Welcome to Litsy!

#FirstLineFridays @shybookowl
It's Proust, so it's a very very long first line!

Extraordinary. Proust can go on a bit. But some of his writing on how we perceive art, how the mind works are just extraordinary and you realise why he's considered such an influence. This set of pages is just.. incredible.

SUCH a good sentence

Ok then, M.Proust, interesting observation on " Israelites"- I can see how casual anti Semitism of this sort could ultimately lead to Dreyfus

I finished this a while ago and forgot to leave a review…. Don‘t know how that happened.

Proust is so deep and dense that you have to really want it, in my opinion—I mean want to read it—in order to make it happen. I‘ve said it before but: casually reading the text doesn‘t give the reader what I think is intended. Many of the concepts require rereads and cerebration. It can be headachey at times (okay, a lot of times); headachingly original.

Really enjoying this, yet I‘m ready for something different. (This is often the case for me.)

Finished the second volume of In Search of Lost Time. It marks the end of his first love with Gilberte and the introduction to his new love Albertine. (And much, much more of course! Such a crude summary fails to capture Proustian expansiveness.) I'm still into, still entranced, although some of his descriptions of young women did make me 🙄🤢🙄🤢🙄🤢
Onward to Volume 3! #morningswithmarcel

the alcohol, with its heightened effect on the nerves, had filled the present minutes with a quality and a charm whose effect had not been to make me more able, or even more willing, to defend myself against them: my state of lightheadedness segregated them from the rest of my life and made me see them as vastly preferable to it; I was trapped in the present, as heroes are, or drunkards[.]

Reader, interrupted. 🐱

I had no difficulty in convincing myself that I should really be happy about all this, and my hope that such happiness would never leave me was as strong as my knowledge that I had never in fact felt it. The joys we most dread losing are those that have remained outside us, beyond the reach of our heart.

Girls! On the beach!
Will Marcel ever meet them?…

Nearly a couple hundred pages into this, and loving it so far. I am having a major hankering to read fiction that‘s contemporary though. The last contemporary fiction I read was “Jerusalem,” which took forever, and somehow didn‘t feel that modern. I mean, parts of it did, but not altogether.

This second volume of “In Search of Lost Time” was amazing in too many ways for me to share briefly. In general, I have never experienced reading a book in which I had to sit and ponder about almost every page. The narrator ruminates about issues which we definitely know occur but seldom talk about out loud. He got too wordy towards the end but, for me, this book is excellent.

For, after all, my mind had to be a single thing; or perhaps there is only a single mind, in which everybody has a share, a mind to which all of us look, isolated though each of us is within a private body, just as at the theater, where, though every spectator sits in a separate place, there is only one stage.

On to volume 2...

This is Volume II of “In Search of Lost Time” and I can‘t even deal with the fact that this story will end. In the midst of the story line, on each page, Proust shares a profound thought that blows my mind. I wait in anticipation as I am reading. This is among one of the best reading experiences that I have had.

#OnThisDay in 1911 Éditions Gallimard was founded in Paris, as Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française. Its catalog includes 36 Prix Goncourt winners, 38 writers who have received the Nobel Prize, and 10 writers who have been awarded the Pulitzer. Albert Camus, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Salman Rushdie, and John Steinbeck have all published works through the company, which is run by the grandson of founder Gaston Gallimard. #HistoryGetsLIT

I think I prefer the alternate title, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, not only because that appears to be the more literal translation (from my poor French) but the subjects both of observing Gilberte in the first half of the book and later the young women at Balbec feels more accurate. I love that the protagonist always seems to be longing, but if given his wish like going to the theater that his idea of it is more grandiose than 👇

I‘ve wanted to have blue hair since I was 18. Twenty-six years later and I‘ve finally did it, at least this once. Better late than never! Also, still plugging away at Proust. Some passages are so lovely I just want to be immersed in them. ☺️

#QuotsyMar21 Day 20: #Clarity

I am 4 days over my schedule but finished this lovely V2 of Proust yesterday. Has anyone reading this been struck by the thought that Marcel, from his observations in the early 1900s, would be just as familiar with the society of today? This volume takes us from his first love Gilberte Swann to the seaside resort of Balbec with his grandmother and his second love(s) the “young girls” Albertine and Andree. I loved Balbec and the characters he meets

