ROGERSHAlTUCK
77
could talk endlessly about how much philosophy, how much feeling, is packed
into every sentence. We want most to know precisely what we cannot know
- the universe of beings that lies outside us. Our soul pours itself out by a
kind offate - entirely in vain. We live a tragi-comic paradox. Near the end
of the passage you can hear the narrator, "moments ... which I isolate
artificially t()day,"' speaking in the present tense, separating himself from
Marcel in the past and cozying up to Proust in the present writing this book,
these words. The narrative goes on to ... What is it, Ned? You want to say
something?
Ned:
Is it that obvious? Yes, just a parenthesis about the fountain anal–
ogy. I've thought a lot about it. The fountain belongs to a special set of im–
ages that aHirm both flux and stasis. There aren't many. Heraclitus's river,
the one you cannot step into twice. In our time, Wordsworth's "standing wa–
terfalls" and Pater's "candle flame." Each one a streaming stillness. Proust's
whole paragraph echoes Heraclitus's balance of opposites.
Prof F:
You 're right. ] never thought of that link. Well, the fourth stage
of Marcel's reading is the immediate, his Sunday afternoon world of a chair
sheltered in the silent garden. At regular yet unpredictable intervals that
hushed scene is invaded by notes striking the hour from the Sainte-Hilaire
bell tower. This outer layer of familiar circumstances contains the other lay–
ers going back to Marcel's soul or consciousness. They form a kind of mul–
tiple capsule or monad. Now all kinds of images in these five pages on read–
ing tell how cut off Marcel remains from the real world he yearns des–
perately to reach, to touch. Yet the last significant substantive of the scene is
crystal,
reinforced by the adjective
limpid.
These two words characterized
the magical, transparent hours of reading , our closest approach to
communication, to getting out ofourselves.
Ned:
What you say about the transparency we find through reading
makes me think of another word Proust uses from time to time to describe
the ordinary state of life without transparency. The word in French is
trou–
ble,
which doesn 't mean "trouble" the way we use it in English. It means a
troubled, a disturbed , a confused state of mind. I began to keep a list. Toward
the end of the
Search
the pages Marcel reads from the Goncou rt journal
cause a
"trouble"
in his mind because they seem to describe transparently
people he has himself known and never grasped so clearly in life. If reading
is our crystal ball, we live in a state of
trouble
-
cloudiness, uncertainty.
Callie:
You said earlier, Professor Fitzhugh, that you are dissatisfied by
what the critics have written about reading? Why is that? Whom do you
mean?
Prof F: (looking at his watch)
I think the cab I ordered may be here
now. I'll have
to
be brief. There's one critic who seems to have led most of
