling her "stupid, dirty, immoral, a thief."  Now, on the one hand I guess we could just revert to Percy Sledge, but what interests me is Mme Verdurin's effort in the first place, which doubtless has far more to do with her interest in maintaining her control (or at least her perceived control) over Elstir than it does her concern over his personal well-being.  As it turns out she did him a tremendous favor because it empowered him to free himself from her toxic community; "he was glad of it, as concerts bless the illness or misfortune that has caused them to withdraw from the world and has shown them the way of salvation."

My Years With Proust - Day 421

   "What's that he says?" shouted M. Verdurin, with an air of disgust and fury combined, knitting his brows as though he needed all his concentration to grasp something unintelligible.  "It's impossible to understand what you say.  What have yo got in your mouth?" inquired M. Verdurin, growing more and more furious , and alluding to Saniette's speech defect.

   "Poor Saniette, I won't have him made unhappy," said Mme Verdurin in a tone of false pity, so as to leave no one in doubt as to her husband's rudeness.

   "I was at the Ch . . . Ch . . ."

   "Che, che, try to speak distinctly," said M. Verdurin, "I can't understand a word you say."

   Almost without exception, the faithful burst out laughing, looking like a group of cannibals in whom the sight of a wounded white man has aroused the thirst for blood.  For the instinct of imitation and absence of courage govern society and the mob alive.  And we all of us laugh at a person whom we see being made fun of, though it does not prevent us from venerating him ten years later in a circle where he is admired.  It is in like manner that the populace banishes or acclaims its kings.

   "Come, now, it's not his fault," said Mme Verdurin.

   "It's not mine either, people ought not to dine out if they can't speak properly."

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 965

I was looking over this section again and trying to make sense of the sections I had marked and the notes I had included in the margins and came across this sentence in my painfully childlike scrawl, "M. Verdurin is a dick."  It's hard to read his abuse of Saniette without having an almost visceral response, that is unless you're rich like the Verdurins.  Even his wife is more posing than she is truly horrified, or maybe she's just been beat down and desensitized over the years.  I really need to devote less time to Twitter (my time on the blog is easing up now that our year-long Discography discussion has come to an end) because it increasingly makes me angry, although in other ways it's therapy because it allows me to reach out to like-minded individuals and also to call the President a tyrant twenty times a day.  I brought this up because I'm so often horrified by the utterly heartless Tweets released by Trump and his sons and other members of the super-rich swamp that passes for an administration.  What people don't realize when they talk about White Privilege is that it is not simply an act, but rather the mindset that made the act possible.  One of Trump's sons was mocking members of the LGBT community the other day, and it was so obvious that he had led such a sheltered existence that he couldn't even imagine the suffering that another human being underwent.  And yet, these are the people that we choose to run our government?  How angry and disillusioned (and, let's be honest, racist and misogynistic) would you have to be to think that these people would actually help you when they have such utter disdain for you?  The entire Trump junta has the compassion of M. Verdurin.

My Years With Proust - Day 420

"By the way, Judge Toureuil and his wife told me they had been to lunch with Mme Bontemps.  They asked me no questions. But I seemed to gather from what was said that a marriage between you and Albertine would be the joy of her aunt's life.  I think the real reason is that they are all extremely fond of you.  At the same time the style in which they imagine that you would be able to keep her, the sort of connexions they more of less know that we have - all that is not, I fancy, entirely irrelevant, although it may be a minor consideration.  I wouldn't have mentioned it to you myself, because I'm not keen on it, but as I imagine they'll mention it to you, I thought I'd get a word in first." "But you yourself, what do you think of her?" I asked my mother.  "Well, I'm not the one who's going to marry her.  You could certainly do a great deal better in terms of marriage.  But I feel that your grandmother would not have liked me to influence you.  As a matter of fact, I can't say what I think of Albertine; I don't think of her.  All I can say to you is, like Madame de Sevigne: 'She has good qualities, or so I believe.  But at this first stage I can praise her only by negatives.  She is not this: she has not the Rennes accent.  In time, I shall perhaps say: she is that.' And I shall always think well of her if she can make you happy." But by these very words which left it to me to decide my own happiness, my mother had plunged me into that stage of doubt in which I had been plunged long ago when, my father having allowed me to go to Phedre and, what was more, to take up writing as a career, I had suddenly felt myself burdened with too great a responsibility, the fear of distressing him, and that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 958-959

