Proust posting

The world according to The Narrator.

So there are the things we desire, except that it turns out that what we’re really after is our own mental versions of those things. We spin up these entire elaborate fantasies about a person, place, or thing and invest everything into them until they take on a life of their own within us. Then we meet the reality, and it’s not very much at all like we were expecting. It turns out that the real person, place, or thing, has a entirely different kind of thickness to it: a history, an interior life which is largely hidden at first but occasionally makes itself known in glimpses and hints.

The Narrator is constantly struggling with this gap between mental construct and reality, between an intense aesthetic ideal and the concrete. This gap, it turns out, drives him bananas. The breakdown between what he desires and what he’s forced to confront, whether its finally visiting a church in a beach town or a girl that he’s convinced himself is equally in love with him, begins to fill him with feelings of jealousy, obsession, mis-read signals and boatloads of angst (adolescent for the most part so far). Timeless stuff, in other words. Except for the social world, which I occasionally have to decode with a bit of digression and research (the demimonde, for example), the basic outlines of the books so far have been pretty universal. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that puts me into someone else’s head as much as this.

Every contour of thought, the mind circling back after going down some side-path, the flash of something which feels like a profound insight but later turns out to be complete nonsense, and the nonsensical moments which shed a brilliant bit of light on human nature - all of these swirl around in a sort of chaos which is nevertheless matched by the slow drumbeat of passing time. Real enough that I’d like to reach into the book and dope-slap the guy now and again. You nitwit. Why not just ask her plainly? What did you expect to happen?. But it’s his head and their his mistakes. That I’m here second-guessing the action as if it really happened (and maybe some of it did really happen) is part of the genius.

Yes, I’m aware of some of the interpretive approaches to these works, the transpositions, and so forth. My response is…I guess? Maybe? The only supplemental material I’m using so far is the introductory sections to each volume and occasional LLM queries about social context, setting, places, and so forth. Meeting the text on its own terms feels like more than enough. I’m getting situated enough now to pick up on some of the humor like the run-up to finally getting see the famous actress, followed by profound disappointment, but then followed by a complete reassessment based on other people’s opinions. Plus ça change. The Faubourg Saint-Germain would have loved Instagram, but most of their accounts would be private.