Rousseau Reveries

Ghost of Yotei

 

Game Mapper

https://www.wargamevault.com/m/product/495222

Ovens & Murray Football Netball League

 

Tom Lehrer - The Elements

Balatro

 

Behind the scenes in Peking, being experiences during the siege of the legations

Mid-Autumn,

Su Dongpo

Mid-Autumn,
I stayed up till dawn drinking,
and wrote this thinking of my brother

To the tune ‘Water Song’

When did such a bright moon ever shine?
Raising my goblet, I question the dark firmament:
What year is it tonight
in the Bright Palace of Heaven?
How I wish I could return home to the moon,
That I could ride the wind there,
but I fear that the cold,
high in those jade towers, in that crystal world,
might be too intense to bear.
So I’ll dance here instead
down in the mortal world,
I’ll play with my bright moonlit shadow.

Here it comes again,
moving round the vermilion mansion,
shining through the fretted casement,
in on the sleepless.
What right does it have
to be so cruel?
What right to choose
To shine so full,
So bright,
when we’re so far apart?
Mankind has its
Sorrows and joys,
Meetings and partings.
The moon waxes and wanes
in clear or cloudy skies.

Things were ever imperfect.
May we all live long,
May we all share,
though a myriad miles apart,
the same fair moon.

Forever Winter

Evidence suggesting that earth had a ring in the Ordovician

All large planets in our Solar System have rings, and it has been suggested that Mars may have had a ring in the past. This raises the question of whether Earth also had a ring in the past. Here, we examine the paleolatitudes of 21 asteroid impact craters from an anomalous ∼40 m.y. period of enhanced meteor impact cratering known as the Ordovician impact spike, and find that all craters fall in an equatorial band at ≤30°, despite ∼70 % of exposed, potentially crater-preserving crust lying outside this band. The beginning of this period is marked by a large increase in L chondrite material accumulated in sedimentary rocks at 465.76 ± 0.30 Ma, which, together with the impact spike, has long been suggested to result from break-up of the L chondrite parent body in the asteroid belt. Our binomial probability calculation indicates that it is highly unlikely that the observed crater distribution was produced by bolides on orbits directly from the asteroid belt (P = 4 × 10–8). We therefore propose that instead, a large fragment of the L chondrite parent body broke up due to tidal forces during a near-miss encounter with the Earth at ∼466 Ma. Given the longevity of the impact spike and sediment-hosted L chondrite debris accumulation, we suggest that a debris ring formed after this break up event, from which material deorbited to produce the observed crater distribution. We further speculate that shading of Earth by this ring may have triggered cooling into the Hirnantian global icehouse period.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X24004230

Andrea del Sarto

Andrea del Sarto




By Robert Browning

But do not let us quarrel any more,

No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once:

Sit down and all shall happen as you wish.

You turn your face, but does it bring your heart?

I'll work then for your friend's friend, never fear,

Treat his own subject after his own way,

Fix his own time, accept too his own price,

And shut the money into this small hand

When next it takes mine. Will it? tenderly?

Oh, I'll content him,—but to-morrow, Love!

I often am much wearier than you think,

This evening more than usual, and it seems

As if—forgive now—should you let me sit

Here by the window with your hand in mine

And look a half-hour forth on Fiesole,

Both of one mind, as married people use,

Quietly, quietly the evening through,

I might get up to-morrow to my work

Cheerful and fresh as ever. Let us try.

To-morrow, how you shall be glad for this!

Your soft hand is a woman of itself,

And mine the man's bared breast she curls inside.

Don't count the time lost, neither; you must serve

For each of the five pictures we require:

It saves a model. So! keep looking so—

My serpentining beauty, rounds on rounds!

—How could you ever prick those perfect ears,

Even to put the pearl there! oh, so sweet—

My face, my moon, my everybody's moon,

Which everybody looks on and calls his,

And, I suppose, is looked on by in turn,

While she looks—no one's: very dear, no less.

You smile? why, there's my picture ready made,

There's what we painters call our harmony!

A common greyness silvers everything,—

All in a twilight, you and I alike

—You, at the point of your first pride in me

(That's gone you know),—but I, at every point;

My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down

To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole.

There's the bell clinking from the chapel-top;

That length of convent-wall across the way

Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside;

The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease,

And autumn grows, autumn in everything.

Eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape

As if I saw alike my work and self

And all that I was born to be and do,

A twilight-piece. Love, we are in God's hand.