Whoops, Marcel's mother just told him what she really thinks of Albertine, which I suppose anyone could have seen coming.  And she did it cleverly, both stating her opinion by quoting Madame de Sevigne and also leaving him with the misguided assumption that he now has the freedom to make up his mind, and feeling the weight of the responsibility.  He compares it to the anxiety he felt when his father allowed him to attend the theatre.

What intrigues me is the concluding line when he speaks of "that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal."  I'm immediately thinking back to the Devo line, which I'm paraphrasing, about how we have freedom of choice, although what we want is freedom from choice.  All this, of course, makes me think of the Turkish election today, and another country moving away towards authoritarian rule, and that maybe democracy was just a moment in time, a beautiful dream, whose time has increasingly come and gone.  Here in the US Trump belittles the rule of law and strips away individual liberties, except for the rich, almost on a daily basis.  I guess what is most troubling is not that there are people who want to do this, but rather the great mass of people who seem quite happy to have them do it.  As Proust tells us, this is "the only life that any of us has at his disposal," so why are we so happy to hand it over to someone else, especially someone who shares almost nothing with us.  Obviously, marriage or any other relationship is its own form of tyranny, although tyranny with a velvet glove, but at least in a relationship you're paid off with orgasmic coin, occasionally, and can pretend that the other person has something in common with you.

Discography - Week 52

June 18th 1993 was my happiest day.  It was the first time I ever took my son to Six Flags Over Georgia, and we had an absolutely perfect day, made possible by the fact that we were the perfect age for a father and a son.  At age five his natural inclination was still to hold my hand, and all the sturm und drang that eats away at the relationship between fathers and sons, if even temporarily, was lurking a decade in the future.  As it grew dark I began to sob, because the day was drawing to a close and I realized with completely certainty that it was my happiest day.  Certainly part of my response was caused by happiness, but there was also the stabbing pain caused by the fact that I knew I would never be that happy again (and for once I was a prophet).  However, parts of the tears were caused by the fact that I felt so remarkably blessed to realize, not twenty years down the road, but right then, at that precise moment, that it was my happiest moment.  When I returned home I tried to explain to my wife Brenda what had happened, which led to another crying jag.  She wasn't surprised, either at my tears or at that realization in the Georgia gloaming.  She always felt that I had a better sense of what a moment meant, what it entailed, and what was required of it than anyone she ever met - and it was one of the reasons why I had been successful.  I've thought about her words a lot over the years because I am constantly surrounded by friends and colleagues who are better educated than me or smarter than me or, increasingly, both, but somehow I muddle through, mainly because I may just have a better sense of what the moment requires than most folks.  And what's the point of that memory and that reflection?  Well, we've reached the end of our year-long Discography music discussion, at least through round one.  To be brutally honest, I've been dreading this moment.  I've enjoyed this year's celebration of music and friendship more than I can say, and I'm actively mourning its passing.

There will always be other moments, but I doubt it they'll be as sweet as the ones that made up this last year; and surely there will be ones as bittersweet as this one.  As Chet Baker reminds us, "There will be many other nights like this/ and I'll be standing here with someone new/ there will be other songs to sing/ another fall, another spring" but it's difficult to imagine such an absolutely perfect group of friends united in such a joyous endeavor.  However, reflecting back on June 18th 1993, I also feel blessed to have had this time with all of you, and also to realize what it has meant, and what it will continue to mean.

Gary Beatrice

Warren Zevon, Keep Me In Your Heart

My mother is a fantastic artist. When I was in my late teens she took up painting and she was outstanding. All of the Beatrice homes have her paintings. About 30 years ago she took up sculpture, and without any doubt that was her calling. She used all type of wood and stone and would frequently spend upwards of six months on a single piece. She sold a few, was commissioned to make more, and won sculpture competitions from New York to Phoenix.

