4. Proust’s own reading was deep and assiduous...

The fourth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero theorises on the nature of reading.

Proust’s own reading was deep and assiduous, although he was careful never to idolise the object (the book) itself…

We know that he approached the base camp of his great novel by a circuitous route that involved a devotional reading of Ruskin. This ultimately became concrete in the form of French versions of two of the eminent Victorian’s works, including Sesame and Lilies, which Proust translated with the help of his mother, who spoke far better English than he did. It’s here that we find his own theory of reading, somewhat at odds with Ruskin’s, which reveals certain themes and techniques that will become familiar in the novel.

According to Proust, a book represents not ‘an end in itself’, nor a simple passing on of irreproachable knowledge from one mind to another, but a beginning, a catalyst that acts on the soul of the reader as an ‘incitement’ to commence a journey of discovery: ‘Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it,’ he writes.

In this way, the original thinker must subordinate reading to her own ‘personal activity’, so that it remains a salutary process rather than a remedial one. When considered like this, reading provides a key, not just to the past, but also to the past within the present, so that what you might think of when reading (beyond the subject matter) are the moments in which the reading occurs, intermingled with both the other moments it evokes and the moments that preceded it – a curious amalgam which is always specific to the individual.

This was something I immediately recognised. For me, reading had always conjured those enchanting instances of prior experience and prior life: specifically the long summer days of my childhood, lost in some adventure, procumbent on the grass, shielding my eyes from the glare of the sun reflecting off the river that ran near my grandmother’s house in the little town where we lived; or in her garden, listening to the sound of worker bees on the hunt for nectar, buzzing around the foxgloves and camellias; or at her feet, transfixed by the rhythmic clack of her knitting needles as she spun scarves, jerkins and jumpers out of thin air, like a latter day Mrs Ramsay.

Or of those short dark winter days, reading in front of the fire at Christmas; turning my face to the flames; the scent of wood smoke, pine needles and Turkish Delight in the air; or alone in the middle room, before the illumined tree, which I felt certain had beckoned me in, to share in the communion of its pregnant silence.

Many years later, of hearing the solemn echo of footsteps, the murmur of subdued voices, around the ancient cloisters of Norwich Cathedral, where I’d sit reading Virginia Woolf for effect, trying to catch the eye of eager and awestruck American students with names like Madison and Aubrey, who’d come to gasp at history.

Or the sweet, seductive smell of the Travelling Companion’s skin; the fine filaments of hair on her arms, springing erect when touched; the hem of her tweed skirt between my fingers; the soft silk of stocking taut across her leg; while all around daisies, dandelions and buttercups fizzed in the summer breeze, as we lay in Norfolk meadows, alive to the deep warmth of the earth and the atavistic beat of our bodies beside one another.

All these precious moments in some way returned to me when I picked up whichever book it was that I was reading at the time and thumbed once more through its hallowed pages – the same transformative phenomenon pinpointed by Proust.

In this way, reading can be both a discovery and an abandonment of the self. The reader is both present in the world and yet somehow absent from it, just as she is both present and absent from the entirely new or alien world the book describes. It offers a reallocation of time and space, a reaffirmation of the void’s awareness of itself, a confrontation with the strange reality of consciousness, and ultimately with the dismal truth of entropy. Reading is the excavation of a now imaginary past, the expectancy of an imagined future, but is also always caught within the viscid threads of the present tense, into which it summons the revenant dead.

Then there’s the outer silence of reading, attended by the familiar rhythm of the inner voice. The duality of this silence and sounding offers us a strange freedom – the possibility to think anything we want without fear of persecution, reproach or censorship; to travel almost anywhere we wish in this vast and mysterious universe.

Reading is a means to reflect upon the experience of existence, while being simultaneously informed by the experience of others, living and dead, real and unreal. Reading has the power to denude the world of its opacity. The caustic demonstration of war’s absurdity unleashed upon the reader of Catch-22, for instance, lifts a veil that will never be replaced. The twisted morality that marks the imperial impulse is seldom concealed from the reader of Heart of Darkness. The true cost of hubris is clear to anyone who has taken the time to read Moby Dick. While the reader of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy knows to never get caught without a towel.

And yet at the same time, reading can mystify, confuse and bewitch us; it can make us feel like we know barely anything of the world, hinting only at something unseen, something unknown, perpetually beyond our grasp. Proust insists that the endpoint of the author’s wisdom should be merely the beginning of our own, ‘so that it is at the moment when they have told us everything they could have told us that gives rise to the feeling in us that, as yet, they have told us nothing.’

For me, one of reading’s strangest qualities is that it is always on the verge of cessation. By which I mean it suffers from the ever-present threat of personal indolence or simple distraction. How often when we read, are we really thinking about stopping and watching television instead? How often are we having some idle thought about what to make for dinner; or wondering what our absent lover is up to, and why he or she said what he or she said and what he or she really meant when he or she said it; or about crisps, or cheese, or sex – until the story we’re reading becomes little more than a dimly heard background noise set against the Babel of multiple interior monologues chattering away, as the words on the page mutate into a series of barely recognisable hieroglyphs?

I think this is the reason Proust’s novel offers the reader such a significant challenge. The journey is so long, and the narrative so labyrinthine, that to begin the Search is an exercise in subjecting yourself to the strange vicissitudes of reading like no other. Despite its numerous attractions, it is in many ways a novel that’s impossible to read. Like all those other texts that litter the world’s libraries, bookshops and bookshelves, it will be partially read, impassively read, and badly read. It will be read while the mind is wandering and read while not really wanting to read at all. And it will, in all likelihood, take longer to read it in these imperfect ways than almost any other book ever written.

The difficulty comes in the need to make an oblation to time itself, just as it does in the way its cast of characters demand a certain kind of propitiation; for they quickly become like tiny gods to the sedulous reader, symbols of the strange forces that stir human souls. And so, the further we go, the more completely time, and what we think of as ‘reality’, becomes gobbled up, the more submerged we become in this strange duopoly of worlds: 19th-century Paris and – in my case – 21st-century London, which bleed into one another so as to almost become indistinguishable.

The trick, I think, is to commit to the task as fully as possible, despite the imperfect nature of reading, and in so doing let the beguiling magic of the book seep into your bones and do its work. Clive James was spot on when he described Proust’s novel as never being done with, ‘because it keeps growing while you are reading it’. ‘Like no other book in the world,’ he writes, ‘Proust’s book leads everywhere; a building made of corridors, and the walls of the corridors are made of doors.’ Once you’ve fully committed to opening the Search, there is no closing it.

Perhaps the creature that can truly read Proust hasn’t even evolved yet. It will be some distant progeny of ours, arisen from the ashes of Western culture, with a brain capable of consuming vast tracts of prose in seconds, able to discern the book’s intricate web of connections, to understand every reference and relate each to its corollary, to recall every scene, every theme, and grasp the layers of meaning that exist between them. Perhaps it will condense all this into one complete and perfect mythic vision that gets shared among the body politic of a new and just society in which a healthy and vigorous secular piety informs every aspect of daily life. Perhaps it will more likely be a machine, an algorithm, processing the words in nanoseconds. Perhaps none of this will ever happen. Who knows?

All I could do back then was throw my tiny mind into reading it as fully as I possibly could, which meant no Metro in the mornings, no Standard in the evenings, no television, no Twitter, no Facebook – only Proust and the soothing obliteration of the tabloid reality around me. At long last, I had a project that required my complete attention. Strange, that it was sat there all along, waiting for the day I was foolhardy, brave, or desperate enough to pick it up.

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Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.