I have many things to blog about - none of them important or possibly even interesting - but no time. To add to my lack of time - and my sense of futility; why bother when so many people have written so many far better things about almost everything already - I have discovered a site where, if you have a spare 145 hours and 18 minutes, you can hear Marcel Proust's great work read beautifully in French. It is wonderful, and it can be found here.
And really, why write anything, post-Proust?
(Yes, the answer is, of course, because it is a way of working out what you think - and it's fun. All the same, it does require time.)
Proust read aloud seems to me something like reading librettos in silence. The long and syntactically involved sentence depends on the written form, doesn't it? In any case, he saw only the first two volumes into print, and I do hope that he wold have revised the later ones extensively. There are whole stretches of twenty and forty pages that call out for parody.
ReplyDeleteYou're right - and yet, you're not. I would completely agree with everything you say, except for the fact that this particular recording is unusually beautifully read.
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