How strange now, looks the life he makes us lead;

So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!

I feel he laid the fetter: let it lie!

This chamber for example—turn your head—

All that's behind us! You don't understand

Nor care to understand about my art,

But you can hear at least when people speak:

And that cartoon, the second from the door

—It is the thing, Love! so such things should be—

Behold Madonna!—I am bold to say.

I can do with my pencil what I know,

What I see, what at bottom of my heart

I wish for, if I ever wish so deep—

Do easily, too—when I say, perfectly,

I do not boast, perhaps: yourself are judge,

Who listened to the Legate's talk last week,

And just as much they used to say in France.

At any rate 'tis easy, all of it!

No sketches first, no studies, that's long past:

I do what many dream of, all their lives,

—Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,

And fail in doing. I could count twenty such

On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,

Who strive—you don't know how the others strive

To paint a little thing like that you smeared

Carelessly passing with your robes afloat,—

Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,

(I know his name, no matter)—so much less!

Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.

There burns a truer light of God in them,

In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain,

Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt

This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine.

Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know,

Reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me,

Enter and take their place there sure enough,

Though they come back and cannot tell the world.

My works are nearer heaven, but I sit here.

The sudden blood of these men! at a word—

Praise them, it boils, or blame them, it boils too.

I, painting from myself and to myself,

Know what I do, am unmoved by men's blame

Or their praise either. Somebody remarks

Morello's outline there is wrongly traced,

His hue mistaken; what of that? or else,

Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that?

Speak as they please, what does the mountain care?

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,

Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-grey,

Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!

I know both what I want and what might gain,

And yet how profitless to know, to sigh

"Had I been two, another and myself,

"Our head would have o'erlooked the world!" No doubt.

Yonder's a work now, of that famous youth

The Urbinate who died five years ago.

('Tis copied, George Vasari sent it me.)

Well, I can fancy how he did it all,

Pouring his soul, with kings and popes to see,

Reaching, that heaven might so replenish him,

Above and through his art—for it gives way;

That arm is wrongly put—and there again—

A fault to pardon in the drawing's lines,

Its body, so to speak: its soul is right,

He means right—that, a child may understand.

Still, what an arm! and I could alter it:

But all the play, the insight and the stretch—

(Out of me, out of me! And wherefore out?

Had you enjoined them on me, given me soul,

We might have risen to Rafael, I and you!

Nay, Love, you did give all I asked, I think—

More than I merit, yes, by many times.

But had you—oh, with the same perfect brow,

And perfect eyes, and more than perfect mouth,

And the low voice my soul hears, as a bird

The fowler's pipe, and follows to the snare —

Had you, with these the same, but brought a mind!

Some women do so. Had the mouth there urged

"God and the glory! never care for gain.

"The present by the future, what is that?

"Live for fame, side by side with Agnolo!

"Rafael is waiting: up to God, all three!"

I might have done it for you. So it seems:

Perhaps not. All is as God over-rules.

Beside, incentives come from the soul's self;

The rest avail not. Why do I need you?

What wife had Rafael, or has Agnolo?

In this world, who can do a thing, will not;

And who would do it, cannot, I perceive:

Yet the will's somewhat—somewhat, too, the power—

And thus we half-men struggle. At the end,

God, I conclude, compensates, punishes.

'Tis safer for me, if the award be strict,

That I am something underrated here,

Poor this long while, despised, to speak the truth.

I dared not, do you know, leave home all day,

For fear of chancing on the Paris lords.

The best is when they pass and look aside;

But they speak sometimes; I must bear it all.

Well may they speak! That Francis, that first time,

And that long festal year at Fontainebleau!

I surely then could sometimes leave the ground,

Put on the glory, Rafael's daily wear,

In that humane great monarch's golden look,—

One finger in his beard or twisted curl

Over his mouth's good mark that made the smile,

One arm about my shoulder, round my neck,

The jingle of his gold chain in my ear,

I painting proudly with his breath on me,

All his court round him, seeing with his eyes,

Such frank French eyes, and such a fire of souls

Profuse, my hand kept plying by those hearts,—

And, best of all, this, this, this face beyond,

This in the background, waiting on my work,

To crown the issue with a last reward!

A good time, was it not, my kingly days?

And had you not grown restless... but I know—

'Tis done and past: 'twas right, my instinct said:

Too live the life grew, golden and not grey,

And I'm the weak-eyed bat no sun should tempt

Out of the grange whose four walls make his world.

