06.09.09
Losing Time in Proust
Each paragraph, each sentence, each word, blurred everything around me – even the manumission of raindrops from their harbouring gigantic greys – they even blurred time. The words were exceptionally lavish that I could not distinguish whether my senses were heightened or anesthetized.
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I am one hundred pages into the corridors of Swann’s Way, nevertheless six hundred pages, plus six more volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu await me, but already I rest in need of a fermata. I am falling in love with Marcel Proust’s synesthetic recollections and I have to breathe.
As Nabokov was gifted with “colored hearing” not too dissimilar from composers Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov’s music-color synesthesias, Proust is unquestionably graced with this extraordinary and prodigious endowment of perception.
I have already rendezvoused with the legendary and anticipated scenes featuring the maternal goodnight kiss and the Madeleine soaked in tea, and the traversed one hundred pages contain evidence of the author’s synesthesia (and I am sure that more proofs remain to be read):“…the old-gold sonorous name…”
“That hateful staircase, up which I always went so sadly, gave out a smell of varnish which had, as it were, absorbed and crystallised the special quality of sorrow that I felt each evening, and made it perhaps even crueller to my sensibility because, when it assumed this olfactory guise, my intellect was powerless to resist it.”“Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which being linked to that taste, is trying to follow it into my conscious mind.”
I think it is not too extraordinary that we have reminiscences triggered by intermingling sensations, but even if Marcel Proust were gifted with a loftier degree of synesthesia, what is even more remarkable is how geniuses like him apply it to art… and right now, I am discovering that synesthesia with art as its aperture is indulging, rousing, and enchanting.
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elaine said,
June 10, 2009 at 1:08 am
you really write so well meewa, i am inspired to read more books.
Miracle ♪♫ said,
June 10, 2009 at 5:47 am
Oh Elaine, you’re too kind. If my writings have inspired you to “take up and read”, then I feel most rewarded. =)
mika said,
June 10, 2009 at 10:51 am
“Proust is unquestionably graced with this extraordinary and prodigious endowment of perception.”
i agree! and somehow, soaking your mind in his art makes one more sensitive to life’s experiences. it’s as if proust gives his readers his gift of perception!
Miracle ♪♫ said,
June 10, 2009 at 11:07 am
That’s true, Mika. Proust is highly contagious! He enhances the way we think, feel, and look at things… in short, he enhances our senses,
but while we’re reading his work, he manages to grasp our attention in such a possesive way and makes us forget everything around us. haha
And oh, Mika, thank you. If it weren’t for your blogs about Proust, I wouldn’t have read any of his works sooner. =)
Kalro said,
June 14, 2009 at 1:33 am
‘Losing Time in Proust’ –but time spent with Proust is never time lost… :)
Miracle ♪♫ said,
June 14, 2009 at 2:09 am
But you see, Karlo, I did not intend to imply that I am losing time TO Proust, rather, he causes me to become immensely engrossed that I am figuratively losing finiteness IN Proust. =)