tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28676316.post4914933459064670555..comments2024-03-26T08:18:06.895-04:00Comments on Moristotle & Co.: Lost time reading Marcel ProustUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28676316.post-20160738815323140782017-02-20T19:01:52.240-05:002017-02-20T19:01:52.240-05:00What an amazing and beautiful display of wording t...What an amazing and beautiful display of wording throughout! Loved it, Morris. Thanks for posting this.<br />Vic M.https://www.blogger.com/profile/06736914347731234718noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28676316.post-21999685413465749752017-02-20T14:40:13.352-05:002017-02-20T14:40:13.352-05:00Well, I think I agree!
I googled "virgini...Well, I think I agree!<br /> I googled "virginia woolf on marcel proust" and found this, on <a href="http://www.catskill-merino.com/blog/virginia-woolf-on-marcel-proust" rel="nofollow">catskill-merino.com, a blog</a>:<br /><br />"Reading Proust nearly silenced Virginia Woolf. She loved his novel, but loved it rather too much. There wasn't enough wrong with it—a crushing recognition when one considers Walter Benjamin's assessment of why people become writers: because they are unable to find a book already written that they are completely happy with. And the difficulty for Virginia was that, for a time at least, she thought she had found one....<br /><br />"Virginia Woolf first mentioned Proust in a letter she wrote to Roger Fry in the autumn of 1919. He was in France, she was in Richmond, where the weather was foggy and the garden in bad shape, and she casually asked him whether he might bring her back a copy of Swann's Way on his return.<br /><br />"It was 1922 before she next mentioned Proust. She had turned forty and, despite the entreaty to Fry, still hadn't read anything of Proust's work, though in a letter to E. M. Forster, she revealed that others in the vicinity 'were being more diligent.' 'Everyone is reading Proust. I sit silent and hear their reports. It seems to be a tremendous experience,' she explained, though appeared to be procrastinating out of a fear of being overwhelmed by something in the novel, an object she referred to more as if it were a swamp than hundreds of bits of paper stuck together -with thread and glue: 'I'm shivering on the brink, and waiting to be submerged with a horrid sort of notion that I shall go down and down and down and perhaps never come up again.'<br /><br />"She took the plunge nevertheless, and the problems started. As she told Roger Fry: 'Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation that he procures—there's something sexual in it—that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can't write like that.'<br /><br />"In what sounded like a celebration of In Search of Lost Time, but was in fact a far darker verdict on her future as a writer, she told Fry: 'My great adventure is really Proust. Well—what remains to be written after that? . . . How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped—and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp.'" [<i>There's more.</i>]<br />___________<br />Another blog, <a href="https://jimtheobscure.com/2013/07/29/woolf-on-proust-joyce-the-letters-of-virginia-woolf-25-january-1882-28-march-1941/" rel="nofollow">jimtheobscure.com</a>, quotes a little more of that last bit:<br /><br />"My great adventure is really Proust. Well – what remains to be written after that? I’m only in the first volume, and there are, I suppose, faults to be found, but I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes. How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped – and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physical – like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined. Far otherwise is it with Ulysses; to which I bind myself like a martyr to a stake...."<br />Moristotlehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02211602374384087074noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28676316.post-31818201913632970512017-02-20T12:03:45.133-05:002017-02-20T12:03:45.133-05:00Oh Morris, how absolutely lovely. Don't be in ...Oh Morris, how absolutely lovely. Don't be in any rush. If this is the only thing you ever read from this point on (and I would say the same for me), what a glorious book to live in. It's funny, reading this extract, the writer I am most reminded of is Virginia Woolf. I don't recall her ever mentioning being inspired by Proust. Thanks for spreading such flowers! Eric Meubnoreply@blogger.com