Books I Read in December (Part II), January and February

For quite a while, I've been posting about the books I read every month, but in December, I only managed to post thoughts about half of them and I've been delaying subsequent posts ever since.

I needed to really think about what I want to say about these books, which led me to question what I was reading, why and what I hope to find. I've never intended my posts to be reviews. There are scads of places to find a standard synopsis of plot and general impressions about books. I don't want or need to try to replicate that. But in thinking about what I'm trying to get out of the books I read, I've been able to zero in on my choices and read much more closely. I plan to talk more about my reading objectives in my next post.

For now, I want to get this list out and provide a few thoughts about these books. If you've read any of these, I'd love to hear what you thought.

On Beauty, by Zadie Smith This book was the start of my problems in talking about books and I may do a separate post about it. I have not read White Teeth, but I have read a number of articles and essays by and about the author. My expectations were high and this was a very good book. What makes this book (and others that fall into the high expectation category) difficult to talk about is that I read them much more closely and tend to be a tougher critic. Zadie Smith is unquestionably a great talent. On Beauty is filled with richly drawn characters and is dense with plot and subplots. There is a point at about the halfway mark where I sensed fatigue on the author's part. I had the strange notion that the author was under tremendous pressure to finish the book and to live up to the early reputation she'd garnered. I also learned, once I'd finished the book that if one happens to be familiar with the works of E.M. Forster, one might have noticed some parallels. I'm disappointed to have not read any Forster and wish I had. I'm certain it would have further enhanced or even changed my experience with this book entirely.

God Knows, by Blayney Colmore I can never resist reading books written by people I know. By sheer chance I found this book, written by the Episcopal priest (now retired) I best remember from the church I attended through adolescence. I was delighted to find that he's also a blogger and I am very happy to be back in touch with him. I nearly finished this book in one sitting. It captures beautifully many of his thoughts and ideas about life and the nature of the world and what it's all about

Edinburgh, by Alexander Chee When I saw the blurb from Annie Dillard on the cover (I never see Annie Dillard blurbs, so this one I paid attention to), I knew I was in for something special. You can find a short plot synopsis here. Reader reactions about the story itself are conflicted, but I believe the tough subject matter has been a factor. There is no debate about the beauty of Chee's prose. I recently heard that he was a poet before he attempted long form fiction, which would explain the lyric, almost hypnotic effect the book had on me.

"Fifteen. I lose my voice. My new voice sounds like a burned string rubbing. Singing is touching, you bang the air and the air moves something inside you and the thing moved registers, says, That is a sound. When we sing to each other we are touching each other through this sleeve of air between us. When my voice changes I know this new creature is capable of no significant touch, no transformations. This voice cannot erase me, take me over and set me aside. This new voice has no light. It can barely push enough air aside to tell people, Hello, Good Morning, Good Night. I stop talking as much."

Songs for the Missing, by Stewart O'Nan This book is about the disappearance of an eighteen year old girl in Ohio and the impact the disappearance has on her family, friends and community over the course of a year. The NYTBR said this. I am sure it's a matter of taste that this book didn't satisfy me, because the reviews have all been very positive. I have no criticisms about the way the book is crafted, I just felt something was missing. Stewart O'Nan is immensely popular and I believe this is his eleventh novel.

Living by Fiction, by Annie Dillard This book changed my life and was the impetus for a complete change in perspective about reading and writing. I wrote about it briefly here. In Living by Fiction, Annie Dillard talks about the art of literature. She has inspired me to seek out the works of many of the modernists and post-modernists and to study how the best examples work. She has caused me to slow down and study novels, rather than tear through them. Dillard's approach to fiction is scholarly, yet she never takes herself too seriously and in fact, is quite funny at times. Exploring the question of whether or not fiction interprets the world:

"Complexity, subtlety, and breadth are the virtues here. If a writer is going to engage in the intellectual business of assigning meanings and showing relationships, he had better think very well. The novel of ideas had better be good...On the other hand, a novel is not a very long-playing but lightweight television set. We are no longer children, and we no longer enjoy fiction with our eyes only. We seek, as I say, a complex, subtle, and broad set of ideas...And-- importantly -- writers who have only an ear for prose and a taste for subtle surfaces may be credited with having a good deal more. We may actually assume such writers have something on their minds."

I will never see fiction again in the same way, and for that I'm grateful.