How could it end in any other way?

You called me, and I came home to your heart.

The triumph was—to reach and stay there; since

I reached it ere the triumph, what is lost?

Let my hands frame your face in your hair's gold,

You beautiful Lucrezia that are mine!

"Rafael did this, Andrea painted that;

"The Roman's is the better when you pray,

"But still the other's Virgin was his wife—"

Men will excuse me. I am glad to judge

Both pictures in your presence; clearer grows

My better fortune, I resolve to think.

For, do you know, Lucrezia, as God lives,

Said one day Agnolo, his very self,

To Rafael . . . I have known it all these years . . .

(When the young man was flaming out his thoughts

Upon a palace-wall for Rome to see,

Too lifted up in heart because of it)

"Friend, there's a certain sorry little scrub

"Goes up and down our Florence, none cares how,

"Who, were he set to plan and execute

"As you are, pricked on by your popes and kings,

"Would bring the sweat into that brow of yours!"

To Rafael's!—And indeed the arm is wrong.

I hardly dare . . . yet, only you to see,

Give the chalk here—quick, thus, the line should go!

Ay, but the soul! he's Rafael! rub it out!

Still, all I care for, if he spoke the truth,

(What he? why, who but Michel Agnolo?

Do you forget already words like those?)

If really there was such a chance, so lost,—

Is, whether you're—not grateful—but more pleased.

Well, let me think so. And you smile indeed!

This hour has been an hour! Another smile?

If you would sit thus by me every night

I should work better, do you comprehend?

I mean that I should earn more, give you more.

See, it is settled dusk now; there's a star;

Morello's gone, the watch-lights show the wall,

The cue-owls speak the name we call them by.

Come from the window, love,—come in, at last,

Inside the melancholy little house

We built to be so gay with. God is just.

King Francis may forgive me: oft at nights

When I look up from painting, eyes tired out,

The walls become illumined, brick from brick

Distinct, instead of mortar, fierce bright gold,

That gold of his I did cement them with!

Let us but love each other. Must you go?

That Cousin here again? he waits outside?

Must see you—you, and not with me? Those loans?

More gaming debts to pay? you smiled for that?

Well, let smiles buy me! have you more to spend?

While hand and eye and something of a heart

Are left me, work's my ware, and what's it worth?

I'll pay my fancy. Only let me sit

The grey remainder of the evening out,

Idle, you call it, and muse perfectly

How I could paint, were I but back in France,

One picture, just one more—the Virgin's face,

Not yours this time! I want you at my side

To hear them—that is, Michel Agnolo—

Judge all I do and tell you of its worth.

Will you? To-morrow, satisfy your friend.

I take the subjects for his corridor,

Finish the portrait out of hand—there, there,

And throw him in another thing or two

If he demurs; the whole should prove enough

To pay for this same Cousin's freak. Beside,

What's better and what's all I care about,

Get you the thirteen scudi for the ruff!

Love, does that please you? Ah, but what does he,

The Cousin! what does he to please you more?




I am grown peaceful as old age to-night.

I regret little, I would change still less.

Since there my past life lies, why alter it?

The very wrong to Francis!—it is true

I took his coin, was tempted and complied,

And built this house and sinned, and all is said.

My father and my mother died of want.

Well, had I riches of my own? you see

How one gets rich! Let each one bear his lot.

They were born poor, lived poor, and poor they died:

And I have laboured somewhat in my time

And not been paid profusely. Some good son

Paint my two hundred pictures—let him try!

No doubt, there's something strikes a balance. Yes,

You loved me quite enough. it seems to-night.

This must suffice me here. What would one have?

In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance—

Four great walls in the New Jerusalem,

Meted on each side by the angel's reed,

For Leonard, Rafael, Agnolo and me

To cover—the three first without a wife,

While I have mine! So—still they overcome

Because there's still Lucrezia,—as I choose.




Again the Cousin's whistle! Go, my Love.

