Dividing Our Time

I came across this quote by Albert Einstein,

Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever.

I find it represents well the tension I often carry with what sort of time I will give to various pursuits. I already took some comfort in the limited time I spend reading 'current events' with the statement made by M. Swann in Proust's Swann's Way in response to value of reading 'the papers'.

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. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it - oh! I don't know; shall we say Pascal's Pensees? . . . And then in the gilt and tooled volumes which we open once in ten years . . . we should read that the Queen of Hellenes had arrived at Cannes, or that the Princesse de Leon had given a fancy dress ball. In that way we should arrive at the right proportion between 'information' and 'publicity'.

Here Proust also refers to a 'division', or as he calls it a right proportion. I still hold to the position that I will be better equipped for political significance if I am formed by transformational texts (and contexts) and I am sensitive and alert to my immediate environment. And then I may well be able to understand what Stephen Harper is proposing for Canada.

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A Miraculous Disincarnation

There is another tremendous scene towards the end of Swann's Way. The young boy of the story begins to anticipate a journey to Italy. His anticipation and wonder of this foreign land begins a process of increasing excitement within him.

During this month - in which I went laboriously over, as over a tune, though never to my satisfaction, these visions of Florence, Venice, Pisa, from which the desire that they excited in me drew and kept something as profoundly personal as if it had been love, love for another person - I never ceased to believe that they corresponded to a reality independent of myself, and they made me conscious of as glorious a hope as could be cherished by a Christian in the primitive age of faith, on the eve of his entry into Paradise.

And in a nod to my own childhood fascination with Atlases.

And for all that the motive force of my exaltation was a longing for aesthetic enjoyments, the guide-books ministered even more to it than books on aesthetics, and, more again then guide-books, the railway time-tables.

I was genuinely becoming excited as his anticipation grew until its climax. This climax was triggered by his father's words for him to be prepared for the weather there. (And in good Proustian style most of the following is all one sentence)

At these words I was raised to a sort of ecstasy; a thing I had until then deemed impossible. I felt myself penetrating indeed between those 'rocks of amethyst, like a reef in the Indian Ocean'; by a supreme muscular effort, a long way in excess of my real strength, stripping myself, as of a shell that served no purpose, of the air in my own room which surrounded me, I replaced it by an equal quantity of Venetian air, that marine atmosphere, indescribable and peculiar as the atmosphere of the dreams which my imagination had secreted in the name of Venice; I could feel at work within me a miraculous disincarnation; it was at once accompanied by that vague desire to vomit which one feels when one has a very sore throat; and they had to put me in bed with a fever so persistent that the Doctor not only assured my parents that a visit, that spring, to Florence and Venice was absolutely out of the question, but warned them that, even when I should have completely recovered, I must, for at least a year, give up all idea of travelling, and be kept from anything that was liable to excite me.

Oh snap! The young boy dissolves so fully into the imagination (his disincarnation) that his body begins to suffer from withdrawal. No further energy to comment at this point.

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Proust On Belief

Tis a season for rejoicing. I finally finished Swann's Way. It was not that it is a particularly difficult read but most of my more literary friends have begun and not finished it. In fact the local bookseller had a standing $25 gift certificate for anyone who could prove they read it. The book certainly lends itself to being dropped. It is not a page turner and it does not have what I would call 'flow'. The movement rather is like a type of emerging or organic still frame. The image developing in your mind becomes more nuanced, more unpredictable. And in the end the book is simply beautiful.
The book is an exercise of and a commentary on memory. In returning to a place that held rich and meaningful memories the young boy, nearing the end of the story, becomes disorientated by the present reality.

And seeing all these new elements of the spectacle, I had no longer the faith which, applied to them, would have given them consistency, unity, life; they passed in a scattered sequence before me, at random, without reality, containing in themselves no beauty that my eyes might have endeavoured, as in the old days, to extract from them and to compose in a picture. They were just women, in whose elegance I had no belief, and whose clothes seemed to me unimportant. But when a belief vanishes, there survives it - more and more ardently, so as to cloak the absence of power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new phenomenon - an idolatrous attachment to the old things which our belief in them did once animate, as if it was in that belief and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause - the death of the gods.

