On Reading Proust or The Music of Middle Age

She had taken a casual remark by my father, had worked it up delicately, given it a ‘turn,’, a precious title, set in it the gem of a glance from her own eyes, a gem of the first water, blended of humility and gratitude; and so had given it back transformed into a jewel, a work of art, into something altogether charming.

Proust

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I remember when I was young I used to sleep outside on our trampoline a lot. I used to pull the trampoline up next to the glass doors of my room so I could watch both the television and the stars. What I watched on the TV I don’t completely remember (old black and white movies, I think, and Magnum PI), but I’ll never forget the euphoria I felt when I gave my full attention to the starlit sky before drifting off to sleep. At the same time, I think I used, or tried to use, the two vistas to enhance each other—for the TV movie to give a story to the stars and the stars to add mystery and depth to whatever movie or program I was watching.

I used to spend hours at night on our upper patio watching the western horizon. I remember once in particular when a storm approached: constant lightning flashes overtop the distant mountains, grumbling thunder, a gentle but increasingly swift wind stirring the nearby trees, a sudden and welcome decrease in temperature. I wanted that moment to go on forever—a moment of quiet expectancy and profusion—the calm before the storm--the calm before my real life, my life of fun and adventure, would begin. I remember another time when I watched the lights on the horizon and listened on my Walkman, in stupid youthful rapture, to the Ennio Morricone soundtrack for The Mission while I imagined what cinema-like journeys of my own I would embark on someday. Another time, I had just watched Lawrence of Arabia and I joyously envisioned the Lawrencian trials that awaited me beyond the horizon I faced and beyond the four mountains that surrounded me, mountains that both hid and enhanced the mystery of what lie beyond.

I remember night games with friends, the pre-dawn sense of solitude as I rode my bike into town to deliver the morning paper, the thrill of discovery and recognition when I read Tolstoi’s War and Peace, waiting in the bathroom with three other guys to see which one Hillary Hanks would choose to “go with” (she chose me!), a deer being shot by police in front of our house, one of my brothers hooking my other brother with a fishing rod in Yellowstone … and many other events of my early life, each of them overwhelmingly intense in the way that only youthful experiences can be and each of them, in one way or another, informed by a symbioses of story and moment—by a fusion of plot and future possibilities.

I also remember moving away from home for an internship in Washington DC and coming back empty. I remember looking at the stars and feeling nothing, watching storms move across the sky and getting bored, witnessing tragedy with aloofness, knowing with certainty that I’d lost something—that I’d grown up and become something I didn’t want to be.

And finally I remember, not distinctly, though, trying to read Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and getting nowhere. Years later, though—last week, in fact—I resumed the effort, this time with much more success. As a middle-aged man, near the age of the author when he was writing, I can better understand the protagonist’s quest to regain something that’s irretrievably gone—something which can never be restored but which can be, must be, revisited and recreated. Put another way, I can better understand the saga of being middle aged—of enduring the “mezzo del cammin de nostra vita” when we focus less on plot and more on style and craftsmanship, when the story of our lives is secondary to process and substance.

To be frank, the story of my life is a monumental disappointment. If the adolescent who slept under the stars and watched storms move across the horizon could’ve known at the time how dull his life would turn out, he no doubt would have done more to hinder the aging process. More than that, the stars would’ve been less bright, the horizon less enticing, the movies he watched less thrilling, the books he read less engaging, the music he listened to less melodic and captivating. The prospective story, in other words—the sense of possibility, the recognition of a familiar plot—anointed my youthful moments with an almost otherworldly charm that only the naivety of early life makes possible. But today, the expectancy is gone. And only the memories remain.

It’s no secret that life gets less exciting as you get older, at least in the superficialities; as your options narrow, as the plotlines thicken and the story, with all its accumulated banalities, starts to take shape, you lose something— most significantly, you lose the numerous prospects of another life and another story. But, as Proust indicates, you don’t lose, or you don’t have to lose, the intoxicating sense of abundancy that you experienced in childhood and adolescence; you need to find it, though—find the beauty and abundance of life—in the depths of your experience rather than in the multitudes; you need to find it in your personalized experience and in your own individuation process.

Disillusionment isn’t the end of the world for Proust, it’s the beginning; it’s a necessary component of self-realization. In order to become a Proustian-like creator—to find, or rather forge, your particular place in the world, your selfhood—you have to first discover the lie of life as it’s presented; you have to eradicate the assumptions of others and create yourself from scratch, building from the void.