Nao Yoshioka

 

Moon in the Flame, from One Hundred Images of the Moon, by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, 1886

 

Max Haematinon Nigro

 

Horcynus Orca by Stefano D’Arrigo

https://theuntranslated.wordpress.com/2019/09/13/horcynus-orca-by-stefano-darrigo/




This colossal book has required from its creator a colossal effort expended over almost twenty years. By the same token, anybody desiring to tackle Horcynus Orca will have to be ready to make a colossal investment in terms of both time and readerly exertion. Nothing less will suffice. D’Arrigo’s book is as unwieldy, awe-inspiring, intimidating, and mysterious as the giant killer whale whose modified Latin name was adopted as the title. The reader might spend some time pondering whether the 1,257-page life’s work of a little-known Messinese author has proved to be a slow-burning success or an ambitious failure before realising that such categories are irrelevant. Whether we want it or not, Horcynus Orca has become a part of our civilisation. It’s there for us, either to admire, or to hate, or to incite us to reconsider our habitual ways of approaching a work of art. Combining the local and the universal, this story, which unfolds over just four days and which is mostly limited to the region of the Strait of Messina, is at the same time a comprehensive narrative summarising the millennia of asking the eternal questions about life, death, and humanity’s place in the complicated world it happens to inhabit. For two months, I was travelling inside the belly of D’Arrigo’s Leviathan, and this review is an account of what I saw there, which some Jonahs-in-the-making might find either useful or, at least, entertaining.







Let me start, however, with a brief historical outline. The first draft of the novel was titled The Dolphin’s Head (La testa del delfino). It was written in just a year, from 1956 to 1957, in twelve quadrille-ruled notebooks. This version never got published. In 1958, D’Arrigo started working on a much larger novel based on that initial text. The novel now was called The Deeds of the Fera (I fatti della Fera) — the standard Italian word delfino was replaced with its dialect equivalent. In 1960, two chapters from the work in progress were published under the title The Days of the Fera (I giorni della fera) in the literary journal Il Menabò. Without the author’s consent, Elio Vittorini, the co-editor of the journal, added to the publication a glossary of the Italianised Sicilian words used in the text. (This glossary, with some additions, can be found in Pierino Venuto’s article La risposta europea a Moby Dick (The European Response to Moby Dick)) This interference enraged D’Arrigo. “Madness, idiotic madness” (una pazzia, una cretina pazzia), that’s how he described Vittorini’s decision in a letter to a friend. Such a strong reaction was a clear indication of what kind of task the writer was trying to accomplish. He was not writing a fashionably neorealist novel about Sicilian fishermen with a smattering of dialect thrown in for the sake of verisimilitude or to convey the local colour. D’Arrigo was creating a unique artistic method of expression in which Sicilian words were used alongside archaic lexis and the bizarre neologisms specially invented for the semi-mythical world of the novel. In order to comprehend this world, the reader was expected to inhabit it and learn its language as he or she trudged along, taking time to take in its wonders. In 1961 The Deeds of the Fera was ready. All D’Arrigo had to do was to correct the galley proofs of the 600-page novel to be published by Mondadori. During the correction process, D’Arrigo began adding new material and expanding some episodes. After several years of continuous postponements, it became obvious that the Sicilian author was transforming the novel into something new and would keep on working until his vision was realised. All in all, the publisher and the readers had to wait for fourteen years until the completion of the definitive version whose title now was Horcynus Orca and whose size had increased twofold. In 1975 D’Arrigo’s Leviathan finally saw the light, and its enormous shape has been looming over the Italian literary landscape ever since.

Vesuvius in Eruption 1817–20 Turner

 

Double-entry bookkeeping not existing until like 1300 is so funny

Explorations in South-Eastern Tibet

The CL-1201

Reading Capital's Materialist Dialectic

Remarkable Paper Pro

Reading and Time by Ryan Ruby

Regrettably, I must begin with the quantitative — the least Proustian of all categories. The six-volume Modern Library Edition of D.J. Enright’s revision of Terrance Kilmartin’s reworking of Andreas Mayor’s and C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is 4,347 pages long. At an average speed of two hundred and fifty words, or one page, per minute, it takes approximately seventy-two hours, or three days, to read it. But seventy-two hours represents a theoretical minimum and an unattainable ideal. Thanks to a few features of Proust’s distinctive style, reading In Search of Lost Time inevitably takes at least twice or even three times as long as this.

