Reading Proust Aloud

OK, I want to keep track of this experiment of reading Proust aloud. Every time that we read I am marking up my book with words I don't know, quotes I swoon over, and the really funny bits. My friend Mary and I began earlier in the summer, I already can't remember the day that we began. I've discovered along the way that we are not the only ones who have ever read Proust aloud, but this is the first time that I've made it through a whole volume of Proust. Reading on my own did not work. We are reading the Penguin Classics Project translation. Lydia Davis translated volume one: Swann's Way.

Here is one sentence:

“And this disease which was Swann’s love had so proliferated, was so closely entangled with all his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what he wanted after his death, it was now so much a part of him, that it could not have been torn from him without destroying him almost entirely: as they say in surgery, his love was no longer operable.”

How perfect. I understand already why there are so many books about reading Proust. There was The Year of Reading Proust: a memoir in real time by Phyllis Rose (which I bought from a remainder pile at the Harvard Book Store many, many years ago and never read). There was How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton (which M., my co-reader, recently read and said it was so great to read it after having read Proust aloud). But I guess I need my own record of our own reading. And this will be it. A way to track without filling up my paper journal with Proust words and quotes. The first mention in my paper journal begins like this: "21 June 2009 ... M. and I have begun to read Proust! It is so much more enjoyable than reading Madame Bovary, which was really a dark, depressing, miserable novel." So, take that, Flaubert!

And to conclude for today ... here are 33 words from Proust that I used to make a 33rd birthday card for L.

magical, golden, silence, water, violet, shadow, dawn, transforming, essence, leap, observe, mysterious, invisible, letters, dream, heart, reading, silence, love, thirst, imagination, surrender, ennui, forgive, moonlight, resonate, orange, lilacs, desire, sleep umbrella, beauty