We all know that reading is fundamental, but one of my personal maxims is that reading is providential. In part, it’s an excuse that I use to convince myself that picking up a book with no particular relevance to my work (I’m an academic) will bear intellectual or artistic dividends down the line. It often does, although that could well be because I’m so committed to the idea that some instinct draws us to the books we need before we know that or why we need them — like dogs swallowing grass to settle their stomachs. That is, I might be unconsciously padding my own stats by retelling my own reading history as teleological: I think I wouldn’t have found my dissertation’s theoretical framework if I hadn’t bought that Tanya Luhrmann book on the strength of an overheard NPR interview, but there may have been dozens of other paths waiting to lead me to that system, or a better one.
If I do tend to rewrite the past in this way, it’s only what Marcel Proust would have predicted. In his massive novel/epic/philosophical treatise/psychological masterwork/microcosm of Parisian life, In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), Proust never fails to note how readily we sell out our past selves in the interest of our present ones, and how easily what psychologists now call the “curse of knowledge” keeps us from remembering our own mistakes and false starts. But if this process results from a kind of cognitive bias, it’s also, Proust knows quite well, what gives our experiences any meaning at all. The “lost” or (in what may be a better translation — anyway, I like it more) “wasted” time that the narrator (spoiler alert!) recoups turns out to have been well spent, not because the endless society parties he’s attended and obsessive crushes he’s nourished were actually valuable in themselves, but because he has distilled what he calls “his book” from those experiences. If he’d been hit by a tram before he started that process, as he acknowledges, his life would’ve truly been wasted. The mixture of chance and (retrospectively discovered) purpose Proust teaches us to see in our lives reminds me of nothing so much as natural history: there are arms races, and asteroids, and creative explosions, and long stagnant periods, and all of them worked together to make the ecosystem we live in. The biological ecosystem, and the mental one — the latter being one of many ideas I wouldn’t have had without Proust, probably.
I’m rereading Proust because some internal clock is telling me it’s time, and I’m writing about it because “his book” is one that everyone deserves to experience in some form. If a little low-presh Proust diary, ranging in tone (I predict) from the frivolous to the ponderous, can lower the barrier to entry — which, I’m not going to deny, is absurdly high — then it seems worth doing. When I picked up the first volume in my high school library during a study period, I certainly didn’t foresee that I’d even finish the book, let alone that I’d reread it six times, or that the story of those rereadings would become the story of my life. Why did a tiny high school in rural Wisconsin have Swann’s Way lying around, anyway? Providence! Which is to say, accident — plus time.
The Arborescent Page 