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Monday
I have completed my Lenten project, which was to read Marcel Proust’s Swann in Love (the first volume of In Search of Lost Time). I chose it in part because my French professor father spoke lovingly of it, in part because my dear friend and philosophy colleague Alan Paskow turned to it when he was dying. As I read it, I couldn’t help but see it through Alan’s eyes.
I’ve written previously about how, in my weekly visits to Alan, I talked about the vivid nature imagery in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Gawain is a man who also knows he only has a short time left—he knows he cannot survive a return axe blow from the Green Knight—and as a result, the poet’s description of the seasonal cycle jumps off the page. When one is seeing one’s final spring or summer, they take on special meaning:
And so this Yule to the young year yielded place,
And each season ensued at its set time;
After Christmas there came the cold cheer of Lent,
When with fish and plainer fare our flesh we reprove;
But then the world’s weather with winter contends:
The keen cold lessens, the low clouds lift;
Fresh falls the rain in fostering showers
On the face of the fields; flowers appear.
The ground and the groves wear gowns of green;
Birds build their nests, and blithely sing
That solace of all sorrow with summer comes ere long.
And blossoms day by day
Bloom rich and rife in throng;
Then every grove so gay
Of the greenwood rings with song.
And then the season of summer with the soft winds,
When Zephyr sighs low over seeds and shoots;
Glad is the green plant growing abroad,
When the dew at dawn drops from the leaves,
To get a gracious glance from the golden sun.
I encountered a similar intensity in Proust. Everything vibrates and everything seems momentous when he takes on a subject, whether it be nature, the arts, love, interpersonal relationships, or the thinking process itself. I’ll focus here on one particular example, which is a little musical phrase that comes to take on great meaning for Charles Swann. Previous to hearing it, Swann’s life has seemed a barren desert:
He had so long since ceased to direct his course towards any ideal goal, and had confined himself to the pursuit of ephemeral satisfactions, that he had come to believe, though without ever formally stating his belief even to himself, that he would remain all his life in that condition, which death alone could alter. More than this, since his mind no longer entertained any lofty ideals, he had ceased to believe in (although he could not have expressly denied) their reality. He had grown also into the habit of taking refuge in trivial considerations, which allowed him to set on one side matters of fundamental importance.
The piece of music, however, brings into Swann’s life “the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation”:
But now, like a confirmed invalid whom, all of a sudden, a change of air and surroundings, or a new course of treatment, or, as sometimes happens, an organic change in himself, spontaneous and unaccountable, seems to have so far recovered from his malady that he begins to envisage the possibility, hitherto beyond all hope, of starting to lead—and better late than never—a wholly different life, Swann found in himself, in the memory of the phrase that he had heard, …the presence of one of those invisible realities in which he had ceased to believe, but to which, as though the music had had upon the moral barrenness from which he was suffering a sort of recreative influence, he was conscious once again of a desire, almost, indeed, of the power to consecrate his life.
This revelation reminds me of Rainer Maria Rilke’s epiphany upon seeing the “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” which leads him to declaim, “You must change your life.” And of James Wright’s comparable discovery while “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” and having an intense interaction with nature:
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
It so happens that Swann is unable to locate the piece after hearing it until he unexpectedly hears it played at an artistic salon he is attending. Because he is in love with a woman attending the salon (Odette), the musical phrase becomes bound up with the different stages of his love, from initial euphoria to jealousy and despair.
Even more than that, the phrase assures Swann that life, rather than being reducible to dust, has transcendent meaning. While strangers may be indifferent to our suffering, this “little phrase” sees in our seemingly mundane existence something
so far superior to everyday life as to be alone worthy of the trouble of expressing it. Those graces of an intimate sorrow, ’twas them that the phrase endeavored to imitate, to create anew; and even their essence, for all that it consists in being incommunicable and in appearing trivial to everyone save him who has experience of them, the little phrase had captured, had rendered visible.
Proust writes that Swann regards musical motifs as “actual ideas, of another world, of another order, ideas veiled in shadows, unknown, impenetrable by the human mind.” Swann therefore comes to see music as more than
a miserable stave of seven notes, but [rather] an immeasurable keyboard (still, almost all of it, unknown), on which, here and there only, separated by the gross darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys, keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs from another…
Artists, he continues, do us an inestimable service
when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme which they have found, of shewing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that great black impenetrable night, discouraging exploration, of our soul, which we have been content to regard as valueless and waste and void….Even when [Swann] was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed, latent, in his mind, in the same way as certain other conceptions without material equivalent, such as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective, of bodily desire, the rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned.
Proust acknowledges that these artistic revelations may be dependent on us, the listeners, and therefore impermanent. As he puts it, “Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we return to nothing in the dust.” But while this may be the case, as long as we are alive, music and the arts light up our lives as a lamp lights up a room, obliterating even the memory of darkness. Proust writes that the music phrase that so captivated Swann
has espoused our mortal state, had endued a vesture of humanity that was affecting enough. Its destiny was linked, for the future, with that of the human soul, of which it was one of the special, the most distinctive ornaments.
And that leads Proust away from a material vision of life. To be sure, he concedes that perhaps “all our dream of life is without existence,” that what lights us up (reading literature for me) is “not being.” But if that’s true, then “these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, are nothing either.” And because that is so hard to imagine, he works his way, very subtly, to a position beyond the material realm. “We shall perish,” he writes, “but we have for our hostages these divine captives who shall follow and share our fate.” And because these “hostages” are so divine, then “death in their company is something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain.”
Note that last “perhaps even less certain,” which has moved us from art as merely consoling us to art as taking us to a place beyond death. Proust does not say so directly but delicately hints that it is possible. Then, to emphasize the point, he resorts to angel imagery:
So Swann was not mistaken in believing that the phrase of the sonata did, really, exist. Human as it was from this point of view, it belonged, none the less, to an order of supernatural creatures whom we have never seen, but whom, in spite of that, we recognize and acclaim with rapture when some explorer of the unseen contrives to coax one forth, to bring it down from that divine world to which he has access to shine for a brief moment in the firmament of ours.
The composer in this process, the author writes, draws aside the veil to render, for a brief moment, this other realm visible.
I think of Alan, who loved the arts—especially painting and literature—as feeling affirmed by this account. In his final months, he could revisit his deep love of Vermeer and Sophocles and find reason to believe that death’s finality is “less certain.” I imagine myself, when dying as some future date, looking back at my beloved authors—Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Austen—and knowing at some deep level that there is more in heaven and on earth than is dreamt of in our materialist philosophy.