Dear diary,
Near the beginning of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Charles Swann gives this little speech that I’ve always loved:
“The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it—oh! I don’t know; shall we say Pascal’s Pensées?” He articulated the title with an ironic emphasis so as not to appear pedantic. “And then, in the gilt and tooled volumes which we open once in ten years,” he went on, showing that contempt for worldly matters which some men of the world like to affect, “we should read that the Queen of the Hellenes had arrived at Cannes, or that the Princesse de Léon had given a fancy dress ball. In that way we should arrive at a happy medium.” But at once regretting that he had allowed himself to speak of serious matters even in jest, he added ironically: “What a fine conversation we’re having! I can’t think why we climb to these lofty heights...”
[translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin]
I have a couple different reactions to this passage. First, let me say what I think its gist is. I take it that Swann is saying: Every day, we read our newspaper online, which informs us of trivialities, but then only once in a blue moon do we take down from our bookshelf a classic volume and read wisdom in it. Swann is saying: it would be better if we switched things around and only perused shallow trivialities once in a while, since the content of the daily news (“current events”) would be bound in those dusty volumes that we seldom remove from our shelves; and then, on the contrary, the sites or networks that are updated frequently, which we check multiple times per day for “news” & “info”, would contain instead the distinguished works of the School of the Ages. That way, we would remain intellectually stimulated by the most robust thinkers for the majority of our lifetime, and only rarely would we expose ourselves to ephemeral factoids.
Now, Swann chooses Pascal as an example of lasting literature. That’s OK; Pascal is passable. But I just want to request Swann to revise his speech and name Montaigne instead. — I’m not being unreasonable about this; I’m not suggesting that Swann mention, say, Emily Dickinson as his paragon, because I understand that he’s a Frenchman speaking French to other French-volk; thus none of them give a hoot about U.S. poetry; but Montaigne is THE MIND OF FRANCE, whereas Pascal is just a phase that the country went thru, like a memory of that week when you caught the common cold.
So, fix your reference, dear Swann.
& yet, for the record, I like Pascal — I’ve read and re-read him with a certain amount of interest. By saying what I did above, I am being too hard on him for the sake of cheap mirth. And boy it feels good.
One other thing I wanna mention about the afore-quoted passage: Proust’s narration sez, “Swann articulated the title with an ironic emphasis so as not to appear pedantic,” and, also, he “regretted that he had allowed himself to speak of serious matters even in jest”. Now this delicacy that Swann shows is probably nothing more than an attempt to display good manners — if so, then I myself am a barbarian. For I appear pedantic proudly & almost constantly, and I’ve never felt the need to repent of this. Maybe I should be less of a sledgehammer-wielder, on the topic of my favorite artworks.
That’s all: I just wanted to note that I am the polar opposite of M. Swann, in at least this one respect.
*
But now I want to shift gears and share a quote from another text. Sometimes when I read something that I love, I let the work provoke me to write something of my own along the same lines; in this way, I arrive at a new creation, which can be called “original” because it hides its derivative aspect. But sometimes a work seems so perfect to me that all I can do is reflect it: copy it out word-for-word, and just stare at it in awe. This latter path is what I’m going to do today, for the text that I just finished reading last night.
But I want to stress that my transfixed reaction stems not from the following work’s aesthetic dignity — it’s rather the raw subject matter itself that moves me so. So don’t look for the finest wording, or anything finicky or poetic about the following passages — what I admire in them is their description of a VERY LARGE BEING. — I myself am a weak, puny fellow whose knees knock together and whose teeth are always chattering; therefore, the man who can eat big, talk big, move big upon the earth, and who can remain in touch with his inner werewolf: THIS savage god is ultra-magnetic to me.
So I’ve been reading in The Indispensable Zinn, whose subtitle describes its contents: “The Essential Writings of the ‘People’s Historian’ Howard Zinn”. — I read thru all 365 pages of this book with intense regard (and many tears, cuz much of it’s sad), and then at the end of the book is a work by Zinn that differs from all the foregoing: it’s a one-person play called “Marx in Soho”, which is what I shall steal from. (Don’t read it, by the way: just let me tell you about it.)
All the sections that precede it in the book (which, by the way, was edited by Timothy Patrick McCarthy) were either journalistic or historical compositions, and there were a few transcribed interviews; so this last part of the collection is the only text that I’d describe as a work of “fiction” — although it comes off as a condensed retelling of the crucial moments and ideas in Karl Marx’s life. So Zinn’s play is like a synopsis of a biography. My reason for noting this is only to admit that I am aware of the fact that the excerpts that I loved are probably available in other sources, and I’m getting them second- or third- or even seventh-hand thru Zinn.