There is, first of all, the famous Proustian sentence, whose syntactic cascades of independent and subordinate clauses were compared by Walter Benjamin, one of his first translators, to the flowing of the Nile. The longest of those riverine sentences, at nine-hundred and fifty-eight words in the original French, could, if printed out on a single strip of paper, be wrapped around the base of a wine bottle seventeen times. No one, except perhaps the most gifted mnemonist, can retain so much information in their short-term memory. By the time anyone else comes to the end of a sentence of this length, having meanwhile pulled into the port of more than one semicolon for a pause, its subject has been long forgotten. To understand what has been written, the reader is sent back to the point of departure and this, in turn, causes the pages not to move, or to move in the wrong direction.

Then there is the attention that Proust lavishes on seemingly insignificant details and physical spaces, such as the lengthy description of the steeple of Saint-Hilaire in Swann’s Way; his stubborn willingness to stay in a scene, such as the interminable dinner party in Guermantes Way or the scene where the narrator watches Albertine sleeping in The Captive, long after another author would have cut away; and his penchant for discursive digression throughout, in which he inflates each Rochefoucauldian aperçu to the length of an essay by Montaigne. As with the multiclausal sentences, these traits of style have the effect of slowing down the pace. Articulating the frustrations of innumerable future readers, an editor at one of the many publishing houses that turned down Swann’s Way is said to have remarked of the opening scene, “I fail to understand why a man needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep.”

Most importantly, there is Proust’s mania for comparisons: for metaphors, analogies, complex conceits, and extended similes, the signature sentences that begin “just as” or “as when.” In a passage in Time Regained — we will return to it — Proust likens his book to a sort of “optical instrument” that enables the reader to read herself. The instrument works by stimulating a reader’s tendency to draw analogies between the events in the book and the events of their lives, such that, for example, one recognizes in the mediocre Bloch or the vicious Madame Verdurin the features of social climbers one has known; or in Swann’s unhappy affair with Odette, the time when one fell in love with a person not of one’s type; or in the contrarianism which topples the Baron de Charlus from the pinnacle of Parisian society, the dialectic of cant and reaction that characterize our own. Owing to this, a frequent experience while reading In Search of Lost Time is to look up half-way through a sentence and stare into the middle distance in a kind of mnemonic reverie or “epiphanic swoon” (as the scholar and translator Christopher Prendergast puts it in his recent study Living and Dying with Marcel Proust), only to find, catching sight of a clock out of the corner of one’s eye, that whole hours have passed.

Quantitative analysis may be regrettable; unfortunately, it is necessary. For it is the sheer length of In Search of Lost Time, compared to which War and Peace is but a diplomatic incident and The Magic Mountain is little more than a hillock, that turns the phrase “reading Proust” from the designation of an ordinary activity into a cultural superlative, the literary equivalent of climbing Everest, walking the Camino de Santiago, riding the Trans-Siberian Express, or even sailing the Nile. (On behalf of our eyes, we may all be grateful to the editor at Gallimard who talked Proust out of printing the novel in a single volume, with two columns per page and no paragraph breaks.) One may note the delicious irony of treating a book which contains an utterly unsparing critique of snobbery as a “badge of bourgeois soul-distinction,” in Prendergast’s words, and at the same time sympathize with the “mid-cult pride,” in the words of Fredric Jameson, felt by those who finish it, as well as the genuine or downplayed regret expressed by those who do not. (A further irony: Proust is not infrequently cited as the classic author whom contemporary novelists have not read in modified versions of the magazine questionnaire that bears his name.)

It is because of its length, which Proust hoped would rival the numerical-temporal One Thousand and One Nights, that In Search of Lost Time has acquired a reputation as a difficult book. Yet Proustian difficulty is not Joycean, Steinean, or Beckettian difficulty. Unlike Finnegans Wake, The Making of Americans, or The Unnameable, In Search of Lost Time is not a book that challenges our sense of what a novel is, only our sense of what a novel can do. Although it makes not inconsiderable demands on the concentration, memory, patience, and perseverance of its readers, it is roughly continuous with the form that the novel has taken since the days of Austen and Balzac. Its ultra-complicated sentences still follow grammatical rules; and while a certain degree of prior familiarity with French literature and history is helpful, understanding them at least does not require the reader to decode neologisms or catch recondite allusions. Although there is some critical controversy over the precise relationship between the first-person narrator and the book we are reading, it can still be fairly described as a Kunstlerroman, the familiar plot of a writer discovering his vocation. The nature of time and memory are its central concerns, and while one of the things the book asks us to do is to rearrange our conception of temporality, the order of the narrative does not depart radically or unexpectedly from the order of events. One is never at a loss to say precisely what is going on in any given scene, which are set in a series of recognizable and historically specific locations — bedrooms, drawing rooms, kitchens, theaters, churches, brothels, public parks, boulevards, train carriages, the countryside — all of them more vividly realized than anywhere else in the history of the form.

