As I mentioned in a post I wrote a long time ago the writer I admire most is Marcel Proust. This is something which has remained constant for very many years. In fact a long time ago he was part of a trinity in my personal literary heaven together with Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. At one time when I was rereading Ulysses I lived in Berlin and had a long commute to work. I tried reading Ulysses in the train but I sometimes had to laugh so much that I found it embarrassing. After that I decided to read the book only discretely and in private. Somehow in the course of time Joyce fell back a little in my estimation leaving the other two alone on the summit. In the end I feel that for me Proust is slightly ahead of Woolf. Some thoughts related to this can be found here. Special features of Proust’s work are that he only published one novel, ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ and that that was extremely long. I have read the whole novel twice in the original and some parts of it more often. I recently started reading a little of it again and that is what has prompted this post. The question occurred to me whether Proust’s writing would still be as attractive for me or whether I might have changed so much over the years that that might have changed. The former is the case. As an example I quote a short passage from the first pages ‘comme ceux qui partent en voyage pour voir de leurs yeux une cité désirée et s’imaginent qu’on peut goûter dans une réalité le charme du songe’. [like those who go on a journey to see a city of their desire with their own eyes and imagine that it is possible to experience in reality the charm of a dream]. The author belongs to the group of people he is describing here and I do so too.
When reading ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ you will not find much about mathematics. I seem to remember that Henri Poincaré puts in a cameo appearance, crossing the salon of Madame Verdurin, but I do not remember that anything significant was said about him. I do, however, see a connection between Proust and mathematics which is that it is often the case in the book that we experience Proust thinking in the way mathematicians do. I, as a mathematician, found myself feeling a sense of community in these cases. I cannot cite any examples. I am not trying to make an argument of literary criticism here – I am just describing my impressions. One idea which I see in Proust’s writing is that it often makes sense to identify things which are isomorphic. Proust presumably never encountered the word isomorphism let alone its formal definition but my impression is that he understood the meaning and significance of the concept very well. Another thing I want to mention is that in the last part of the novel, ‘Le temps retrouvé’ there is a scene which can be thought of as a spacetime diagramme. Not surprisingly it is a Newtonian spacetime, not a relativistic one. Proust was distantly related to Henri Bergson who also wrote about the concept of time. I read in the biography of Proust by Jean-Yves Tadié that Proust was irritated by the fact that people liked to compare him with Bergson. I have not read Bergson but I suspect that what he wrote about time was nothing but hot air so that Proust’s indignation was justified.
What is it that makes Proust’s writing so attractive for me? Both content and form are important. On the level of content I feel that I am very much on the same wavelength as the author in matters of philosophy. I really do not know to what extent I, in my youth, found my own ideas reflected in those of Proust and to what extent I simply adopted his ideas in forming my own. On the level of form I find his use of language exceptionally beautiful. It took quite some time for me to be able to absorb his long and complicated sentences. A favourite of mine (I claim no originality for my taste here – this is one of Proust’s most famous sentences) is the sentence which begins ‘Mais quand d’un passé ancien’. When I read the sentence it evokes a picture of a mountain stream, flowing rapidly downhill, turning repeatedly to avoid large stones until it flows into open water (l’édifice immense du souvenir). This image has nothing to do with the content of the sentence, it has to do with its rhythm.
Hydrobates 