When friends asked what I was reading, I said, “I’m reading Proust, actually,” acknowledging the improbability. I had the sense, while I was reading Proust, that I was “reading Proust,” having a packaged experience like a tour of the Louvre. Over the next couple of nights I read the “Overture” chapter. Everyone says you should read Proust, but no one had ever told me that I, specifically, should read Proust. Its obsessive attention to memory, time, and the minutiae of experience as it occurs through thinking-it was not just good. I pulled Swann’s Way off the shelf, read the first paragraph, and was astonished. Then I thought about In Search of Lost Time, another novel people, especially writers, almost brag about not having read, as though admitting you haven’t read Proust suggests you’ve read everything else. Perhaps I could write about not reading Moby-Dick. I want to, very much in fact, but I rarely read long books, and moreover feel that I’m saving Moby-Dick for an unclear future experience, some contained and isolating context it deserves-a long sea voyage, my deathbed. I considered writing about Moby-Dick, but did not seriously consider reading Moby-Dick. One recent Monday evening, I scanned through our bookshelves for an unread classic-I had one last piece to write in this series on revisiting the canon.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |