After reading the translator’s introduction I feel quite overwhelmed. My study of Proust will most likely not be as insightful or exhaustive, and this troubles me because I have already decided that Proust is the way, the truth, and the light (yes, I should not decide so soon) and so I should like to know him instead of just feebly explore him. Perhaps the St. Johnnies believe this exploration is itself the way, the truth, etc.. Or maybe they believe it is a necessary first step. Fuck! I think about writing this paper so often and write it so rarely! I so frequently assume that I will never evolve past this infantile way of being.
Poor old solitary immobile Proust was turned down by so many publishers who were blind to his genius. This makes me feel something. I don’t know what it is. Probably despair for my own unspoken writerly ambitions. If his brilliance, so radiant, can so easily go unnoticed…
Swann’s Way is fascinating, overwhelming, behemoth. I am daunted. Further, I am afraid my familiarity with it has dulled my initial wonder, or that I have forgotten what is so remarkable about it. It is hard to remember, to open myself to it again. Maybe I should not be searching for those initial reactions- maybe I should seek out my current ones instead. And maybe, meanwhile, my old ones will resurface.
The Martinville steeple incident is, I think, and here it is difficult to remember, important to me…I mean, it is remarkable regardless, but I seem to have had some glimmer of empathy, of understanding that came from shared experience. I thought at one time Proust was describing a very mysterious and nearly ineffable experience I had dimly witnessed myself. But I wonder now if I am not making a huge mistake when I say I can sympathize with Marcel, and here’s why: I sometimes perceive a monstrous enigma, a vast mystery when I inquire even briefly into my signal witnessings. I become piercingly curious about them. All this I formerly believed Marcel shared, and that it was this radical confusion in the face of reality he was expressing. However, somehow, this experience of his has been consummated, or fulfilled, or concluded, or explained to him by his writing. Do I need to have written that to understand its effects? This is why I am so curious about how far this family of experiences extends- and whether there are any familial experiences for his writing. Then maybe I could come minutely closer to understanding.
Fuck. I feel so powerless to interact intellectually with reality. Is this just my own personal hangup because father was hypercritical or is it the true state of affairs? It’s Plato who expresses so many of these difficulties, and I don’t see him providing any answers. But then, my complete inability to understand existence is eclipsed by my complete inability to understand Plato.
I feel like there must be some sort of trick to engender a totally new and gratifying insight…I think the tutors know this trick and I do not think they want to tell us. Maybe it would make no difference to tell us, and it would only be meaningful if we arrived at it honestly and individually. I have a suspicion that maybe one trick is to juxtapose two unlikely ideas or situations and compare them. Maybe another trick is to come to some provisional conclusion and then see if you can’t apply that conclusion elsewhere, somewhere that you would not naturally go. It seems what’s common to these two tricks is the action of somehow surprising yourself…of arbitrarily examining a situation in way you wouldn’t normally…Now I wonder if what this method provides isn’t wisdom but only freshness and novelty, and ideas that are only potent in this way. And now I wonder if this is all I want. Just novelty, passing beauty. (It can be so hard to find ideas beautiful and significant!) This makes me think I am just playing a game like mathematicians play (math). Is this the exploration-type model of the life of the mind? Have I come back?
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