This appears at least on the surface to indicate a loss of youthful imagination in the possibilities of reality. What it offers more profoundly is a commentary in the work it takes to experience reality. Reality is not a given in its basic thereness. Rather the present reality must be joined with belief and belief is the medium for the imagination required. And if we loose that belief we will suffer the increasing idolatrous attachment to the past which we will attribute divine presence (rather than our present bodies). The book concludes with the young boy's reflection on memory.

How paradoxical it is to seek in reality the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed. . . . The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are fugitive, alas, as the years.

The book ends, in my mind, in a type of liminal space where belief is the hardest and most necessary of tasks. Belief of the past can be recalled in memory but cannot engage the present. And without belief reality moves about pixalated without any form emerging and in this account the emergence of form signals the emergence of meaning.

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Proust, Prayer and Memory

In his classic work on Prayer Evagrius of Pontus writes,

"When you are praying the memory brings before you either fantasies of objects from the past, or recent concerns, or the face of one who has caused you hurt."

It is well known (or at least popular history) that the final years of Proust's life were spent largely in a sound proof room in Paris where he wrote at night and slept during the day. Here he completed his metanarrative À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). I am in the final stages of reading the first of the seven volume literary cosmos Swann's Way.
Swann's Way is a meditation on memory and the sublime. Under Proust's pen every instant (every memory) is infinite. In his secluded final years memory dominated him as he wrestled with the faces of love and hurt in his monastic cell. And it was two faces that emerged; one was a young boy's mother in first half of the book and other being M. Swann's lover Odette in the second half.

I read both relationships as exploring the basic human sense of insufficiency. Being alone with your self stands as a terrifying prospect for most individuals. I am not referring to being by yourself but being alone with yourself; to travel inward and commune with what you encounter. This was Proust's journey and as Evagrius points out when you travel inward (typical language for the movement of prayer) you will encounter memory and you will encounter the wound that drives our compulsions. The beauty of Proust's life and work (as I limitedly understand it) is that this movement and intentional uncovering was his healing as his life reflects a solitary communion with self. What Proust offers us is a vision of how attentiveness in life (again typical language of contemplative prayer) opens the gratuitous (infinite?) reality of life. This did not come from fleeing his wound but allowing it to be a generative place in his thought.

Proust entertains only a sort of contemplative memory. As he begins to enter his childhood experience he realizes that he could indeed recall more factual memories of his life in Combray but these came through "an exercise of the will", his "intellectual memory". Here again we hear mystic imagery. St. John of the Cross distinguishes sharply between meditation and contemplation. We can do meditation but not so with contemplation. Contemplation is a state of reception. Proust speaks of 'willful' memory in this way.

"The pictures which that kind of memory shows us of the past preserve nothing of the past itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this residue of Combray. To me it was in reality all dead. Permanently dead? Very possibly."


Proust is interested in living memory. This is not the end of a posture of contemplative prayer but it is the path. I will post shortly exploring Proust's most famous passage on 'living memory'.

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The Poet of Ordinary

In his Letters to a Young Poet Rainer Maria Rilke rejects any notion that a poet require an "eventful life" to write good poetry.
He writes,
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place. And even if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses - would you not then still have your childhood, that precious kingly possession, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attention thither.

After reading this first letter of a collection of ten I turned to the other book I had with me, Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. The first 50 pages are an expansive and metaphysical/aesthetic account of his anxiety over being with his mother. Towards the end of this account he pours over a childhood experience of eating a piece of cake and tea.
He writes,
No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestions of its origin.

In an attempt to recapture this feeling he continues to eat and drink but realizes that the experience is only weakened and so concludes that,
It is plain that the object of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself. The tea has called up in me, but does not itself understand, and can only repeat indefinitely, with a gradual loss of strength, the same testimony.

His reflection continues,
I put down my cup and examine my mind. It is for it to discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail nothing. Seek? More than that; create. It is face to face to with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.

Proust continues to trace his pursuit for a few more pages before accepting the loss of what he could not retrieve and return to the routine of the everyday at which point he receives the gift he was searching for, the memory triggered by the tea and cake.

I am beginning to recognize the real significance of poetry. There is reckless and abundant meaning in its care. You begin to suspect that every room that you enter whether physically or in mind drips with meaning and possibility and that all that can be known is there to enter into. As the quote in my header suggests,
There is another world, and it is the same as this one.

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