To Go or Not to Go?

"This is a great moment, when you see, however distant, the goal of your wandering. The thing which has been living in your imagination suddenly becomes a part of the tangible world." --Freya Stark

It's been on my horizon for over three years now. Ever elusive, whimsical, charming, it rises over the peaked roofs of my neighborhood as if out of some other world, a fairy tale perhaps. Up until yesterday it was, in fact, just that: my fairy tower, a mystical white tower topped with a green peaked turret, the kind that Rapunzel let down her long hair from. 

What made it even more magical, more unreal and other-worldly, was the fact that it used to dance enticingly over the horizon, ever-shifting, never-stable. Walking home from work it would appear out of nowhere over the treetops, from a new angle, in some new light; it seemed impossible that it stayed where it was while I moved. I'd think of Marcel Proust, who often wrote of the shifting steeples over a horizon in central France, until they became metaphors for his characters: ever-changing, never who you thought they were. I'd try to guess the purpose of my tower--Minaret? Mosque? Lookout?--but I'd never look it up. I never tried to find its base, half-believing it moved continually in its own reality, and half-content to let it be, evidence of a dream world more compelling than my every day reality.

Yesterday a gentleman approached the register and informed me that I would not have made this sale had not his bus been late. The comment gave our transaction a kind of fated appeal, as if it were meant to be. As I bagged his books, he informed me that he was taking the "66 to the 39" a familiar bus route for me, in fact, my bus route home.

Had I ever heard of the Roxbury Water Tower, the customer wanted to know. I didn't think so. "They're doing some construction on it now, so it doesn't look the same, used to be white." Suddenly I remembered that in recent weeks my fairy tale tower had changed, had been magically transformed into a brown tower. I had imagined some evil spell had been cast; now I knew the spell was scaffolding.

The customer drew a photo-copied map out of his bag, and began to explain his trek to me. As I became more and more certain that this man was on the journey I had never dared to make, on a pilgrimage to my fairy tower, and that this was the treasure map to its elusive base, I grew more and more alarmed. Dared I look at the map? Learn the roots of this tower, the truth of this story? It seemed I had no choice. "Oh," I said weakly, "I always wondered about that tower."

"Yup, it's a water tower," the man confirmed, and informed me that were rehabilitating the tower, that they hoped to open it so that the public could go to the top to enjoy the view.

Would it have been better not to know? I wondered as I watched the man leave the bookstore to continue on his quest. According to Proust, the places we long for are never quite the same in reality; it's the essence of their mystery, the very appeal of desire itself that we crave, and rarely find fulfillment when we journey to their base. His narrator is almost always disappointed in the destinations he has dreamed.

However, in my limited travel experience, I often find that there is joy in the journey itself, and perhaps my imagination is not quite so ardent as Proust's: it rarely over-shoots a destination, allowing me to be quite happy at the end of a quest. It's one thing to hold a destination as sacred, it's another to keep it--untarnished, but un-experienced--at arm's length, in another world. There's something to seeing in reality something you've only imagined. When the Roxbury Water Tower turns white again, perhaps I will set out on a pilgrimage of my own. Who can tell what worlds I'll spy from atop it's turret?

Twenty-four Hours with Proust

A few years ago, as my friend Tera and I were wandering around the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, I wondered aloud if Proust’s manuscripts were there, either on display or hidden away in some dusty archive. So when we inadvertently befriended a bored security guard, we asked. Unfortunately, neither of us spoke much French. But the guard seemed to understand, became animated, and sent us off down a long hallway with directions to turn at the end. We eagerly complied, only to end up at an exhibit of Louis the Something’s Globes.

Proust’s coveted hand-written drafts of his 3,000 page novel, In Search of Lost Time, have never been on display outside of Paris. When I left the city I thought I had left my chances of ever viewing the spidery scrawl and crowded margins of my favorite author. But now, in celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the publication of Swann’s Way, Proust’s papers have made their way outside of the confines of the Bibliothèque national, and are on display at the Morgan Library in New York City.

In conjunction with these celebrations, 192 Books in Chelsea decided to host “Proust in 24 hours” a 24-hour reading of Swann’s Way. And they decided to hold this event last Tuesday, February 19, in other words: on my 30^th birthday. As could think of no better way to celebrate, reflect on, and downright ponder the passing of time, I decided to go.