But here’s the funny thing: throughout the work, which is really just a long monologue, Zinn’s Marx is critical of capitalism while sympathetic toward socialist and commusitic ideas, as one would expect; but then he begins to talk ambivalently about his acquaintance Mikhail Bakunin; and that’s where, for me, things grow fun. I get the feeling that Zinn’s Marx wants his audience to side with his own Marxian socialism contra the anarchism of Bakunin — if that’s the case, then I as a reader end up rebelling against my good guide, because Bakunin thrills me:
I would never have the guts to act like Zinn’s Bakunin does in reality, and to speak truly I probably wouldn’t want to be around someone like him in our actual world; but since this is literature (even if it’s “painted from life”), his character dazzles & allures me: I fancy the fantasy. As long as it’s understood that I am speaking in a romantic sense, then I can say that I aspire toward the state of Bakunin. — Maybe I should put it like this:
My soul IS Bakunin. His image is how my soul appears; his actions are how my soul acts. (I know this because I’ve owned my soul since birth.) So when you read the following excerpts from Zinn’s Marx describing Mikhail Bakunin, keep in mind that you are beholding BRYAN RAY’S SOUL:
Did you ever see a photograph of Bakunin? A giant of a man. Bald head, which he covered with a little gray cap. Massive beard. Ferocious expression. He had no teeth—scurvy, the result of his prison diet. He seemed to live not in this world but in some world of his imagination. He was oblivious to money. When he had it, he gave it away; when he didn’t have it, he borrowed it without any thought of returning it. He had no home, or, you might say, the world was his home. He would arrive at a comrade’s house and announce: “I’m here—where do I sleep? And what is there to eat?” In an hour he was more at home than his hosts!
That is me, to a tee. — Now let me quote more. Here’s what it’s like for my true spirit to pay you a visit:
We were having dinner, and Bakunin burst in… he almost knocked the door off its hinges. He looked around, smiled his toothless smile, and said, “Good evening, comrades.” Then, without waiting for a response, he sat down at the table and began devouring sausage and meat in enormous chunks, stuffing in cheese too, and glass after glass of brandy.
I said to him: “Mikhail, try the wine, we have plenty of that; brandy is expensive.”
He drank some wine, spat it right out. “Absolutely tasteless,” he said. “Brandy helps you think more clearly.”
Isn’t that praiseworthy!? Now here’s what my behavior during dinner is like — I swear this is a spot-on rendering, not only of my spirit now but, at least in this case, of my real-life demeanor (and anyone who’s ever eaten with me can vouch for the truth of this claim):
He then began his usual performance, preaching, arguing, ordering, shouting, exhorting.
Jenny was furious: “Mikhail,” she said, “Stop! You’re consuming all the oxygen in the room!”
He just roared with laughter and went on.
I also like this next passage; I interpret it as a physical retelling of a spiritual truth — when the text refers to “the police”, I think of the Gnostic Archons, the evil deities who botched the creation of this universe (here called “Europe”) and who rule over it malevolently:
Bakunin had a hundred disguises, because the police were looking for him in every country in Europe. When he came to London, he was disguised as a priest. At least he thought so. He looked ridiculous!
Let me keep quoting, I love this so much. Here Marx describes another average visit from me:
Well, he was with us for a week. Once we stayed up the whole night, drinking & arguing & drinking some more, until neither of us could walk. In fact, I fell asleep in the midst of one of Bakunin’s perorations. He shook me until I woke up, saying, “I haven’t finished my point.”
God! how I wish I could reach out and shake my readership. You should be glad that I’m trapped behind these letters of this text.
But I don’t wanna scare you away, so I’ll give just one last passage, which describes a tussle that Karl and I got into. I’ll leave you with this, like a mark to serve as my signature:
Bakunin roared. It sounded like a prehistoric animal. Then he leaped on top of me. You must understand, the man was enormous. We wrestled on the floor, but were too drunk to really hurt one another. After a while, we were so tired that we just lay there, catching our breath.
Then Bakunin rose, like a hippopotamus rising out of a river, unbuttoned his trousers, and began to urinate out the window!
I could not believe what I was seeing. “What in hell are you doing, Mikhail?”
“What do you think I’m doing? I’m pissing out your window.”
“That’s disgusting!” I said.
“I’m pissing on London. I’m pissing on the whole British Empire.”
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