I remember sitting in a jazz club two or three months after my divorce. It was one of the most difficult periods of my life. But as I sat there among friends, listening to the eccentric genius of Bill Frisell, I was as happy as I had ever been. The music at first enticed me with its familiarity and then with its uniqueness—with the grace and novelty of the improvisation. I was utterly swept away by the moment. But unlike my youthful moments of rapture, I wasn’t lost in a dream of future possibilities—of imagining adventures to come, knowledge yet discovered, or fame yet to be achieved. I wasn’t happy because of the moment’s omens. I wasn’t happy because of anything. Though my world had just crumbled down around me and all my plans been laid to waste, I was glad still to be alive, happy not with the pregnancy of the situation but with the situation itself, glad just to be there at that jazz club with that music at that moment, one of countless similar moments I would have throughout the same summer. As I look back, I realize that that summer was possibly the greatest of my life, in spite of, or maybe not in spite of but because of, the hardship and the suffering I had to endure because of my divorce, when the story I’d planned on acting out was stolen away. For that summer, at least, the story of my life didn’t seem to matter; my failed marriage put me in such an unfamiliar place that I was able to experience joy (and all other emotions) on a deeper level than I ever had.

In addition to Proust, I’m also re-reading Moby Dick, a book which starts out much like my early life experiences: full of hope and intrigue and expectation of adventure. And while the protagonist certainly finds a kind of adventure, it isn’t the adventure he would’ve wished for and nor is it the adventure that makes the whaling journey worth the trip or the novel worth the read. What makes the novel worth reading, and I imagine what made the journey worthwhile for the protagonist and what made the novel worth writing for the author, is the laborious and often tedious—yet substantative—middle. It isn’t the story that makes Moby Dick a classic. The story is just another variation on a familiar motif. What makes Moby Dick a classic are the digressions from the story in which the narrator ponders the whiteness of the whale, when he enumerates the whale's historical depictions in art and literature, when he details the ins-and-outs of the whaling industry and everyday whaling life, and when he painstakingly elaborates on the whale’s taxonomy—when the vast storehouse of whale trivia spills out of the narrative and suggests, as I believe Melville meant to suggest, that the story hardly matters—that it’s no more possible to capture the white whale, or any whale in its entirety, than it is to contain, to capture, life in the written word, in a story. Nature isn’t reducible to information, nor is it capable of being interpreted by language or possessed by written knowledge. Life is a journey into the unknown. And it’s only in that element—the element of the unknown, when you have no firm ground to stand on—that the marrow of life can be mined and a deeper substance discovered. As Melville puts it: "in landlessness alone resides the highest truth."

The middle, that point in our lives in which we find ourselves lost in the dark forest, our “selva oscura”—when we’re afloat amid the vast oceans and the world, and life as it once presented itself to us at last fades away—the middle is where we finally begin to find our essence—when the story that we were expected to ratify is lost to us and a new world, a richer world based in elusiveness, epiphany, and substance, can be created in its place. It’s only then, in the artist’s Purgatory, that we learn to appreciate and understand the full radiance of our peculiar existence—when we begin to see, and are unafraid and perceptive enough to see, passed the story and into the bottomless depths and the inexhaustible richness of our private moments.

In Proust’s novel, we can see the protagonist’s evolving perceptiveness of life in the way he comes to appreciate the subtleties, i.e. the substance, of a certain sonata:

Because it was only in successive stages that I could love what the sonata brought to me, I was never able to possess it in its entirely -- it was an image of life.

In the Vinteuil sonata, the beauties one discovers soonest are also those which pall soonest, a double effect with a single cause: they are the parts that most resemble other works, with which one is already familiar. But when those parts have receded, we can still be captivated by another phrase, which, because its shape was too novel to let our mind see anything there but confusion, had been made undetectable and kept intact; and the phrase we passed by every day unawares, the phrase which had withheld itself, which by the sheer power of its own beauty had become invisible and remained unknown to us, is the one that comes to us last of all. But it will also be the last one we leave. We shall love it longer than the others, because we took longer to love it.

After I got back from Guatemala, I sat down to have lunch with a friend. During the course of our conversation, he asked me what I thought my life would be like if I had stayed with a particular ex-girlfriend. And that’s when it hit me. My life isn’t too bad. I’m grateful for all the choices I’ve made that have led me to where I am—to this moment. I’m happy just to be alive—to be here in this place under these circumstances at this particular inimitable time. I’m happy that my life didn’t fulfill the expectations I once placed on it. I’m happy to be a failure. I’m happy that I’m no longer motivated to emulate a familiar story. I’m happy to be middle aged.

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The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

Rilke