Swann's Way, by Marcel Proust I was excited enough about this book while reading it to dedicate a post to it before I was even finished. Committing to reading the whole of In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past is to the reader what running the New York Marathon is to the casual jogger. Swann's Way is the first of seven volumes that make up the whole novel and it initially took some time to learn how to read Proust. I read with a highlighter and dictionary at hand and was constantly checking the end notes. Over time, Proust taught me how to read him and to truly love his work. The book was originally self-published and one publisher's rejection was something to the effect of "I don't see why a man should take thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before he goes to sleep." If you've read Proust, you're probably laughing. In contrast to the modern novel's get to the point within fifty words or less approach, this languid style takes some getting used to and I imagine, most people don't have the patience for it. But if you can weather the initial shock of bumping up against Proust's style, there is something wonderful here.

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, by Marcel Proust Although I intended to spread the seven volumes of Proust's novel out over a long period of time, I was engrossed enough after Swann's Way to move on to Volume 2.

The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell This pop-culture exploration of the Puritans and their journey to America to become John Winthrop's "city upon a hill" could not have been a more radical departure from Proust! Sarah Vowell was best known to me as that quirky voice often heard on NPR's This American Life. The Los Angeles Times Book Review (may it rest in peace) called her "a Madonna of Americana". Despite the unusual style and the humorous insights, The Wordy Shipmates draws an excellent historical picture of early American figures like Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop, Rhode Island's Roger Williams and activist Anne Hutchinson that is informative and surprising. At times, the analogies to pop culture were intrusive -- but that's me. I think this book and this approach have made legitimate history more accessible and palatable to younger readers who might not otherwise be interested in the subject.

The Stranger, by Albert Camus I'd read Camus and Sartre in early adolescence and despite my cigarette-sneaking, black turtle-necked, angsty, brooding nature, I'm afraid the philosophical implications were lost on me at the time. I picked it up again after having watched a series of lectures on DVD about Existentialism and it made much more sense the second time around. For more The Stranger, look here.

Waiting for the Barbarians, by J.M. Coetzee After reading Disgrace, I became a fan of the South African born Coetzee. Waiting for the Barbarians is an allegorical tale about oppressors and the oppressed, set in a fictional country in an indeterminate time period. One can't help but wonder about Coetzee's roots in South Africa when reading this story, but it's not long before one's musings about the story become broader even than that.

Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov I'd read Lolita (more than once, actually) and although I'd heard of Pale Fire, I knew nothing about it when I began to read. The novel is structured around a 999 line unpublished poem, written by a recently deceased fictional poet and narrated by his fictional friend and neighbor. This is an amazing example of successful metafiction. I am not a huge fan of metafictional novels because so many are (in my opinion) more style than substance. Not so with Pale Fire. This novel is one of those few where I was dazzled by the concept, the prose and the elegance of it the entire way through. I would imagine there are scholars who've spent entire careers studying and interpreting this work.

The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow Reading novels written decades ago is sort of like getting off a freeway, driving into a rural village and getting out to stroll. I have an almost visceral change in posture when I pick up one of these older, bigger books and I feel like I have all the time in the world to give to them -- and they generally do need more time and patience.

English-born writers and literary critics Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis have both noted that The Adventures of Augie March is certainly on the short list of Great American Novels if you consider the definition to encompass a story that focuses on life in America within a given time period.

"I am an American, Chicago born -- Chicago, that somber city -- and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus,, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles."

Wikipedia describes the novel this way: "The Adventures of Augie March (1953) is a novel by Saul Bellow. It centers on the eponymous character who grows up during the Great Depression. This picaresque novel is an example of bildungsroman, tracing the development of an individual through a series of encounters, occupations and relationships from boyhood to manhood."

Bellow, like Proust is a writer who demands patience. I read this novel with highlighter in hand, as I do Proust as the author frequently makes references to historical figures and events that aren't necessarily well known (at least not to me). I recently read a quote from Norman Mailer about Saul Bellow where he accused him of reading a million books, but not really having any ideas. I thought was an interesting comment as Bellow's familiarity with a huge body of literature comes through quite clearly in his work, but I don't know that I agree with the second part of his comment.

I kept the highlighter handy for a second reason. Bellow was an incredible writer. I often like to highlight especially fine passages in books I read to refer back to them later, but in the case of this book, I found myself tempted to highlight nearly everything! His descriptions of people, in particular, captivated me.

