Reading Proust - Swann's Way: 1
About 64 pages in...

Have you ever heard about the scene in Proust with the madeleine? It's about 60 pages in. I just read it, and wow, I'm starting to get what this is all about, especially why you get books like 'Proust and the squid' or 'Proust was a neurosurgeon.' He really has a great way of explaining how memories can be lost and then evoked by certain senses.

I was actually thinking about this quite a bit earlier because it comes after a 50-page memory of how the narrator used to cry for his mother as a child. I didn't find that part very inspiring, but without it this essay or whatnot on memory would not have had the same impact. I was thinking about how I would summarize or explain this to someone who hasn't read the novel, and then it hit me that if we were capable of summing up in a few words what it took a novelist 60 pages to say, the world would have no need for literature. The novel is an art form that expresses a view of human experience in a very specific way, and the only way to get that is to actually read the novel (same goes for any other work of art, I guess). I think that's why I prefer it to straight philosophy - it kind of teaches by example or illustration instead of by theory. Being told "A man died" would not have the same impact on you as if you actually read the story of that man's life, suffering and death, even though the end result is ultimately the same. Kind of like the difference between watching a game and seeing the score in the paper the next day. Maybe that's what makes a book good, or even great - expressing that experience extremely well?

As I anticipate that reading In search of lost time will be quite an adventure, I hope to post more of these quick entries on thoughts I have on the book as I go along, partially to share my thoughts but also just to leave bread crumbs of where I've been over the course of the 2500 pages. We'll see where this leads. I also just read Hrabal's I served the King of England. I'll have to come up with something on that as well.