Ummagumma

[ Read Part One ] If we're constantly becoming different people, why don't we notice? Proust's answer is that change happens too slowly to be perceived while it's happening. We only realize we've changed after the fact. He compares it to natural phenomena: "It is the same in life; the heart changes, and it is our worst sorrow; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change." (pp. 91-92) We can track individual moments, but we don't feel the overall transformation. It's like watching the hour hand of a clock—you never see it move, but eventually you realize it's pointing somewhere completely different. This makes change feel like a kind of suicide we commit without noticing. The narrator realizes he's destroyi...

Note: This is the first of three parts. Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time offers one of the most profound explorations of personal identity in literature. Throughout this massive work, Proust returns again and again to a startling idea: we are not one continuous person living through time, but rather a succession of different selves, each born and dying as we move through our lives. As Joshua Landy argues in Philosophy as Fiction , Proust portrays the self as "a synchronically multiple entity" that is also radically discontinuous across time—so much so that "today's moi cannot predict tomorrow's, nor even always remember that of yesterday" (p. 105). The result is what Landy calls "a gallery of photographs taken at different stages of development" rather than a unified personality.  I've had Landy's book for well over a decade now and I still randomly thumb through it at least a little bit each year. Proust rarely makes the Self ...

[Read Nature in Proust .] In Search of Lost Time is many things, of course, and one of them is erotic. Sex is omnipresent yet seldom described. The few explicit scenes are not interruptions in the novel’s flow but condensations of its deepest themes—memory, imagination, class, and art. Proust refuses to separate physical desire from the entire apparatus of consciousness, memory, and aesthetic perception. He writes not of sexual acts but of the erotic imagination itself, that restless human effort to translate desire into knowledge. From the early fantasies of peasant girls to the aestheticized perversions of Charlus, sex in Proust is always more than physical: it is a metaphysical inquiry rendered through the body. Beneath it all runs the cool pulse of voyeurism—the pleasure of watching that transforms experience into art. Proust’s eroticism is the art of the observer. The narrator’s first sexual stirrings come as a fusion of landscape and longing. In the Roussainville passage of Swa...

Note: It has been my intention to return to Proust since I finished In Search of Lost Time in April. Upon completing the massive novel for the fourth time, I rushed off a couple of quick thoughts (see here and here ) but that was not meant to be the end of it. Now, I return with three essays on different aspects of the novel to show, as examples, how deep the rabbit hole can go with literally dozens of possible subjects. My chosen topics are Proust and Nature, Sex, and the Self. The last topic “grew in the telling” to borrow from Tolkien and will be submitted in three parts on its own. Almost all quotes are from the 1992 Enright edition as I have it on kindle and don’t have to type so much. Plus, at least 80% of the time I prefer the Enright translation to the more recent ones (2002 – 2023) I read this latest tour through the novel. Here’s the essay on Nature in Proust... ~ "Trees," I thought, "you no longer have anything to say to me. My heart has grown c...