I spent the afternoon at the Morgan with Proust. At least, that was what it felt like, as I enclosed myself in the small, cubicle exhibit and poured over his manuscripts. Never mind that his handwriting was illegible and that, while my French has improved somewhat since my miscommunication with the library guard, my continuing education French classes haven’t quite got me up to the speed of, well, Proust’s vocabulary. I remembered that Proust translated his favorite author, Ruskin, without learning English, and I stared at those pages until I began to recognize the passages I had committed to heart.

On the opening page to Swann’s Way, Proust had drawn a bold line through an entire first paragraph. Then, near the bottom, he had penciled in a line so tenuous and faint it was difficult to discern: “Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.” In another draft on display the famous madeleine was referred to as a “biscotte”—it originally had its source in a commonplace slice of toast. This toast to madeleine transubstantiation will forever stand in my mind as the quintessential transformation of life into art.

Sufficiently immersed in Proust, I dropped my bags at The Jane Hotel and headed up 10^th Ave to 192 Books. The small, one-room carefully curated bookshop was cozily packed with people crowded around a small table where Adam Gopnik and Anka Muhlstein would introduce the 24-hour reading. Champagne was poured and madeleines nibbled as we listened to Gopnik read an exchange of letters between Proust and André Gide, who declined to publish Proust. Muhlstein talked about her new book Monsieur Proust’s Library, which chronicles the literature Proust both references and draws from throughout his novel. There are over 200 characters in In Search of Lost Time, and a good many of them are readers.

We had quite a few readers that night at 192 books. I felt privileged to be among them as I took my turn at the mike. And while I did not make it through the entire 24 hours, I did stay long enough to hear the madeleine dipped into tea, and of how its taste conjured up a past believed to be lost, the narrator’s panacea, and one for us all, against the forward turning of the years.

I thought that was the end of my Proustian pilgrimage to New York City, but I was wrong. The following day, as I was walking down 5^th Avenue, I glanced in the window of Bergdorf Goodman. The luxury department store had decided to go literary, giving five window displays over to great moments in literature, among them, In Search of Lost Time.

For a Long Time...I Talk About Proust

It happened again. I stopped mid-sentence, my eyes re-focusing on the waitress who was clearing plates from in front of everyone around me. I looked down at my own half-eaten plate of cooling mac & cheese and I knew--I'd done it again. I'd gone off on another Proust rant that took me out of my time and transported me into another; for the past who-knows-how-long I had been completely unaware of those around me. Luckily, my listeners this time  were my fellow Proust Club members, meeting around the corner from Booksmith at Hops n Scotch, and Proust rants, while perhaps not relished by everyone present, were at least tolerated. I sheepishly passed around the Tupperware full of honey almond madeleines I had baked the night before, and felt immediately forgiven.

Ever since I first read Proust's seven volume, 3,000 page novel, In Search of Lost Time, almost five years ago now, I have not been able to stop talking about it. So when Booksmith happened to hire a fellow Prouster, Lydia, who is mid-sixth-volume, and Natasha in Used Books informed me she planned to read it all in a year, signing Shuchi up at the same time and somehow inspiring Carl in Used Books to make us beautiful little journals in which to keep our "Proust Club Notes," it was inevitable: we would form a Proust Club.

As this is the third Proust Club I have belonged to, and as I have already read Proust's first volume, Swann's Way four times, I decided that instead of reading along with the group, I'd take the opportunity to read supplementary material about Proust, and contribute what I could to the discussions. Lucky for me, in addition to the used books Natasha's been discovering,we've been inundated with a run of new books about Proust.

The most essential of these to our Proust discussions has undoubtedly been We Love Madeleines, a new cookbook by Miss Madeleine. The madeleine is a spongy, scalloped tea cake. When dipped in tea, this little delicacy has the power to transport Proust's narrator back into his days in a small village called Combray; from these memories his novel is born. For each of our Proust Club meetings, I've decided to sample a new recipe from We Love Madeleines. So far we've tried and approved the Pumpkin Spice Madeleine, the Brown Butter Bourbon Madeleine, and, our Proust Club favorite: the Honey Almond Madeleine. One of these days I'm going to try the Chocolate Bacon Madeleine.

The most heated discussion surrounding our Proust Club has been which translation to read. Until recently, Booksmith customers who were found puzzling in the "P" section of Fiction were always treated to a small, controlled Proust rant and then gently but forcibly directed to purchase C.K. Scott Moncrieff's translation. 

But now that Lydia has joined our ranks, anyone who comes looking for Proust will be privileged to witness a lively, friendly debate between Lydia--who prefers the new Lydia Davis translation--and me. Without going into all the reasons why you should read Proust through Moncrieff, I will say that a new, beautiful slim volume that Shuchi recently discovered containing Lydia Davis's words on her own translation, has at least made me appreciate her efforts as translator of Proust, even if I still believe them inferior to those of Moncrieff. Proust, Blanchot and a Woman in Red was published as part of the new Cahiers Series--check them out on our Staff Recs Shelf.

