Peut-être l’immobilité des choses autour de nous leur est-elle imposée par notre certitude que ce sont elles et non pas d’autres, par l’immobilité de notre pensée en face d’elles.

- Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, p.6

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.

- Proust, Swann's Way, p.5

To grasp the exact meaning of the above quote from the beginning of Proust's Search has always been a problem for me. Maybe this is a syntactical issue, but something in the phrasing seems to evade my attention. One meaning of the sentence is, I guess, that we tend perceive elements (choses) outside of our mind as stable or immobile when in fact it is our own mind that is immobile. This might suggest that our mind (or pensées) is not in itself mobile. And this is where I tend to get lost in the logic of the sentence. What the apparently immobile mind imposes on the things that surround us is not so much an actual immobility, but rather a conviction that what is arround us is immobile, thereby saying that what surrounds us is in fact mobile. The power of the mind to render things as immobile is thus merely a selfdelusion. At least according to Proust. Everything is subject to change, especially the mind.

The all-absorbing

..we must not forget that Proust inaugurated a new conception of temporality summarized and elaborated on the ambitions of all prior novelistic creations by crafting a sort of bildungsroman - a round-trip journey from past to present and back. -

Julia Kristeva, The Experience of Time Embodied

As I slowly progres on my work on Proust and sleep I suddenly realised how little I've actually posted on this blog. This is mainly due to one thing: To study Proust is all-absorbing!

I do not claim any specific talents with regard to literary criticism, but one thing I always insist on is the need to read any text thoroughly. Every word has to resonate within me before I can even pretend to write about a passage in a meaningful way. As with Proust this surely poses a problem. A la recherche du temps perdu simply requires a massive amount of time to digest.

Therefore in the following few weeks I intend to post various 'short commentaries on Proust' (as Adorno aptly entitled his miniature analyses). These will most likely take the form of either: reading lists or quotes with 'micro comments'.