"He was a beer saufer; droopy, small, a humorist, wry, drawn, weak, his tone nosy and quinchy, his pants in creases under his paunch; his nose curved up and presented offended and timorous nostrils, and he had round, disingenuous eyes in which he showed he was strongly defended. He was a tio listo, a carnival type, a whorehouse visitor. His style was that of a hoofer in the lowest circuit, doing a little cane-swinging and heel-and-toe routine, singing, "I went to school with Maggie Murphy," and telling smokehouse stories while the goofy audience waited for the naked star to come out and begin the grinds. He had a repertory of harmless little jokes, dog yipes, mock farts; his best prank was to come up behind and seize you by the leg with a Pekinese snarl."

Throughout Augie March's journey, he encounters and often returns to dozens of characters. The dialog and discussions between them are full of ideas.

"Boredom starts with useless effort. You have shortcomings and aren't what you should be? Boredom is the conviction that you can't change. You begin to worry about loss of variety in your character and the uncomplimentary comparison with others in your secret mind, and this makes you feel your own tiresomeness. On your social side boredom is a manifestation of the power of society. The stronger society is, the more it expects you to hold yourself in readiness to perform your social duties, the greater your availability, the smaller your significance. On Monday you are justifying yourself by your work. But on Sunday, how are you justified? Hideous Sunday, enemy of humanity. Sunday you're on your own -- free. Free for what? Free to discover what's in your heart, what you feel toward your wife, children, friends, and pastimes. The spirit of man, enslaved, sobs in the silence of boredom, the bitter antagonist. Boredom therefore can arise from the cessation of habitual functions, even though these may be boring too. It is also the shriek of unused capacities, the doom of serving no great end or design, or contributing to no master force. The obedience that is not willingly given because nobody knows how to request it. The harmony that is not accomplished. This lies behind boredom. But you see the endless vistas."

I loved this book and will be reading much more Saul Bellow.

The Easter Parade, by Richard Yates I'm an enormous Woody Allen fan and bought this book some time ago because his characters in "Hannah and Her Sisters" mention it. With all the talk about Revolutionary Road recently, I decided it was time to read Richard Yates.

The Easter Parade is the story of two sisters, who live different, but individually tragic lives and is told over the course of four decades, beginning in the 1930's. The book has one of the best first sentences I've read in a long time:

"Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents' divorce."

The book is told from the point of view of the younger sister, Emily and I was quite taken with the intimacy and accuracy the author brought to a female character. The writing is spare and beautiful and the story was poignant and painful.

On a separate note, this book is the type of story that I believe people are talking about when they claim that literary fiction is depressing.

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My Personal Age of Enlightenment

One of my favorite lines from the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life is, “youth is wasted on all the wrong people”. When it comes to the pursuit of knowledge and a broad education, maybe there’s a little truth to the sentiment. If I’d left high school in 1979 and gone on to a four year college, my life would have taken a far different, although not necessarily better path. In those days, my ability to retain information was nearly photographic compared to now, when I find myself struggling to remember common words with increasing frequency.

What I didn’t have then was the ability to see the relationships between things.

I hesitate to try to explain what the last month has been like for fear I’ll sound a little crazy, but it is like the universe has broken open for me. It started with Marcel Proust and it picked up speed with the DVDs.

Last January I read a novel by Alain de Botton called On Love. I loved the author’s style so much that I sought out more that he’d written and to my delight, there was plenty to choose from. The same month I read How Proust Can Change Your Life and I wrote a little about each book here.

It’s hard to believe it was only the first of January when I dove into Swann’s Way. I won’t attempt to explain what it is about Marcel Proust that brings about such an intense response from me as a reader, but I touched on it a bit in this post. Our birthdays (mine and Proust's) are a day apart and in some silly way, I feel like that connects me to him and his eccentric, neurotic life.

I jumped right into In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower as soon as I finished Swann’s Way. After finishing it, I decided to read two or three other books before picking up The Guermantes Way because I’m already half grieving at the notion that once I read all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time, there will be no more.

I said I might sound a little crazy.

Reading Proust is giving me plenty to think about, but toward the end of December I’d ordered some DVD lecture series’ from The Teaching Company, so when I haven’t been reading or watching movies, I’ve been listening to these lectures. Apparently the adult education business is feeling the pinch of the economy and there were fire sale prices on these courses at the year's end. I bought Great Ideas of Philosophy, a series of 60 half hour lectures, a 24 lecture course on Existentialism and a five course series on the great world religions, which includes Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.