Extreme affective and cognitive states, such as sadomasochism and pathological jealousy, are presented alongside more routine ones, such as wonder and disappointment, and are observed and analyzed according to the codes of a psychological and sociological realism notable only for its surpassing astuteness and wit. Although it is firmly anchored in a class to which none of its contemporary readers belong — the fashionable monde of the Faubourg St. Germain aristocracy — it touches on every sector of society, from the haute-bourgeoisie to which Swann belongs, to the professional middle class of the narrator’s family, the Verdurins, and the “little band” of girls at Balbec and the lower middle-class of the shopkeeper Camus and the tailor Jupien; from the demi-monde of Odette and Rachel to the art worlds of the composer Venteul, the actress Berma, the writer Bergotte, and the painter Elstir; from the memorable appearances made by the working class soldiers in Jupien’s brothel to the peasantry, such as the milkmaid seen from the train to Balbec and the former peasantry, exemplified by the narrator’s remarkable cook and nursemaid Françoise, one of the outstanding characters in twentieth century literature. In any case, as long as snobbery is a cross-class feature of social life, and possessiveness is a feature of romantic life, and the anticipation of our desires proves more pleasurable than their satisfaction, In Search of Lost Time will never lack for relevance.

In fact, the major difficulty of reading In Search of Lost Time today is not placed there by Proust; it is placed there by the economy. If, for the novel’s narrator, “lost time” refers to the past, for its reader, one hundred years after Proust’s death, it refers to the present. Proust’s narrator searches for time lost to the past and finds it in memory and in the creation of a literary work of art; Proust’s twenty-first century reader searches for the time to read this literary work of art which is lost to a culture that is consecrated to speed and an economy at war with human-scale temporality and, more often than not, fails to find it.

 “The primordial scarcity eradicated in the arrival of industrial modernity returns [in the twenty-first century] as the specter of time-famine,” writes Mark McGurl in Everything and Less, his incisive study of the political economy of producing and consuming fiction in what he calls the Age of Amazon, perhaps the most extreme form of market society that history has ever known.

Consider the average day of a member of the social fragment that until very recently constituted the demographic core of the novel’s American readership — the educated, salaried professional living in the suburbs of a large or mid-sized city — with its tripartite division of eight hours for sleep, eight hours for work, and eight hours for leisure. From that last eight hours, take away overtime; take away time for getting showered, dressed, and ready for work, and time for commuting to and from the office, and time for preparing food, eating it, and cleaning up afterward, and time for buying groceries, filling prescriptions, and picking up dry cleaning; time for household chores and repairs; time for dentist’s appointments, doctor’s appointments, appointments at the stylist, scheduling future appointments; time for waiting in line and on hold; time for catching up on emails, making phone calls, paying bills, doing taxes, filling out forms and applications — that whole panoply of activities that falls under that rather sinister classification, “life admin.” Of the original eight, perhaps only two or three hours remain, along with the parts of the weekend not devoted to sleep or other tasks such as these, the eleven public federal holidays, and the paltry eleven days of paid vacation that the average American worker receives. If one is responsible for taking care of children or someone who is ill, or if one is ill oneself, the amount of available time diminishes significantly across the board.

It gets worse. Within this finite number of hours, time must be found to perform the hundreds of activities which are regarded by corporations as further opportunities for monetization and value-extraction and by the people who do them as essential to a meaningful and fulfilled life. This includes, but is not limited to, time for socializing with friends, family, and one’s current or potential romantic partner; time for attending weddings, funerals, and reunions; time for the maintenance and improvement of one’s physical and mental health; time for travel and hobbies; time to go to the cinema, theater, concert hall, museum, dance club, or stadium; time for religious worship, political involvement, or participating in the community organizations of which one is a member.

Each of these non-work activities imposes a more-or-less steep opportunity cost on the others, and that is before we get to the locust-swarm of consumption that hoovers up an astonishing eight of the average American’s waking hours, namely, non-print media: social media, digital streaming, video sharing, online news, online retail, gaming, podcasts, radio, television, and so on. Although it can be inferred from this statistic that large amounts of digital media must be consumed by Americans at the office, extra time for leisure is invariably taken from sleep, as activities that cannot be concealed from one’s boss while sitting at one’s desk start to run up against the limitations imposed by biology on the functioning of the human organism.

