Proustian Sentences
I've been reading for 25 years but I've never paid much attention to the structure and length of sentences until I started reading In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. About 50 pages into Swann's Way, the first volume in the series, I realized that my expectations about how quickly I could read the book and how much I would understand were wildly optimistic primarily because of the length of his sentences.
I kept finding myself deeply engaged in the book and then I would stumble through one of his sentences which seemed to go on forever. No matter how focussed I was, by the time I got to the end of a sentence, I'd have no memory of the beginning and only a vague idea about the point that was being conveyed.
This made me feel that there was some flaw in how I was approaching the book. I ended up searching online for guidance on reading Proust. My search led to me Benjamin's McEvoy's video, How to read Proust's In Search of Lost Time. He encourages us to read Proust a few pages at a time, reread it, and just sit with the words, ideas and narratives and let our own thoughts and memories bubble up.
This freed me to read slowly and question the productivity expectations - pages and word count - that I'd shackled myself with. I started to enjoy getting stuck, rereading the same page until I "got" a little bit of what was being said, delaying the gratification of finding out what came next. Slowly, I started learning how to hold on to his words and sentences in my mind, along with a sense of what he was trying to convey. I ended up reading the book over six months but I still feel that I might have rushed through the ending of the book.
Swann's Way has three parts. I've selected three Proustian sentences for you look at and read. Feel free to love and hate them, to question the apparent unnecessity of writing this way. These are from thrice translated / reworked Modern Library Edition.
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
Combray, pages 63-64.
Indeed, agonized by the reflection, as it floated by, so near and yet so infinitely remote, that while it was addressed to them it did not know them, he almost regretted that it had a meaning of its own, an intrinsic an unalterable beauty, extraneous to themselves, just as in the jewels given to us, or even in the letters written to us by a woman we love, we find fault with the water of the stone, or with the words of the message, because they are not fashioned exclusively from the essence of a transient liaison and a particular person.
Swann in Love, page 309.
I still believed that Love did really exist outside ourselves; that, allowing us at the most to surmount the obstacles in our way, it offered its blessings in an order to which we were not free to make the least alteration; it seemed to me that if I had, on my own initiative, substituted for the sweetness of avowal a pretence of indifference, I should not only have been depriving myself of one of the joys for which I most longed, but fabricating, quite arbitrarily, a love that was artificial and valueless, that bore no relation to the true one, whose mysterious and foreordained ways I should have thus ceased to follow.
Place-Names - The Name, pages 569-570.