Happy Proust Day
The most wonderful time of the year
Cumin (Duodi), 22 Messidor, CCXXXIV
Just a quick note reminding all of you that today is Marcel Proust’s 155th birthday. I expect that most of you were already planning to observe it with all sorts of exquisitely tasteful festivities. Five years ago, when Leaves in the Wind was still quite new, I published a birthday greeting to the great man, which you can read here if you care to do so. I would write a new one now if I were not feeling a bit under the weather and if I were not resolved, despite my health, to totter off to the museum to look at a patch of yellow on a wall in a painting by Vermeer. Wish me well.
Oh, before I go, I have written about Proust at this site on a few other occasions—such as here and here.
I finally finished the penguin Proust, of the several translators, early last year. That was after 16 years and multiple restarts (18 years, if you include my first look at the original Moncrieff, which I bounced off hard as a 20 year old).
It's something that rewards growing into, I think. No doubt there are precocious souls who devour the whole thing at 16, but so much of the pleasure is the ironic invocation of the strange idiocies of youth, which you need to accumulate a few regrets to really appreciate.
I have requested a French language set for my 40th birthday next week, on the basis that my French is now good enough to read a basic newspaper article, so why not Proust? Same thing, surely ...
Great photo. I can only image it is an air violin that he prepares to perform the Vinteuil Sonata on