Sadly I did not inherit her artistic skills. If I had I would have used them to write a song. I would have written a beautiful good-bye song to my wife, Margie. It would not have been a sad song, although death and separation are certainly sad. The song would be about love and friendship and be gently hopeful.

Since I can't write or sing a song I am steeling Warren Zevon's good-bye song and dedicating it to my wife and children:

Hold me in your thoughts
Take me in your dreams
Touch me as I fall into view.
When the winter comes
Keep the fires lit
And I will be right next to you.

Sometimes when you're doing simple things around the house
Maybe you'll think of me and smile.
You know I'm tied to you like the buttons on your blouse
Keep me in your heart for a while.

Dave Wallace

Valerie June - Got Soul

I don't think that I've posted a newer song before on this blog because I had such a backlog of older songs that I loved and wanted to share.  But, for my last entry, it seems appropriate to pick something recent.  I liked Valerie June's debut album, but her recently-released second album, The Order of Time, is a leap forward.  I encourage all of you to check it out.  My favorite thing is the album closer, Got Soul.  I couldn't find the studio version on Youtube, but I've linked to a very good (and faithful) live version.

Cyndi Brandenburg

Okay, here's the thing.  Choosing the ultimate song to share as my
last post on a year of Discography is impossible. And I suspect others
will dig deep and share frighteningly smart and/or crushingly profound
reflections that are impossible to match.  So, I am defaulting to a
knee jerk upbeat homage to my blogger co-authors, and I hope you will
take the time to humor me by reading my sentimental musings before
actually listening to this fun song.

Last Saturday night I laughed so hard that I cried more than once, and
I felt totally confident and comfortable living in a space that might
have rightly been dubbed "sloppy seconds."  I woke up the next morning
with this ear worm in my head, and I listened to it before even
bothering to get about of bed.  Cheesy as it is, misnamed as it was
(um, WHITE wine--duh),  it reminded me well of a prior night of
glorious joy with friends, many of whom appear here. Wine, poured all
over. Embarrassingly, it's increasingly what we are known for.

But it reminded me of other important things about the all of you too.
Your brilliance (done your research, also what you smart people are
known for), your force (like water), and the fact that maybe we can
happily and comfortably be stupid and superficial together before
pendulum-swinging back into an equally compelling intellectual space.
We've got a lot here. I'm coming over again (assuming someone invites
me), and all the steps I take are gonna lead there --but definitely
not in the love-song-gone-wrong sense. Keep listening, keep writing,
keep sharing. Scudder, we all know you have something crazy and
irresistible up your sleeve to help us along.  Love you, champions.

The New Pornographers, Champions of Red Wine

Can you add this to the end of my sappy blog post please?  Thanks.
__________________

And if you are not yet convinced of the merits of this band, try these
other songs before you decide for sure. I particularly love the first
one, with Neko Case--and those lyrics....

Adventures in Solitude 

But this one is fun too, for a different pace, off their new album.

Avalanche Alley (off their newly released record) 

I read this today, which I loved not just because Debbie Harry apparently shares my affinity for Chardonnay, but because of this exact quote:

"Since all rock stars need at least one tour vice, Harry always likes to keep a bottle of Chardonnay on hand. But how wild can things get with white wine? You'd be surprised."

Feel free to add it to the blog if it feels right.

Phillip Seiler

Thomas Dolby, I Love You, Goodbye

There are a number of underrated artists from the 80s that continued making interesting music behind their synth-pop beginnings. Thomas Dolby, now a professor at Johns Hopkins, is certainly one of them. This is one of my favorite songs ever and seems appropriate for our final week. I also love the tie in with Scudder and his tales of New Orleans and traveling. It has been a joy discovering music both new and old, familiar and not and I thank Gary for inviting us to participate. In the scariest days of my time on earth, music has provided a solace and for that I celebrate you all for sharing. But I will leave Dolby's words as my final thought for this journey.

The saddest words I know

I love you, goodbye.

Dave Kelley

"but til then . . . . ."

"Born to Run"  Bruce Springsteen

Bruce is my favorite artist, and this is his greatest song.  Even though there are five to ten of his songs that I personally like more than "Born to Run", this is the best thing he has ever written and recorded. 