Needless to say, the psychic conditions produced by such an organization of daily life —exhaustion, burnout, stress, anxiety, fear of missing out — are hardly conducive to fostering the mental state that an appreciation of Proust’s style requires. It is challenging enough, after a day of paid and unpaid labor, to summon the concentration necessary to read passages of prose consisting of sentences several clauses long. Interruptions from other people, whether they are the ones we live with, or whether they come in the form of ring tones, text messages, push notifications, or street noise—not to mention the ambient distraction facilitated by “connectivity,” that is, by the mere knowledge that at all times there is a node for possible information transfer and communication on one’s bedstand or in one’s pocket — are positively fatal to it. As attention diminishes, reading time increases, and along with it the likelihood the book will go unfinished, especially when there are so many less-demanding forms of entertainment immediately to hand.

Compared to “other forms of cultural consumption” such as social media or television, McGurl notes, “reading a novel is a relatively long-term commitment,” which is why, according to a Pew survey in 2022, Americans read an average of fourteen books per year. (The typical, or median, American will read only five; and twenty-five percent of Americans will read none at all.) And no novel requires a more substantial commitment than In Search of Lost Time. Someone who diligently set aside one hour every day to do nothing but read thirty pages of it could dispatch the six volumes in little over three months—not so much time in the grand scheme of things, a mere third of one percent of a modest seventy-five-year lifespan. But because of all the things that are competing for that hour — not forgetting, finally, the desire to read any of the five hundred thousand to one million titles brought out by the American publishing industry every year—the number stretches out to the more representative thirteen months it took the biographer Phyllis Rose, author of The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time, to finish it; or the eighteen months it took Deidre Lynch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University, to finish it; or the thirty-six months it took Mike Shuttleworth, a bookseller and literary events coordinator in Melbourne, Australia, to finish it. It is little wonder that so many people take a break to do or read something else, and find the prospect of returning to whichever point they left off or starting again from the beginning prohibitively daunting.

(Since few essays on Proust resist the temptation of a personal anecdote, I will add that, having over-ambitiously started the novel on three separate occasions in my teens and early twenties, in which I got no further than the aforementioned dinner party scene, my first full reading of In Search of Lost Time, according to the note I left on the last page of my copy, took place over the course of nine months when I was single, childless, largely unemployed, unable to afford other entertainment, and not on social media. What got me across the finish line was a severe depressive episode. On one particularly low January evening on the Brooklyn Bridge, I asked myself what I would be missing out on if I jumped off. The answer came to me unbidden: I would never find out how In Search of Lost Time ended. I resolved, with a self-seriousness I can only smile at fifteen years later, to finish the book and then kill myself, but just as when Proust read Ruskin, when I read Proust “the universe suddenly regained infinite value in my eyes,” and when I came to the book’s last word, “time,” on September 11, 2009, I no longer wanted to die.)

What, then, would be the ideal conditions for reading Proust? Spending “a month in the country” with In Search of Lost Time has become a fantasy as proverbial as it has become out-of-reach for even the relatively privileged people whose lives I have sketched above, but the pastoral setting, which recalls the bourgeois narrator’s descriptions of his own leisurely reading experiences as a child in Combray, is in any case not dispositive. History furnishes us with a number of counterexamples, starting with the cork-lined bedroom on the second floor of the five-story apartment building at 102 Boulevard Haussmann, in the heart of Paris, where, in a frantic race of the pen against the scythe, the book was written. “The sad thing is,” according to Proust’s brother Robert, “that people have to be very ill or have a broken leg in order to have the opportunity to read In Search of Lost Time.” In a similar vein, a character from Haruki Murakami’s IQ84 quips, “Unless you’ve had…opportunities” in life such as being in jail, “you can’t read the whole of Proust.” The Kolyma gulag, for instance, where Russian journalist and short-story writer Varlam Shalamov, who had been publicly critical of Stalin, read Guermantes Way; or the NKVDs infamous Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where the Polish poet Aleksander Wat read Swann’s Way. Wat’s compatriot, the painter Jósef Czapski, followed Robert Proust’s advice and read the whole of In Search of Lost Time while bedridden during a summer spent recovering from typhus; later, as a member of the Polish officer corps during World War II, he too was captured by the NKVD, and in the forced labor camp in a former monastery in Gryazovets to which he was sent he delivered a series of lectures on the novel to his fellow inmates, now published as Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp, reconstructing long passages of it orally from memory like a latter-day Scheherazade. And in a different context, Daniel Genis, surely one of the best-read persons of our time, finished it, along with just over a thousand other books, while serving out a ten-year sentence for armed robbery at the Green Haven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York.