For some reason, I always feel a little awkward when I tell people I’m reading one of the classics or let’s face it, actually studying something for my own gratification. People often seem to react to these kinds of pursuits with an innate suspicion and sometimes a defensiveness. Why would I do this? I realize it's not everyone's idea of fun, but I am having the time of my life.

The more I learn, the more I want to know. Scott has been watching the philosophy lectures with me, and they’ve all been excellent. I’ve finished the lectures on existentialism, and earlier tonight I finished the last lecture on Islam after completing the courses on Judaism and Christianity.

Had I been reading what I am or trying to follow these lectures at some other time in my life, I’m certain it would have felt like work but for now I feel like the John Travolta character in the movie Phenomenon (well – except I didn't see a meteor and I’m not turning into a genius or anything -- I’m just hungry for more).

This has happened before with other things. I've gone on redecorating frenzies and painted every room in my house, not stopping until the last piece of masking tape was down and the last switch plate cover replaced. I had the same sense of dedication to watching every episode of all nine seasons of The X-Files that I did to studying every wine region in the world and starting my own modest collection (which we ended up drinking before our last cross country move).

I’ve done little to no writing at all since this binge started, but I don’t have any guilt over it. It feels like I have things to learn before I go back to creating something of my own.

But it's all connected.

Not a day goes by that I don't hear a reference to a Greek myth or a German philosopher and my worldview has opened up completely after learning the history of the three great monotheistic religions that not only trace their origins back to Abraham, but share a history of theological, political and mystical struggle.

The day is coming when I'll have taken in as much as I can handle and this intensity and passion will fade. Maybe then it will be orchids or Asian studies or watching old episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Until then, I'll continue to find my bliss in each discovery.

The Joy of Slowing Down

Before I begin bloviating about slow reading and my adventures with Marcel Proust, I want to share some information and some links.

Timothy Hallinan, author of a number of novels, but most recently, The Fourth Watcher has got a fascinating series of guest blog posts on creativity going up each week. The first was by author Christopher West and on Sunday, the second post in the series, by Stephen Cohn, Emmy Award winning composer will be up. Tim has a whole series of guest bloggers lined up so check out these fascinating posts and comments on living a creative life.

Larramie, known to most as the muse behind the delightful Seize a Daisy has launched a new project and blog called The Divining Wand. Have a wish you want to make with your own personal fairy godmother? Curious? You should be. Check out the site and maybe one of your dreams will come true.

On a more serious note, Travis Erwin from One Word, One Rung, One Day lost his home and everything in it to a fire earlier this week. Thankfully, Travis and his family were not injured. Blogger Erica Orloff and friends have set up the Habitat for Travis site where you can help the Erwin family.

* * *

When I think about reading as a child, or more accurately, as a pre-adolescent and then a teenager when books made their deepest impressions on me, I recall a feeling of warmth and of hiding out with a book. It’s a fetal, curled up with bare feet memory. I have sense memories of sitting on beaches, disappearing into sofa cushions, elbow-propped face in hands underneath an oak tree or summer furniture on a breezeway or porch and I remember that nothing in the world existed but what was on the page in front of me and maybe the sound of waves crashing or leaves rustling. It seems I was always reading, but I don’t remember having lots of books. Most came from the library or were borrowed -- with or without the permission of their rightful owners. I was serially monogamous with books and in love with whatever I was reading at the time. I may even have needed a cooling off period, the space to grieve the book just finished before I turned to something new. I was depressed at learning I’d read the only book by an author whose words I couldn’t get enough of and frequently I started a book I’d only just finished all over again so that the experience didn’t have to end.

I don’t read that way anymore and I miss it. Rare are the times most of us have to slip away and spend hours reading. We grab a quick chapter at lunch or on the treadmill or before bed. We listen to books while we drive or when we’re drifting off to sleep. We don’t discover books in the same way we did as kids. Thousands of titles are competing for our time and attention and we’re in a race to read through the piles that spill over from our bed side tables onto stacks all around our homes. My unread books come from places they’d never have come from before. I never knew an author or bought a book written by anyone I knew before I started blogging, but I’ve read quite a few in the past two years. Recommendations used to come from a trusted few who knew my taste or through happy accidents browsing my local bookstore, but now I choose books I read about online more often than not.

I confess to frequently choosing novels based on their lack of heft, the pressure to work through the intimidating pile of unread books spurring me to just get through them. It’s not really a very satisfying experience and I sometimes feel guilty, thinking I haven’t given the author the time and care he or she put into the work.