If you've already read Proust, you may be interested in some recent scholarly works on him, including Proust as Philosopher by Migel de Beistegui and Martin Hagglund's Dying for Time. Any attempt of mine at summing up these erudite studies of his work risks ending up like Monty Python's "Summarizing Proust Contest." Let's just say that I've spent a lot of time thinking about my chronolibido over the past few weeks.

And finally, a more accessible Monsieur Proust's Library by Anka Muhlstein was released just last week by Other Press. Muhlstein, author of Balzac's Omelette, explores first, how and what Proust read as a child, then the later impact that authors such as Baudelaire, Ruskin, Racine and Balzac had on the author.

That Proust knew these author's works intimately is evidenced in his pastiches, or imitative essays written in the style of a particular author, some of which have been collected in The Lemoine Affair, published by our friends at Melville House. Come to think of it, I believe it was Proust's incredible sensitivity to the spirit behind an author's works that may have set off my rant at Hops n Scotch. Madeleine, anyone?

The Proust is in the Pudding

So a bunch of the nerdiest staff members are gathering together and tackling Proust's epic, 6-volume novel In Search of Lost Time. Some of us have read it before, some of us are in book 5, some are fresh and new to the longest novel in the universe, but we're all having fun eating madeleines and talking about the book, and there is QUITE A LOT to talk about when each page has a whole novel's worth of unpacking to be done about it.

I have had as much fun finding and reading secondary material on Proust while I make my way through the series. My background in philosophy in particular is sending me on all kinds of romps through Husserl, Bergson and Merleau-Ponty to not only refresh my memory on phenomenology but to see also how the moment-to-moment perceptions and almost stream of consciousness style move along the observations and action in the novel.

If you're interested in a similar pursuit, there have been some serendipitous coincidences of arrivals in the UBC on the front of Proust-related books.

David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous
Abram's book is an investigation of language and perception and how through history our language and means of storytelling have influenced our conception of space and time; a subject of primary importance to Proust.

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
Bergson was a contemporary of Proust's, and in fact he even married Proust's cousin. Proust read Bergson and was highly influenced by him. Creative Evolution is a work written on the heels of Darwin drawing on immediate, moment-to-moment sense experience to explain reality, rather than pure reason alone. We got this beautiful Modern Library edition WITH a rad dust jacket that I lovingly mylared for you.

Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life
de Botton turns to Proust's modern epic to learn important life lessons. Important chapters include: "How to take your time," "How to read for yourself," and perhaps most importantly, "How to be happy in love."

and of course, there's Proust himself. We have several volumes and versions of the epic novel.

Curl up with some madeleines, tea, and the perfect autumn to winter novel (and any and all supplementary materials), and read along with the staff!

Destination: Elsewhere

Last week, I was chatting with a coworker as she prepared an after-shift smoke, carefully rolling the tobacco as we discussed the day and her present need, at the end of it, to be elsewhere. "I like to sprinkle a little dried lavender in," she said. "It has a nice effect."

I gasped and wouldn't let her go smoke the lavender-and-tobacco bundle until I had dragged her down to Destination Literature to show her the essay I had read the night before, entitled "Lavender."

The essay is the first in a new collection by Andre Aciman, Alibis: Essays from Elsewhere. The book begins with the scent of lavender, as vivid as if you had been smoking it yourself, emanating from Aciman's father's aftershave. In the next pages Aciman will be tracking the essence of this memory and the essence of the self, trying to determine what fragrance best expresses, epitomizes, and may one day, for his own son, immortalize, him.

The Proustian shadow is eminent in this as well as in the essays that follow. All the reader has to do is replace the scent of lavender with the taste of a tea-soaked madeleine to understand that Aciman is on his own hunt for lost time. Aciman acknowledges his emulation of Proust, accepts it as a part of the self he explores, as a Proust scholar and editor of The Proust Project. A Proust fanatic myself, I forgave any parasitic tendencies in these essays, as Aciman does not just evoke the style and philosophical musings of my favorite author, but continues Proust's exploration of the romantic relationship that our imaginations hold with alibis, elsewhere.

Aciman left Egypt with his family when still a young man, an exodus captured in his work Out of Egypt. In Alibis, Aciman returns to the streets of Rome, his first city of exile, to discover if anything of the past remains from his three years in the city. Instead of memories, however, he finds the streets paved with scenes from the literature he escaped into as a young man absented from any homeland outside of his imagination.