If such examples of astonishing commitment to high art under involuntary confinement seem extreme, not the sort of experiences one is ever likely to have, I encourage you to Google “reading Proust during lockdown.” Proust, who always feared that he did not live up to the expectations of his father, a well-regarded doctor specializing in infectious diseases and the author of a medical paper entitled “The Defense of Europe from the Plague,” would have relished the opportunity to do so. What is essential in all of these cases is not that they are luxurious, or even minimally comfortable or safe; it is that each amounts to total physical removal from everyday life as organized according to the logic of the market and the dictates of capital accumulation. Needless to say, it does not speak well of our society that the two spaces where free time — which Proust’s distant cousin Karl Marx defined as “idle time” as well as “time for higher activity” — is most readily available are the country house and the prison cell.

 Proust has become the unlikely grandfather of a cottage industry of popular English-language non-fiction devoted to or inspired by his life and work. His name appears in the titles of memoirs (Rose’s aforementioned Year of Reading Proust), self-help books (Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life), pop-science (Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Marianne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid), cookbooks (Shirley King’s Dining with Marcel Proust), books of art history (Eric Karpeles’ Paintings in Proust) and Jewish history (Benjamin Taylor’s Proust: The Search, Saul Friedländer’s Proustian Uncertainties), along with literary criticism aimed at a general audience (Malcolm Bowie’s Proust Among the Stars, Anka Muhlstein’s Monsieur Proust’s Library, Christopher Prendergast’s aforementioned Living and Dying with Marcel Proust, Jaqueline Rose’s Proust Among the Nations, Michael Wood’s Marcel Proust). The list could be easily expanded if one wanted to add short biographies such as those by Edmund White and Richard Davenport-Hines, guidebooks such as those by Roger Shattuck and Patrick Alexander, and compendia such as André Aciman’s The Proust Project, not to mention the vast academic and scholarly literature on the subject. Whatever differences these books owe to their particular genres and target audiences, each of them is haunted to a more or less explicit degree by the question, Why read Proust? And hidden beneath that question is the blunter, Why read? And hidden, in turn, under that one is the rather more disquieting: Why do anything at all?

The standard answer is for pleasure. Reading, as the literary critic Christian Lorentzen likes to say, is a fundamentally hedonistic pursuit. On the substance, this is not wrong, and few authors make the case more convincingly than Proust himself: if there is a scene in the whole of literature that provides more intense pleasure than the one in the Guermantes library in Time Regained, I have not read it. As a motive for reading, however, pleasure has always struck me as insufficiently persuasive, and even a kind of trap, in the context of a culture that, to this day, sees no more reason to prefer poetry to push-pin than Bentham did. To ask after the utility of works of art is not, as is generally thought, a legitimate form of philosophical skepticism; it is a form of cultural blackmail, and should probably be refused outright. In a healthy culture, the intrinsic value of works of art would be so obvious that it would never occur to anyone to need to justify their existence in terms of their usefulness. Ours, it goes without saying, is not a healthy culture, despite its obsession with physical and mental “wellness.” Yet since the utilitarian devil is already here, it seems discourteous not to ask him to dance.

One may be tempted to invoke Mill’s distinction between higher and lower pleasures here, and declare that it ought to be a matter of perfect indifference to the person who has access to In Search of Lost Time that someone else spends their finite hours on the planet with the minimal but at least immediate gratifications of Colleen Hoover’s eleven New York Times bestsellers, with another installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or doomscrolling Twitter. After all, Proust’s position in the culture seems secure enough to weather the negative externalities that the contractions of American reading habits and the regression of secondary and post-secondary education ruthlessly impose on the production, acquisition, and consumption of equally challenging but less-canonical works of fiction: both the Modern Library edition of In Search of Lost Time and the more recent omnibus translation edited by Prendergast for Penguin remain, for now, in print, and are slowly being supplemented by new volumes, such as James Greive’s and Brian Nelson’s new translations of Swann’s Way as the novel enters the public domain.

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