Status Updates From Proust Among the Stars

“The huge exploratory program of the novel…exists under the sign of an ever-vigilant & opportunistic Eros…sexual appetite is subject to displacement & endlessly transferable into other areas of human thought & behavior. Eros is within touching distance of everything else that the book contains.”
A bold assertion, tho one that the author supports w cogent arguments! Proust = morality & sex anthropologist

Bowie’s dissection of Proust’s covert (yet upon closer inspection, blatantly self-evident) politics of sexuality is INSANE. Also I will *never* get over Charlus being into BDSM (w a man younger & poorer than him. in 20th century France, AT THAT?!)
“In the brothel, in wartime, love holds out against death…in the farcical reinventions of an unequal society..love & fraternity have found their last stronghold.”

“The price to be paid for this confident assumption of the artistic vocation is that of being a helpless bystander before real political events The artistic ego can consume and transform everything in its path; it can look upon class wars and world war and not be shaken…But although power converges upon Proust's artist…he still cannot…imaginatively reinvent the spheres in which it is exercised by others.”

“A certain slant of light, in the words of a great poem by Emily Dickinson, can bring an unanswerable intimation of death into an ordinary winter afternoon. But that same light, made memorable by who knows what conjunction of place, mood and memory, can tell us how to inhabit later afternoons, visited by different rays, differently slanted.”

A probing, erudite foray into Proust’s monumental work. Spellbinding!