I wanted to start this with something about seeing the world through Proust, and choosing this image (Degas’s Beach Scene) for the background brought the question into perspective. This painting is inseparable in my head from A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. In Sodome et Gomorrhe, arriving at Balbec for his second visit, the narrator comments that the sea is never the same two days running, and indeed that the sea isn’t the same as it was when he was there a few years ago, looking from the very same hotel-room window. What’s happened in the interim is art: ‘mes yeux, instruits par Elstir à retenir précisément les éléments que j’écartais volontairement jadis, contemplaient longuement ce que la première année ils-ne savaient pas voir’. From looking at Elstir’s paintings, he has learned to see the world in a different way, through the lens of art. He pays attention to all the details he never used to even see.
Every so often, something happens to show me how far Proust’s novel has become the lens through which I see the world. Sometimes it’s an effect of light, a particular kind of park bench, a piano chord, the sensation of déjà vu, a remembered image of Paris or Venice. Most recently it was Visconti’s Death in Venice, the opening of which seems to contain an atmosphere so Proustian it took my breath away. Some of the things I love, I love more because they resonate with the world that the Recherche has created in my head: Manet, Degas, Vermeer, the photographs of Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Fortuny dresses, Debussy, the grubby and objectively charmless Jardins des Champs-Elysées. In a way, these are my guilty Proustian pleasures. The academic part of me judges this fan, this fetishist, who secretly wants to live in the world of the novel. We’re supposed to appreciate the text in a distanced way, analytically, not turn the book into a talisman or a fetish object. We shouldn’t or give way to spurious nostalgia for an imagined Proustian world which one could in any way inhabit. But I always keep a volume by my bedside because its mere existence makes me feel better about the world.
