Welcome to Litsy!

I finally made it to Pere Lachaise today, and Proust was my #1 dead person I had to visit. The map I found online turned out to be wildly unspecific (right quadrant, wrong position for EVERYONE), but I ran into a nice lady who offered me help and steered me right to him.

Alas, I never did find Sarah Bernhardt, but I also said hi to Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison. The latter is so rowdy they‘ve got metal event barriers around him.

I‘ve always been intimidated by Proust and was thrilled to read this one with a few others. Proust has a meandering way of exploring the world around him. He‘s not rushed and his sentences are long and indulgent. That can feel exhausting at times, but then you come across a line so beautiful and achingly relatable that it stops you in your tracks. I‘m not ready to tackle the rest of the series, but maybe one book a year would be the right speed.

In February and March, I‘m reading Swann‘s Way with a few bookish friends. I love hearing everyone‘s comments each week. We are reading the Lydia Davis translation and just made it to the halfway point. Proust‘s meandering thoughts are beautiful, but exhausting at times. I love having a chance to savor his words and reflect on them each week instead of rushing through it.

Nostalgia and run-on sentences.
Recollections of a sad, anxious boy, his memories and accounts of people, often miserable, that he grew up around, scandals that are only scandals due to the attitudes of the time. Very little of the protagonist emerges amongst detailed descriptions of the scenery (nature and architecture), a few books, even place names, aside from his ambition to become a writer and the start of one love affair, 1/?

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Monocle kink? 🧐

#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude
This was one of my favourite '80s albums (1984), the only LP by Swans Way which spawned one Top 20 single, "Soul Train", so a definitive one-hit wonder, but brilliantly so. Mixing jazz, orchestral and baroque pop, it's Ultra Cool! Reconnecting with it over the past week I think it still really stands up as a great record. Definitely back on my play rotation.
You Tube album link in comments ?

That moment when you pause to listen, realize it's raining... 🌧️😌 Love how he describes the succession of sounds.

Lost in reading....🥰

Proust always sounds so regretful. I can't tell why he looks on the past with so much sadness for time past. Surely these are happy memories?

This was great the first time around, much better the second.

I love Proust and his cool sentences, as well as his observations. This is the type of thing you have to read slow to absorb it, and understand the full depth of the ideas he‘s conveying. It‘s definitely not something to just run through so as to be able to say you read it.

Basically, the text gives back what you put into it. This is usually the case but even more so for Proust imo.

This is an incredible description of what it feels like when clouds are chased away

This is beautiful, evocative writing. I've said it before but it bears repeating - Proust might go on a bit at times( a lot, actually) but there are passages of such beauty, and so vividly described, that it is definitely worth reading

I had no greater desire than to see a storm at sea, not so much because it would be a beautiful spectacle as because it would be a moment of nature‘s real life unveiled; or rather for me there were no beautiful spectacles except the ones which I knew were not artificially contrived for my pleasure, but were necessary, unchangeable—the beauties of landscapes or of great art.

Makes ya think, don‘t it?…

one thing love and death have in common, more than those vague resemblances people are always talking about, is that they make us question more deeply, for fear that its reality will slip away from us, the mystery of personality.

"The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience . . . The memory of a certain image is only regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years."
Thus ends Volume 1. I am in love. ?

Even before seeing Odette there, even if he did not manage to see her, what happiness it would give him to step on that earth where, not knowing the exact location, at any given moment, of her presence, he would feel palpitating everywhere the possibility of her sudden appearance….

Zipporah, Jethro's's daughter -- a small detail from Botticelli's "The Trials of Moses."
I looked up this painting (like many Proust readers before me) because Swann believes Odette resembles this portrait, which helps him fall in love with her.
(It would seem that is not a great reason to fall in love with someone, or might not lead to lasting happiness.)
I'm about halfway through Volume 1. Still enjoying my #morningswithMarcel

This is such lovely writing

That's quite lovely

And so it begins....mornings sith Marcel.

This is such a stunning sentence

Whether it is that the faith which creates has dried up in me, or that reality takes shape in memory alone, the flowers I am shown today for the first time do not seem to me to be real flowers.

Even I preferred cream cheese when it was pink, when I had been allowed to crush strawberries in it. And these flowers had chosen precisely the color of an edible thing, or of a delicate embellishment to an outfit … one of those colors which, because they offer children the reason for their superiority, seem most obviously beautiful to the eyes of children, and for that reason will always seem more vivid and more natural to them[.]

Did Swann just invent air quotes?!

"After luncheon the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the zenith,..." - Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

What's your favourite weekend reading place? Here's Woman Reading by American Impressionist painter Childe Hassam (1859-1935) #BooksInArt

#books #bookquotes #weekendreads #weekendreading #bibliophile #amreading #booktime

“And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading“

My favorite place for reading Proust
@EadieB

008. Marcel Proust: ISOLT vol 1: The Way By Swann‘s (1913, tr. Lydia Davis, 2004)

Something of a mountain to climb, with this being merely the set-up of the story to come. But throughly enjoyed a daily session, taking a leisurely stroll through the past, soaking up the details.

I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinancy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.

The thirst for something other than what we have…to bring something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it.

M.P

Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

On page 28. Reading Proust day 1. The introduction was really sublime and surreal.

Finished ca. 7/13, 5/5

Here are my top reads of 2020 with the tagged book standing in for the 7 volumes of #Proust2020 year long read. Interesting reading year for me with several top reads published well before 2020 but these are the ones that will stay with me- most of the many 2020 published books I purchased I did not read- time to get to those in 2021 as apparently I need to stare at a book on my shelves for awhile🤷‍♀️ Anyway these are the top of 2020.

Proust‘s memory was not just madeleines and tea; he also mentions pain d‘épices, or gingerbread. So I had to make some to go with my tea...

chai & madeleines with proust 🤍🤍🤍

“The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.“

Remembering my favourite neurasthenic, Marcel Proust, on his birthday.

#top6reads Through 6/30, I‘ve read 66 books, and Swann‘s Way was the only 5 star read. The next 5, all 4 star reads (no 4 1/2 star reads) would be Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, Night Theater by Vikram Paralkar, Malice by Keigo Higashino, Cherry by Nico Walker, and Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather. Runners up (also 4 star) would be After the Fire by Henning Menkell, Ride the Pink Horse by Dorothy Hughes, and maybe👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻

"I don't deny it," answered Swann in some bewilderment. "The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance."

But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as "seeing someone we know" is to some extent an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of..

#QuotsyMay20 Day 11: #Zone

Aside from perhaps some poetry and Shakespeare, I don‘t think I‘ve read anyone who can capture the singular beauty of an image in time using all senses more gorgeously than Proust. There were moments in this book, especially in Combray and again in Place-Names•The Name where I wanted to dissolve into the scene. I think someone‘s review on Goodreads said it best, that this is an ontological look at love as even as it tore me apart, I liked it.

Proust lives up to the hype. I loved this beautifully written book ❤️
#24b4monday

Current stack for #24b4monday I‘m hoping to finish today.

Social distancing day 15