There are a few books I keep on a special shelf that I know require more of me than the two or three days most books are allocated and at the start of the year, I decided it was time to read one of them.

Mention of the name, Marcel Proust brings about a wide range of reactions. Most people know him as the turn of the century French author of what some think is the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Since I watched the movie, Little Miss Sunshine, I’m afraid I can’t think of him without thinking of Steve Carell’s character. Proust's novel, In Search of Lost Time is actually seven separate books weighing in at something like 3,000 pages. Swann’s Way (the first book) is a manageable size at under 450 pages. I felt a little weird attempting the book, worried that I’d be too stupid to get through it and wondering if reading Proust and then attempting to talk about it made me seem pretentious. There is a freakish sort of competitiveness that I confess to living with. I’m not measuring myself against anyone else, which is why I don’t think competitive is the right word, but I do have a certain need to challenge myself. More than almost anything else, I was inspired by Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life (and everything else I’ve read of his) to give Proust a try.

January 1st, the took out a fresh notebook, a set of Post-It flags, a pen and a highlighter and I hunkered down, curled up, found a corner to hide in and I began.

In addition to a generalized intimidation factor, there are several things that make reading Proust challenging.

One is that the book was originally written in French, so there is always a danger that the translation may not have preserved the meaning and tone of the original or that the translations aren’t necessarily accurate. Many of the words used in the book are words that, quite simply, I am not familiar with. The version of Swann’s Way I’m reading was published in 2004 and by all accounts, the translation is excellent. The original book was published in 1913 and the story begins when the narrator is a child, so many of the references are to places and people who were well known (if you were French and of a certain social standing) in the late nineteenth century, but the translator has done the reader a great service by footnoting many of the references.

Swann’s Way is not structured like a traditional novel. Lydia Davis, the translator says:

“In fact, it does not set out to tell a linear, logically sequential story, but rather to create a world unified by the narrator’s governing sensibility, in which blocks of a fictional past life are retrieved and presented, in roughly chronological order, in all their nuances. A reader may feel overwhelmed by the detail of this nuance and wish to get on with the story, and yet the only way to read Proust is to yield, with a patience equal to his, to his own unhurried manner of telling the story.”

Those who’ve described Proust as difficult sometimes attribute the difficulty to his notoriously long sentences. Long sentences work when they’re called for. I have a certain affinity for authors who use them to good effect and he is one of them. From Lydia Davis again:

“Proust felt, however, that a long sentence contained a whole, complex thought, a thought that should not be fragmented or broken. The shape of the sentence was the shape of the thought, and every word was necessary to the thought: ‘I really have to weave these long silks as I spin them,’ he said. ‘If I shortened my sentences, it would make little pieces of sentences, not sentences.’ He wished to ‘encircle the truth with a single – even if long and sinuous – stroke.’"

In approaching Proust with such patience and such caution, I’ve learned that I would likely enjoy a great many other books more if I would take them a little more slowly. I’ve found that although I am taking what many would consider an annoying and painstaking route through Swann’s Way, it has put me into a pleasant rhythm and taught me how to read Proust.

Admittedly, the first fifty pages were slow going for someone accustomed to reading modern day novels where if a reader isn’t “hooked” within the first page, or paragraph or sentence (!) he might toss the book aside and look for something more exciting. But once I surrendered to Proust’s style, I found that I was committed to a narrator unlike any other I’ve ever read and I have been unable to put the book down – save the multiple times per page that I do stop to write down an unfamiliar word, or flip to the back of the book in order to read a footnote.

I have encountered many words I’ve had to write down and later research, but I’ve become much more aware of words that I am familiar with and that I assume I do know the meanings of, but in this slower, more patient approach I've come to realize that they may not mean exactly what I think they mean – often nuance is everything. I’ve written them down and looked them up too and have had a few surprises.

Here’s a sampling of some of the words I’ve encountered: architectonic, expatiations, metempsychosis, transvertebration (no luck finding this one), Merovingian, ferruginous, lorgnon, ignonimous, demimonde, cocotte, alienist, viaticum, otiose, desuetude, lacunae, reredos, chimera, porphyry, ashlar, annulated, crenellated, quatrefoil, cardoon, punctilious, sibylline, calash, chasuble, hymenopteran, palimpsest, sainfoin, and immanent.

