Status Updates From Praeterita: The Autobiograp...

Proust loved this book, which makes sense. It reads like a sloppy first draft for Swann’s Way. Meaning: it’s great. I’m choosing to read it as (above all else) a book about being an only child. Volume 2 opens with Ruskin musing: “For as I look deeper into the mirror, I find myself a more curious person than I had thought…”

I feel asleep for three hours after reading 70 pages.

End of Part I

Slowish going, as Ruskin continues to run the rivers of his prose into maddeningly tightening spirals and countercurrents. Know this is far from autobiography, lest he have us believe he spent all his life among Swiss snow-capped aiguilles and vale's grasses that grow directly before one's eye.

Steamrolling.... Ruskin is still in his 20s, writing, traveling, drawing, handling geological specimens, and suffering bouts of nervous fever.

Ruskin on the preeminence of Byron -- for whom a glacier is a glacier -- greater than Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Locke.

Ruskin is discursive, insightful, ideogrammatic.