"Lire Proust, c'est traverser la mer…"
These words were spoken on a podcast series released in celebration of the centennial of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
Pascal:
Curiosity is only vanity. Most frequently we wish not to know, but to talk. We would not take a sea voyage for the sole pleasure of seeing without hope of ever telling.
Well, I crossed an ocean to get here (France), thinking I would have a fairy-tale experience in a graduate philosophy program based on some grandiose ideas about the nature of the French university system, only to underwhelm and be underwhelmed.
One of the things I sought in my failed attempt at renewing my formal education was an escape from the frustrations of a world largely post-metaphysical. I find life exceeding difficult to bear without the mediation of a metaphorical lens. If that's what it means to be an artist, then…whatever. Suffice it say that I am not the sort of pragmatic, rational person who leans upon structured thinking to understand and cope with the world.
But the writers I admire most are the ones who exist in the "dreamtime of reason," a phrase I'm borrowing (and likely misapplying) from Peter Sloterdijk. They seamlessly weave together fact and truth, poetic imagery and (sometimes dull) reportage. I'm thinking of Dickens, McElroy, Sebald, a few others. These are writers not-yet unmoored from the realm of intuition, memory, and being by the strictures of mundane realism. Dickens, I think, extracts his perennial cheerfulness and faith in humanity from this taproot. Sebald conjures his visionary narratives from I-know-not-where, but evidently he, despite his status as a writer and intellectual of post-war Germany, did not give in to the insipid comforts of a critical and monumental history, as so many people who came of age in that period have done and still do. He relies upon the memories of others as if they were his own. And McElroy's labyrinthine sentences and temporal cæsurae complement his contemporary obsessions with an alluring, Faulknerian subjectivity.
If Nietzsche is to be believed:
In the Horizon of the Infinite. We have left the land and have gone aboard ship! We have broken down the bridge behind us, - nay, more, the land behind us! Well, little ship! look out! Beside thee is the ocean; it is true it does not always roar, and sometimes it spreads out like silk and gold and a gentle reverie. But times will come when thou wilt feel that it is infinite, and that there is nothing more frightful than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt itself free, and now strikes against the walls of this cage! Alas, if home sickness for the land should attack thee, as if there had been more freedom there, - and there is no "land" any longer!
then it would seem we are all afloat, with some of us resorting to diving bells, some to aircraft and time machines, others to fantasy, abstraction, and mettle. The titan of Port-Royal could not have imagined the world of Proust, still less that of our day. It would seem curiosity is not simply vanity any longer, but a perdurable optimism, a need not only to talk but to be.
Whence the motivation behind this (other) blog, supplementary to my personal site, where I rave and dote over faits divers. I call it the will to silence. This one is titled Dogfooding a Metaphysics with Proust (and friends). I hope to produce a weekly essay/post about something philosophical or in any wise stimulating within the pages of À la recherche de temps perdu as I read it with painstaking slowness over the next six months. I have the modest intention of entertaining myself; the slightly more involved idea of elaborating a personal and practical metaphysics to complement my necessarily vulgar existence as a citizen (yes, we really do live in a society…); and the lofty goal of having an audience. The jury's still out on that one.
More to come.