To be fair, quite a few of the words relate to parts of churches or castles, plants, religious articles and archaic items no longer in use, but many of them are perfectly good words that we just don’t often see.

The words slow me down, but so do the hundreds of references to painters, sculptors, musicians, writers, Greek mythological figures, playwrights and other cultural and social references. Again, Lydia Davis has provided comprehensive notes to enhance the reading experience.

In terms of style, there is nothing especially difficult about Proust. In fact, once I gave in to him, I realized that Proust was teaching me how to read Proust and it is easy to stand back and see why the entire novel runs as long as it does. I have never read an author who was able to communicate sensory experience or the details of an emotional experience, or the odd interaction between human beings in social situations in the precise and exacting way that he does. I’ve never read characters who are more meticulously and perfectly described.

On the narrator’s elderly great-aunt, who has withdrawn to her bedroom, insisting that she's too ill to go out anymore:

“If Saturday, which began an hour earlier and deprived her of Francoise, passed more slowly than other days for my aunt, she nonetheless awaited its return with impatience from the beginning of the week, because it contained all the novelty and distraction that her weakened and finical body was still able to endure. And yet this was not to say that she did not now and then aspire to some greater change, that she did not experience those exceptional moments when we thirst for something other than what we have, and when people who from a lack of energy or imagination cannot find a source of renewal in themselves ask the next minute that comes, the postman as he rings, to bring them something new, even if it is something worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it; when the will, which has with such difficulty won the right to surrender unimpeded to its own desires, to its own afflictions, would like to throw the reins into the hands of imperious events, even if they may be cruel. Doubtless, since my aunt’s strength, drained by the least fatigue, returned to her only drop by drop deep within her repose, the reservoir was very slow to fill up, and months would go by before she had that slight overflow which others divert into activity and which she was incapable of knowing, and deciding, how to use.”

On Swann, who until this scene was not physically attracted to Odette:

“Standing next to him, allowing her hair, which she had undone, to flow down her cheeks, bending one leg somewhat in the position of a dancer so that without getting tired she could lean over the engraving, which she looked at, inclining her head, with those large eyes of hers, so tired and sullen when she was not animated, she struck Swann by her resemblance to the figure of Zipporah, Jethro’s daughter, in a fresco in the Sistene Chapel. Swann had always had this particular penchant for amusing himself by rediscovering in the paintings of the masters not only the general characteristics of the real world that surrounds us, but what seems on the contrary the least susceptible to generalization, the individual features of the faces we know: for instance, in the material of a bust of the Doge Loredano by Antonio Rizzo, the jut of the cheekbones, the slant of the eyebrows, altogether the very evident resemblance to his coachman Remi; under the colors of a Ghirlandaio, M. de Plancy’s nose; in a portrait by Tintoretto, the whiskers, the break in the nose, the penetration of the gaze, the congestion of the eyelids of Dr. du Boulbon. Perhaps because he had always continued to feel a touch of remorse that he had limited his life to worldly relationships, to conversation, he believed he could find a sort of indulgent pardon granted him by the great artists, in the fact that they too had contemplated with pleasure, introduced into their work, faces like these which give it a singular certificate of reality and of truth to life, a modern flavor; perhaps, also, he had allowed himself to be so caught up in the frivolity of the society people that he felt the need to look into an old work of art for these anticipated and rejuvenating allusions to current proper names. Perhaps, on the other hand, he still had enough of an artist’s nature so that these individual characteristics gave him pleasure by assuming a more general meaning as soon as he saw them extirpated, emancipated, in the resemblance between an older portrait and an original which it did not represent. Whatever the case, and perhaps because the abundance of impressions that he had been receiving for some time, and even though this abundance had come to him more with his love of music, had enriched even his delight in painting, he now found a deeper pleasure – and this was to exert a permanent influence on Swann in Odette’s resemblance to Zipporah as painted by Sandro di Mariano, whom people call more often by his popular nickname of Botticelli, since that name evokes, not the painter’s true work, but the idea of it that is vulgarized, banal, and false.”

It is quite an indulgence that I’ve asked of you, in citing these long excerpts, but I don’t think it’s possible to even begin to offer up a sampling of Proust’s work without providing long passages. If you are still with me, I thank you.

I’m beyond the halfway point in Swann’s Way and I’m already a little sad to know that it won’t be long until the book is finished. Fortunately, there is much more Proust to read.

This reading experience has gone far beyond merely exposing me to this great writer’s work. It has allowed me to slow down and savor words again.