 It was written by a young man who had no ambition to be anything other than a professional musician.  Little Steven has said that this is what set Bruce apart from all of the other musicians he knew.  Bruce literally had no plan B from the time he was 14.  He was going to play music for a living be it in sold out arenas or small clubs on the Jersey Shore.  For a guy who champions the working man, Bruce admits he has never worked a real job for more than a few weeks. 

At the time he wrote "Born to Run", Springsteen had released two albums that sold poorly.  Despite being hugely popular as a live act in the Northeast and something of a critical darling, Springsteen was in great danger of being released by his record company.  Instead of playing it safe, he poured everything he knew into a song that was too long to be released as a single and contained most of the instruments known to mankind.  The result is so amazing that there is really no need to discuss it at length.  But of course, I will.

To me, the lyrics and the performance combine strength and vulnerability and hope tinged with pessimism.  After writing his autobiography, Springsteen came to the realization for the first time that in some ways the song was about his parents.  He had an optimistic mother who came from a family of means.  His father was a mentally ill blue collar worker who drank too much and obsessed about how few of his dreams he was fulfilling.  Despite these issues they stayed together.  His dad impulsively moved his wife and his youngest child to California when Bruce was a teenager.

Joe Posnanski in writing about the song a few years ago made a point that has stuck with me ever since.  Despite all of the great imagery in the lyrics, the key line in the song is really "but till then."  Isn't that where we live our lives for the most part?  We have goals and dreams that we want to accomplish, "but till then."  We have dream jobs, dream relationships to which we aspire, "but till then."  We are gonna get to that place where we really wanna go, "but till then".  Is there anyone who is so happy and content with every aspect of their life that he or she does not largely live in the "till then"? 

I think we live and die in the "but till then" zone, and that is OK.  I have always agreed with the cliché that life is about the journey and not the destination.

Thanks everyone for fifty two great weeks.  I look forward to the resumption of the blog down the line, "but till then" good health and Godspeed to all of you.

Gary Scudder

Bill Evans, Detour Ahead and Some Other Time

I've never been this late getting the weekly Discography posting out, and while I can blame a very busy week in the end I think I just didn't want this to end.  Often I, like Dave Wallace, write up my blog posts weeks in advance, but this week I could never finish, although I engineered many false starts.  I wrote five or six complete posts with several different artists and an array of songs, but ended up erasing every one of them.  As the Cure tell us in Untitled:

Never know how I wanted to feel
Never quite said what I wanted to say to you
Never quite managed the words I wanted to say to you
Never quite knew how to make them believable
And now the time has gone
Another time undone

In the end I found myself being drawn back to jazz and specifically to Bill Evans, an artist I love more every year.  I suppose I should have learned something from attending Neil Young and Drive-By Truckers concerts in the last year and blown it out on the last week, but instead I'm going to end softly like the 4th movement of Tschaikovsky's 6th Symphony or the last song of most Lucinda Williams albums.  And of course the irony - or the pristine logic - is that I don't know what to say, and so I'm finishing with songs with no words.

We are facing a detour ahead, politically and societally in our country,  but also emotionally and personally in our little group.  After Gary's beautiful words that opened this week I was really hesitant to respond because I felt that I would doing a disservice to the courage and honesty with which he's faced his illness.  It is hard to believe, but there was a time when he was just a friend of a friend (Dave Kelley is the world navel of all friendships), but he became more than that and has been one of my closest friends for almost thirty years now.  The time we've spent together has been a blessing, and Gary, you are the man I would be if I were a better man.  I love you, brother.

If you happened to stumble into my blog on off-days, which I hope you didn't because it's the equivalent of a seedy Midwestern town after the nice folks have gone home for the night, you'd know that I've spent the last year and a half grinding my way through Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.  Purists have always complained that the more appropriate translation would be In Search of Lost Time. What I just discovered this week is that Proust's most famous translator, Moncrieff, chose Remembrance of Things Past as an homage of Shakespeare's 30th Sonnet, and that in some ways the entire work plays out along the lines of the sonnet.  If I had known that I could have saved myself 3200 pages of Proust describing why he's not in love.

