The Proust Project

 This morning I finished volume one of Proust's immense novel, In Search of Lost Time (yes, I am reading it in English). This means I am 465 pages into the over 3,000 pages or about one-sixth of the way. This is going a lot faster than I anticipated. When I moved to Mexico over twenty years ago, one of the projects I thought I would have time for was finally reading this book in its entirety. But alas, life intervened and I kept setting it aside. Reading it now I realize that it helps to be older. When I first started reading it I was in my early thirties and just too young to appreciate it.

So what has happened in the first four hundred and sixty-five pages? Well, we have heard a lot about going to bed early and not going to sleep, about different bedrooms. About different walks in Combray. About M. Swann and his obsessive love for Odette, a person of questionable character. About different places and different seasons and how they seem to reflect our obsessive loves. The unnamed narrator himself develops an obsessive love for Gilberte, the daughter of M. Swann and Odette. And that's about it. Mind you, we learn a great deal about how people act and think about themselves and the world around them. It's all about Time and Space. And obsessive love.

Perhaps the most refreshing thing about the novel is that the political content is just about zero. As opposed to our world where, as Scott Adams averred the other day, if you look at CNN and Fox Cable news there is actually no news at all--it is entirely politics.

What a strange world we have stumbled into. And did we really choose this world? Is democracy as is sometimes said, a situation where the people vote for what they want and then they get it--good and hard?

I continue to watch/listen to the new set of recordings of the Shostakovich symphonies with Valery Gergiev and the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater as filmed by a French crew and continue to be impressed. Yes, these are not the tidiest recordings and there are occasional odd balances and other flaws. But honestly, these are deeply passionate performances and well worth your time. Here is the Symphony No. 5: