Noel’s Reviews > The Captive / The Fugitive > Status Update

“His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. ‘That’s how I ought to have written,’ he said. ‘My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.’ Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition. In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter. ‘All the same,’ he said to himself, ‘I shouldn’t like to be the headline news of this exhibition for the evening papers.’

“He repeated to himself: ‘Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof, little patch of yellow wall.’ Meanwhile he sank down on to a circular settee; whereupon he suddenly ceased to think that his life was in jeopardy and, reverting to his natural optimism, told himself: ‘It’s nothing, merely a touch of indigestion from those potatoes, which were under-cooked.’ A fresh attack struck him down; he rolled from the settee to the floor, as visitors and attendants came hurrying to his assistance. He was dead. Dead for ever? Who can say? Certainly, experiments in spiritualism offer us no more proof than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there—those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only—if then!—to fools. So that the idea that Bergotte was not dead for ever is by no means improbable.”

Am I delusional for thinking I could finish this in two weeks? There are 500 pages left in my edition. I have a feeling that Time Regained will be very cozy…

...I think part of proust is reading him slowly, reading him in time, reading him in punctuation, even reading him in boredom, allowing the experience of his prose to flicker like the butterflies, the flowers, in paintings of gardens, then, when sufficiently drawn in, entranced, absorbed, he turns, wilfully, cruelly perhaps, to the next tableau, the subsequent meditation, to lead readers to revisit where they have been from another perspective as in our mutable sense of lost time, from moment to moment, inexorably, as all these great painters he mentions, all these works, express valiant futility of capturing or recovering in search of lost time. what I suggest is not that you can read it rapidly, I imagine it can be done, but that to do so might be entirely contrary to the embedded metaphysics of the work. in other words, I suggest you read him deliberately slowly...

Thanks, Michael :) Oh, I’ve been reading him slowly. I’ve been reading him too slowly! I think I was a teenager when I first started reading this novel. Tons of major events in my life have been inflected with his ideas. I do worry about the consequences, though… That it’s like, say, watching a film like A Brighter Summer Day, a minute a day, for a year. Of course, books are very different from films in how you experience them. But I worry whether, when I finish it, I’ll have actually read it—especially since I’ve already forgotten most of it…

Are there 100000000$ if you finish? Cause I think I have zero interest to continue after the first volume, but I mean if there's so much money maybe I should reconsider. But I am gonna read one word a week!

A million dollars, in literary cred.

Do they somehow convert into book coupons at least?

*Not redeemable for cash. No refunds or exchanges.

Also, no.

I found "Time Regained" a wonderful payoff that more than made up for the tedium in some of the other volumes. In fact, I think it's about time to read that volume again.