Today, I share a little family secret: my Proust Project. Merely mentioning the name Proust in our household will cause eyeballs to roll, smirks to form and heads to shake. Many humbling events may occur in our lives, particularly in the current tenuous era, but none of those can approach Proust's particular way of highlighting my shortcomings as a literary Pilgrim.
Our saga begins in 1983 on Surfside Beach in Nantucket, a good place, one would think, to start an eight part continuous novel, Remembrance Of things Past (ROTP). After all,the great work itself begins at a family summer retreat called Combray. My beach book was Volume I of the 1981 Random House Terence Kilmartin update of the classic C.K.Scott Moncrieff original translation from the French. It stands before me now with its warped, weatherbeaten cover and 1018 text pages filled with sea air, humidity and a few grains of sand. The bookmark is the same slice of Pierre Deux ribbon borrowed in 1983. I'd like to report that I actually did finished this volume.... in 2006 with a little help from a new Penguin translation overseen by Christopher Prendergast. That's right; it took me 23years to read two novels.
I should probably tell you at this point, if you have not actually read Proust in its entirety, that it may be described as a Seinfeldian work in that nothing much happens. That is, life happens, but it is the birds tweeting, the leaves being leaves, music playing, parties being parties. Some have referred to it as a Zen novel. To draw a one last, political, analogy, ROTP is the Albany of literature. It progresses at its own slow pace, day after day, character after character, word by word by word, and not too much is accomplished, except that, since its about people with loads of dough, they find a million ways to spend it.
Where were we? 2006, thirteen years after starting the first volume, I finish it. So, I am pumped, energized. Also, I have an enormous amount of time on my hands due to a sudden disruption in life. I acquired a rare 1927 Moncrieff Cities Of The Plain (IV)published by Albert & Charles Boni, also their 1929 The Captive (VI) . Additionally, I begin keeping Vintage paperback editions handy and continue trying the contemporary Penguin translations.
But I do not finish. In fact, I become deeply discouraged when my brother-in-law, a French scholar and international educator, visits and tells me that the entire work must be read in sequence and all at the same time in order to enjoy its true depth and beauty. And so, my friends, I must begin again, from the beginning, and I am valiantly trying to find the strength to so so.
But, you may ask, why should we care? Why, Reader and Fellow Pilgrim, in this topsy-turvey world of ours should you give a souffle' about my Proust travails?
I was reminded today of my Proust Project by a little piece in the Times, which as you know, is a favorite whipping boy of mine and such a willing victim at that. A Mr. John Schwartz writes a small piece about how the healthcare naysayers harp about the size of the House bill, 1990 pages, as evidence of its worthlessness. He actually finds an expert, Katz, a "fellow in empirical legal studies" at U of Mich. Katz and his colleague brilliantly point out that although the bill contains 363,000 words, only about 234,000 of them " have an impact on substantive law and that "234,000 words do not present a barrier to reading."
I'll bet that will ease any doubts you may have had! They go on together to say that, at this length, the bill is comparable to J.K. Rowling's longest book in the Harry Potter series. I'm not making this up.
Mr. Schwartz, Katz, Times editors (if there are any left who can think and read), thank you all once again for pointing out the obvious to us all: the House bill can only be seen as a work of pure fiction, containing fantastic tales of medical delivery and dark mathematical wizardry. This work would earn Drs. Pelosi and Baucus an unprecedented Triple Nobel Prize for Medicine, Mathematics and Literature, if it ever passed. With friends like Schwartz, and more bad luck, it probably won't.
And newspapers wonder why they are going out of business.
If this is the best that the bill's supporters, like the Times can do, then there is every reason to hope that I will be able to finish reading Proust's entire Remembrance of Things Past before Congress' monumental work of fiction ever becomes a real law.
"For a long time I used to go to bed early...."
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Please Note: thirdgarage editors would like to remind loyal and even disloyal readers that the staff is currently showing a series of collages at Wine At Five, Rye's premier wineshop and (temporary) art gallery. Having sold one piece last week, staff discovered that reducing prices had a positive influence on buyers. Therefore, prices are currently $95-150 for these unique and, admittedly, slightly odd original works.
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