Aciman's tendency to read place through the literary imagination infuses his travel essays with beauty and nostalgia for places never to be returned to. Sometimes literature overrides his experience of reality, and the reader is left believing that the places she longs for can only be found within the confines of the self. But every once in a while the spell works in reverse, as art, such as a cherished Monet painting, leads Aciman on a pilgrimage to a place never before experienced in the immediacy of a present moment. Aciman's descriptive, winding prose captures such moments and tantalizes the reader in much the same way that scenes from literature and art inspired his own travels--to Rome, Venice, Tuscany, Barcelona, Paris, Alexandria, and New York.

The reward of reading these essays in getting to travel with Aciman, not only into new landscapes, but into the reflective depths of the self. After all, much of what the traveler sees in a city is simply a projection of the self. This is what Aciman calls "the miracle of intimacy with a place that may be more in us than it is ever out on the pavement."

Reading these essays is, in fact, not far from the experience of an after-shift smoke: breathing in a new atmosphere, a fresh scent, looking up from the page to letting the reflections swirl about, deep within the self, before exhaling the ephemeral language that inevitably leads your imagination back out into the surrounding streets of your city.
As I neared the end of Aciman's book, I went back to the initial essay, this time with a lavender-laced tobacco pipe in hand. The essay ends in a lavender field in Provence, where Aciman has traveled with his wife and sons. There is a sense of fulfillment in this ending, a comforting feeling that things have come full circle: here is the source of the scent, the thing itself, and, perhaps, a glimpse of the ever-elusive self, no longer dwelling in the past, no longer elsewhere, but finally, fully present, if only for a moment. As I read this passage, I exhaled and sniffed the air.

Like Aciman, and before him, Proust, I was remembering. I first read Proust while house-sitting in Seattle. For me, one of the greatest pleasures of house-sitting is getting to try out soaps, shampoos, and lotions other than your own. The lotion of that particular host, which I would lather on after a bath and before curling up with Proust, was scented with lavender.

the round table.

Three booksellers, two writers and a painter, are wondering what the hell the problem is. The cocktail of hope and desire and suspicion and surmise gets passed around the, actually, square table piled waist high with Patti Smith, Malcolm Gladwell, Barack Obama, Jaron Lanier, Michael Lewis, John Banville; and we are all careful with the cup as we pass, but if, as Jodie wishes, Marcel Proust were at table, and if, as Gene surely would have it, David Foster Wallace could be here to drain his share, and if, as I like to think I desire, Jackson Pollock could keep himself from drinking everyone else's share, if they were with us at this table, things might make more sense. What is the problem? Are there no readers? If there are readers, are they thinking, are they comparing, are they judging, are they applying what they confront on the page to their own experiences? Are there writers? Are the writers reading? Are the writers synthesizing what their peers, living and dead, have to offer, and are they overturning it, exalting it, destroying it?

Are there no stages, other than Oprah?
Are there too many stages, any of a million blogs?

When Beckett and Joyce put pen to paper it seems, from this distance, that the world was their stage, and that the world was listening.
Later, when David Foster Wallace put pen to paper, a bunch of writers got excited to write about eccentric geniuses in boarding school.
When who paints? Yeah, I like this gallery, too, do you want to go get a drink somewhere now?

I don't think there was any end to this conversation, I don't think there will ever be.

But I'm the one writing this momentary fragment of my impression of a conversation that was loosely based around a vague unsettling feeling that goes something like "what the hell is the problem here?" which was shared by three young people who are actively engaged in their passion. And while the feeling is vague, and its presence unsettling, it is shared.

It is shared.
It is shared.
It is shared.

I am the one writing this, so I will offer my conclusion. I say that we are in a brilliantly lit Dark Age. We can all see every last thing that everyone else is clamouring to show us. We are all hyper-literate, communicatory omni-presence is at our fingertips and spilling into our ears, and every word and every image is backlit and projected; aimed at everyone of us and pinning each of us in the spotlight of our own stage.

How do the brightest lights - the ones among us whose fires, in an earlier age, would have lit up a world bathed in its own natural state of darkness - make themselves seen now? The contrast is turned down to zero, the brightness up to one hundred. What is on the other side of this moment? And if, as my wife lamented recently, with rage rippling under the words, everything in the modern world is all sewn up, where is the slipped stitch that those with the knives of creation can exploit?


When Proust wrote, he felt all the time in the world, and he made a story out of it.
Who among us feels they have even one day?