Faulty memory
Can memory ever be truly faulty given that it can never anyway be faultless? Rather as we have learned to live with the realisation (discovery?) that there is no absolute space and time, we have also learned to live with the discovery (knowledge?) that there is no true path back to the past. And so as I begin to re-read the final volume of Proust’s novel I am already surprised, and appropriately so given that this is Proust after all, how faulty my memory is of past readings. And not straightforwardly faulty. After my first reading, many years ago, I go it into my head/memory that at the last, Proust’s final revivification of his past comes about when in Venice he steps on a broken paving stone as he crosses St Mark’s Square. What’s more I ‘remember’ this scene as a highlight of the entire novel, and despite the fact that I have since read the novel again, and had the chance to correct that memory. Indeed I remember how much I enjoyed that scene the second time round. And yet though I must surely have corrected the memory on the second reading, the first incorrect memory persists. Proust doesn’t, in this volume, return to Venice as I had remembered. Well I haven’t got to the relevant section yet so who knows what I will discover this third time around. I haven’t actually embarked on this final leg of the journey, but I am ready to. I’ve read the introduction, and out of that reading was forced to adjust my memories. I can’t even begin to imagine what I will find when I get to the actual scene.
Jane tells me that I would not have had to investigate far to find Proust’s first reference to the Arabian Nights. It comes in the first pages of the first volume. And yet though I have just now looked I cannot find the reference, so perhaps Jane’s memory has played tricks too. (I doubt it, and wait for page numbers.)
Reading the Arabian Nights I see like a penny dropping that Proust’s diversions and digressions are licences given to him out of his love for these stories. Delayed gratification is a strong force, and apparently a strong early indicator in children of later adult mental health. (Those who learn to delay are better off. Often literally so.)
Night at the opera last night: finally got to see Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, an opera I have loved on CD. Very disappointed when Covent Garden cancelled its production during its years of crisis. Particularly pleasing then to experience a world class performance at an opera house which has been going through its own years of crisis. Perhaps ENO is coming out the other side.
Ligeti says he meant in this opera to abolish time; to turn time into space. The clocks stop. Does everything resonate? Again this seems a propos as I begin to read In Search of Lost Time, a novel which ultimately finds the artist, after thousands of pages of digression, ready to begin writing the very novel that the reader has just completed. No time passes. Things vibrate sympathetically. My dinner partner and I agree that we regret the modern use of the word empathy, when sympathy must be what is meant. Empathy is not possible, it’s the tragedy of being human. Sympathy is our best consolation.
At dinner afterwards we wondered if there is such a force as unconditional love. In somewhat Socratic fashion we started from the premiss that there is not, but quickly came – I think it shocked us both – to the opposite conclusion. The conditions we beset around such love are invariably conjured in an attempt to mitigate the despairing realisation that when we do love unconditionally, we really do.
Iain Burnside trailed his next week’s program (the one I’m on) twice today. I learned for the first time that he is calling it ‘Little and Large’. It turned my blood cold hearing my name. I suppose there are people in world who just love to be on the radio live.