     When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
     I summon up remembrance of things past,
     I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
     And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
     Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,
     For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
     And weep afresh love's song since cancell'd night,
     And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
     Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
     And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
     The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
     Which I new pay as if not paid before.
     But if the while I think of thee, dear friend,
     All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.

So, I guess in the end Shakespeare was right again, "But if the while I think of thee, dear friend/ All losses are restor'd and sorrows end."  My sorrows end when I think of you.

With that I'll leave you with one last song from Bill Evans, his painfully beautiful Peace Piece from Everybody Digs Bill Evans.

Salaam.

My Years With Proust - Day 419

   "Take that, Chocotte," said Mme de Verdurin.  "And otherwise, did you have a pleasant journey?"
   "We encountered only vague specimens of humanity who thronged the train."
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 955.

I don't know if I have anything earth-shatteringly profound to add other than I thought this was a pretty funny line, and it proves that I'm not the only one who says things like this.  It also reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where Jerry calculates what percentage of people are actually good looking, and determines that the DMV is like a leper colony.  Of course, the line is provided by the scholar Brichot, who the rest of the characters abuse with consistency.

Playing Against Type

Every year is a little stranger than the previous one, and this school has been marked by me being sought out, illogically, by students to participate in their projects.  In addition to my ill-advised performance in Kerry's play in the fall, this semester has brought small roles in three student films and now a video game voice over.  This is all a bad idea because a) I'm not an actor, 2) I don't aspire to be an actor, 3) I'm really bad at it, and 4) I have a horrible voice.  Nevertheless, my students keep coming out of the woodwork to dragoon me into participating in their projects.  This time it was Amos Byrne, who has never actually taken me for a class, and Michael Manfredi, who, at least, has been in my class once.  They both went on last spring's trip to Zanzibar, and Michael also went to India last month.  Amos showed up with the recording equipment, and the script, and I worked through my character.  I do feel like I'm increasingly typecast as a grumpy and snarky old man, which at least gives me the opportunity to explore that unused side of my nature.  My character, named Scudds, and apparently written with me in mind, is a doctor who is dealing with issues.  Here is my favorite line from today: "Great, I get absolutely no fucking say in this?  Is that it?  I just fucking sit here and stitch up whoever you fucks bring in?  Is that it?"  I don't know why I was chosen for this role.  Well, I do have a theory about that, which brings me back to the time when the nice woman who ran the Georgia Radio Reading Program asked me to read Playboy and Esquire over the radio, "We knew you would say the bad words."  Since I had not seen the script in advance I couldn't warn the professors in the next office, who thought I had gone insane and was screaming at a student, endlessly.  I guess I should take the student requests as something akin to a compliment, although I suspect it is probably still mainly a recognition of my willingness to say the bad words.

The picture is a little blurry, but I think it captures how hard we were both laughing.  Seriously, how can I person who uses the word fuck so much in casual conversation fuck it up while reading it?

My Years With Proust - Day 418

   "Out with it," Mme Cottard said to her husband encouragingly, "tell us about your odyssey."

   "Well, it really is rather out of the ordinary," said the doctor, and repeated his narrative from the beginning.  "When I saw that the train was in the station, I was dumbfounded.  It was all Ski's fault.  You're pretty eccentric with your information, my dear fellow!  And there was Brichot waiting for us at the station!"

   "I assumed," said the scholar, casting around him what he could still muster of a glance and smiling with his thin lips, "that if you had been detained at Graincourt, it would mean that you had encountered some peripatetic siren."

   "Will you hold your tongue!  What if my wife were to hear you?" said the Doctor.  "This wife of mine, is is jealous."