#Proust2020 This is my happy place and my comfort in these heady days. In Nashville we had a devastating tornado on the 3rd then on the 12th we declared a public health crisis as our venues closed and panic spread even more quickly than the instances of possible exposure. We have been hit a blow but we are strong. I have chosen to immerse myself in the classics and Proust has been a distraction for me. Read for calm and clarity and be loved💖

I wanted to check in with my #Proust2020 fellows. I‘m having trouble concentrating on his long (albeit wonderful) sentences. I‘m stressing a bit over how much isolation to enforce on employees in my department who don‘t get paid if they don‘t work and don‘t have many duties they can do from home. I‘m checking the CDC and other news too often (but can‘t stop myself!) and think I may need some escapist reading. So I may not post on this book much.

“but the spread flowers made it seem a more private pastime even than that, a mysterious one, and seemed to hint that one should apologize for an indiscretion, as one might on inadvertently glimpsing the title of a book lying open and divulging the secret of what she had just read” #Proust2020

“But given that my resolve was unbreakable, given that within 24 hours, inside the empty frame of tomorrow, where everything fitted so perfectly because it was not today, my best intentions would easily take material shape, it was really preferable not to think of beginning things on an evening when I was not quite ready - and of course the following days were to be no better suited to beginning things.” Balthazar agrees. #proust2020

Better for book one maybe, but it‘s still a good snack for evening Proust. #Proust2020

Challenge accepted, @megnews A first line only Proust could create. #firstlinefridays @ShyBookOwl

“The state of total independence from his facial muscles in which M. de Norpois lived enabled him to listen while not seeming to hear.” #Proust2020

#Proust2020 This is the version of Volume 2 that I will be reading. This is sometimes titled “In a Budding Grove”. We will be reading this gently, around 10-15 pages per day until the end of April if you care to follow along.

New volume, new translator. I got my first 16 pages in before breakfast. #Proust2020

“...the voice not only offers the same singular and sensual surfaces as the facial features, it belongs to those unplumbable depths tempting is to the vertiginous peril of impossible kisses”
Last thirty pages and I feel like I am highlighting every other line. So good.

How I feel about my iPhone...😳

Reading this new translation after loving my first read in the old Moncrieff translation. Definitely some interesting differences. The main one is where the freak did Moncrieff or the publishers get the title “Within a Budding Grove?” How idiotic.

#readingresolutions day 3, #labordayreads. Our Labor Day was on May 1st, so today is just Monday 🤢 But as evening is sneaking in I find myself quite content with Proust on audio and knitting with leftover yarn. Happy Monday!🧡 @Jess7

This is hard work. I feel like I‘ve been reading Proust for so long and I‘m only through book two. Yikes.

Wisdom cannot be inherited—one must discover it for oneself, but only after following a course that no one can follow in our stead; no one can spare us that experience, for wisdom is only a point of view on things.

It is not only when we speak of ourselves that we think others are blind: we act as though they were. Each of us is watched over by a special god, who hides our faults, or promises us it shall be invisible

So it is that the average life expectancy, the relative longevity, of memories being much greater for those that commemorate poetic sensation than for those left by the pains of love

Proust is a pretty writer. You could frame images he creates. His characters tend to be snobbish, silly, and overly concerned with the way one wears a waistcoat to dinner (looking at you, Bloch!) The novel(s)

"Peace of mind is foreign to love, since each new fulfillment one attains is never anything but a new starting point for the desire to go beyond it."

☝️️

This second installment is rich with quotable material.

After reading and loving In Search of Lost Time, my husband bought me the next one! My first #chunkster of 2018 and am very much looking forward to it.

The fact is that a sound idea transmits some of its force even to its contradictor. With its share of the universal value of all mind, it takes root among other adjacent ideas, growing like a graft even in the mind of someone whose own idea it rebuts 💡

Reading Proust to me is really hard working at times, I find it difficult to keep following his thoughts and not be distracted. More than a few times I finished a page without remembering what I've read. And I have to admit that, between the streams of consciousness, I keep looking forward to some action (like a conversation). I am proud of myself for finishing the second Proust #1001books

Reading something cozy on this blustery morning while the husband is still in bed. It brings to mind another modernist: "I can hear the mermaids singing each to each; I do not think they will sing to me..."