Goodreads: Days of Reading

Goodreads:

Days of Reading
Marcel Proust

I have not read Proust since my first try at college (roughly twenty years ago). I remember being overwhelmed by him. Part of that is the time constraints of a college semester. That meant we had two weeks to read In Search of Lost Time in a span of about two and a half weeks. Proust had, as indicated in Days of Reading, a much larger love of reading than I did at 17/18. I still struggle with all the many things that pull me in thousands of directions and won't allow me the time to read as much as I would like. If I tried to read that single novel in seven volumes in the span of two and a half weeks I would undoubtedly resort to what made the endeavor successful the last time - Cliff Notes. It's funny though that Proust explains, both explicitly and implicitly, why his masterpiece is so long.

Explicitly, he notes the length of his novel is long because he doesn't conceive of the novel as a succinct plot with a few characters. Days of Reading began as a newspaper article entitled, "Snobbery and Posterity". This is the implicit reason for the lengthy novel. We know that this essay was supposed to be a newspaper article entitled, "Snobbery and Posterity" because Proust tells us at the very end that is what he had initially set out to write. He was completely unsuccessful and instead wrote something completely different and promised to give the article at a later date.

I was expecting a short story when I picked this book up. I didn't read the cover and was struck unawares when it turned out to be a couple essays on literary criticism, art, aesthetics and the nature of truth. I'll have to reread this with a notebook some time later to grasp everything, but Proust has such a beautiful and flowing style that one can't help but admire his writing. If Proust is correct what draws me to him in his style is my recognition of his quality of vision and his role as the doorman, welcoming all readers into his own private universe.

Proust compares readings to an number of things: loving relationships, religious experience, friendships, telephone calls and more. He tends to elevate reading above all the comparisons he makes, but he still subordinates it to truth and creating. Reading is a form of friendship, a pure form. If we spend an evening with a book we do so because we choose to, not because it is imposed on us. "Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it" (Proust, 72). "Reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the odor to those dwelling places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter" (Proust, 75). For Proust, the truth is something that is deeply buried on the inside of the individual. The only way to make truth real is to create something out of that internal truth. Reading allows us to dig in there; but, it is a means and not an end.

There are two other quotes i underlined in the book that I'll add here so I don't forget them that aren't really relevant to the review. I just thought the were interesting and masterful sentences. "Love-affairs with living people may sometimes have a sordid origin which is later purified" (Proust, 39). "And so this voluntary servitude is the beginning of freedom" (Proust, 42). Two contradictory realities brought into harmony in such a short space of words: Proust was capable of succinctness! I think though, Proust very much enjoyed the sound of his own voice on the page. However, I type this in the complete knowledge, having brought to the cusp of this truth by reading this book, that I enjoy the sound of my voice at least as much as he enjoyed his.