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 953

First off, as I get older I increasingly realize that most of life is about narrative, whether the conscious and unconscious construction of a narrative or the battle for control of the narrative.  Sadly, part of that relates to the construction of a false narrative, which is not quite the same as outright egregious lying (or maybe I'm just being easy on myself or have already been impacted by our post truth presidency).  Over the many decades before I became free of the carnal whirlwind I occasionally was involved with women who were almost stiflingly jealous.  A little jealousy is OK in that it shows the other person is paying attention and have not reached the point where they think that no other woman would desire you (because they themselves have stopped desiring you), and with some women a tiny sliver of jealousy is a wonderful aphrodisiac.  However, some women (and men obviously) can be so jealous that you spend half your time constructing a narrative that makes your environment and your co-workers and the presenters at the conference and the people at the gym and the people at the grocery store and people in the cars next to you at traffic jams as unpleasant, tedious, odious and, well, male as possible.

Secondly, if you have lived your life in such a fashion wherein you were not occasionally detained by a peripatetic siren you've lived your life very foolishly.

My Years With Proust - Day 417

By a transposition of the senses, M. de Cambremer looked at you with his nose.  This nose of his was not ugly; it was if anything too handsome, too bold, too proud of its own importance.  Arched, polished, gleaming, brand-new, it was amply prepared to make up for the spiritual inadequacy of the eyes.  Unfortunately, if the eyes are sometimes the organ through which our intelligence is revealed, the nose (whatever the intimate solidarity and the unsuspected repercussion of one feature on another), the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 943

As often noted, I pull out passages from Remembrance of Things Past for any number of reasons, ranging from the sublime to the silly.  Sadly, I think this one is representative of the latter, and it has cursed me in that I'll be looking at people's noses and determining the truth of Proust's words.  However, it also got me thinking of the peculiarity of cultural aesthetics and sexual desire.  People will often talk about the eyes or the cheek bones or the mouth, both in regards to beauty and also outright desire.  Even the ears sometimes get attributed.  When Haruki Murakami is not having his characters descend into wells, he will often have them notice the beauty of a woman's ears (surely there is some psychological link here that has formed the basis of a scholarly paper).  However, the nose never seems to carry the same sway.  That said, if I did a Google search for nose porn I'm sure I'd find something, as there is no obscure aspect of human depravity which the Internet doesn't service.  Of course, thanks to the GOP my search history is now for sale so it would doubtless come back to haunt me. Or it would come back to haunt a younger man.  I suppose there is some advantage to being at the end of one's career.  When you have few professional aspirations left I guess you're free of the professional (if not the carnal) whirlwind.

My Years With Proust - Day 416

It went off very smoothly, despite the astonishment of Mme Verdurin, who had had a nodding acquaintance with my grandfather.  And as she had no tact and hated family life (that dissolvent of the little nucleus), after telling me that she remembered seeing my great-grandfather long ago, and speaking to me of him as of somebody who was more or less an idiot who would have been incapable of understanding the little group and who, to use her expression, "was not one of us," she said to me: "Families are such a bore, one longs to get away from them"; and at once proceeded to tell me of a trait in my great-grandfather's character of which I was unaware, although I had suspected it at home (I had never known him, but he was much spoken of), his remarkable stinginess (in contrast to the somewhat excessive generosity of my great-uncle, the friend of the lady in pink and Morel's father's employer): "The fact that your grandparents had such a smart intendant only goes to show that there are all sorts of people in a family.  Your grandfather's father was so stingy that at the end of his life when he was almost gaga - between you and me, he was never anything very special, you make up for the lot of them - he could not bring himself to pay a penny for his ride on the omnibus.  So that they were obliged to have him followed by somebody who paid his fare for him, and to let the old miser think that his friend M. de Persigny, the Cabinet Minister, had given him a permit to travel free on the omnibuses.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 940

There's not a lot going on here, although I do love the anecdote that Mme Verdurin shared about Marcel's great-grandfather being an incorrigible miser.  I also appreciate the comments of Mme Verdurin, who "had no tact and hated family life", which she described as "that dissolvent of the little nucleus."  As the pseudo-patriarch of the Bleak House Orphanage for Mournful and Petulant Teenagers I can completely vouchsafe this observation.

As I've mentioned several times I've done my best to avoid learning more about Proust, mainly so that this blog is my response to Remembrance of Things Past and not simply a summary of my intellectual betters.  However, my good friend Brian Murphy sent me an interesting note yesterday about an interview with Gregory Rabassa, the famous translator (the one who's translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude was, at least according to Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, better than his Spanish original).  Rabassa has a few interesting things to say about Proust, including the fact that the title, which some had criticized him for because they claim that In Search of Lost Time, which you'll sometimes see in other translations, is more appropriate, is actually drawn from Shakespeare's Sonnet number 30.  Somehow, and once again this proves the gaping holes in my inbred Hoosier upbringing, I didn't realize the connection.

     When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
     I summon up remembrance of things past,
     I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
     And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
     Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,
     For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
     And weep afresh love's song since cancell'd night,
     And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
     Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
     And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
     The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
     Which I new pay as if not paid before.
     But if the while I think of thee, dear friend,
     All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.

Rabassa proposes that all of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past is contained in the sonnet, which, if he's correct, would have saved me 3200 pages of reading.  It is an extraordinary work, and reminds me once again how oddly underrated Shakespeare (much like Proust) is in that he's such an obvious choice, and thus in many ways unfairly ignored as we rush for more obscure topics for adoration.

My Years With Proust - Day 415

One might have thought that it was Mme de Marsantes who was entering the room, so salient at that moment was the woman whom a mistake on the part of Nature had enshrined in the body of M. de Charlus.  Of course the Baron had made every effort to conceal this mistake and to assume a masculine appearance.  But no sooner had he succeeded then, having meanwhile retained the same tastes, he acquired from this habit of feeling like a woman a new feminine appearance,due not to heredity but to his own way of living.  And as he had gradually come to regard even social questions from the feminine point of view, and that quite unconsciously, for it is not only by dint of lying to other people but also by lying to oneself that one ceases to be aware that one is lying, although he had called up on his body to manifest (at the moment of his entering the Verdurins' house) all the courtesy of a great nobleman, that body, which had so well grasped what M. de Charlus had ceased to understand, displayed, to such an extent that the Baron would have deserved the epithet ladylike, all the seductions of a great lady.  Besides, can one entirely separate M. de Charlus's appearance from the fact that sons, who do not always take after their fathers, even without inverts and even though seeks after women, may consummate upon their faces the profanation of their mothers?  but let us not consider here a subject that deserves a chapter to itself: the Profanation of the Mother.

   Although other reasons may have dictated this transformation of M. de Charlus, and purely physical ferments may have set his chemistry "working" and made his body gradually change into the category of women's bodies, nevertheless the change that we record here was of spiritual origin.  By dint of imagining oneself to be ill one becomes ill, one grows thin, one is too weak to rise from one's bed, one suffers from nervous enteritis.  By dint of thinking tenderly of men one becomes a woman, and an imaginary skirt hampers one's movements. The obsession, as in the other instance it can affect one's health, may in this instance alter one's sex.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 938-939

Proust continues his dissection of M. de Charlus, or maybe of himself (I really do need to do more research on Proust's own sexuality, but, as I've stated, I wanted this blog to be my response to Proust and not someone else's - although when I return to re-reading and re-commentary I'll include that aspect): "One might have thought that it was Mme de Marsantes who was entering the room, so salient at that moment was the woman whom a mistake on the part of Nature had enshrined in the body of M. de Charlus.  Of course the Baron had made every effort to conceal this mistake and to assume a masculine appearance."  As we've discussed, the fact that Proust was having this discussion in a novel a century ago is profound, and far outweighs the occasional clumsiness of his observations.  As I always scold my students - while we need to take advantage of what we know or believe now, we can't give into the tyranny of the present.  What continues to intrigue me, as it has throughout Remembrance of Things Past, is Proust's understanding of perception.  Proust continues, "But no sooner had he succeeded then, having meanwhile retained the same tastes, he acquired from this habit of feeling like a woman a new feminine appearance,due not to heredity but to his own way of living."  Marcel has determined that M. de Charlus is a homosexual, and now he perceives him completely differently.

Continuing a theme from yesterday, Proust once again ruminates on the influence of mothers in the development of homosexual men - and mentions, even including it in capital letters, the Profanation of the Mother.  He suggests that he'd need a book to discuss the topic, which makes me think that it was a topic discussed at the time, and so this is another subject calling for later research.