I can think of any number of good reasons why not Proust, beginning with our incredible shrinking attention spans and our post-Hemingway distaste for most species of ornate prose (Proust favors the sentence-as-steeplechase approach), and moving on to our great democratic repudiation of social snobbism (the man was legendary, even in his own time, for his obsession with class and caste distinctions) and the general postmodern sense of bemused detachment from the steadily growing midden of history, the nightmare from which Joyce's Stephen Dedalus was famously trying to rouse himself.

All of these reasons have powerful tributary force, but there is another that is more compelling still. It has to do with our arrival, in a collective cultural sense, at a new place, a threshold of self-reflection. Whether this has to do with the attainment of hitherto unimaginable kinds of leisure, or a certain critical mass of psychological awareness, I don't know -- but the signs are everywhere. We are in the era of the retrospective impulse, the written token of which is the memoir.

Then, too, we must note the enormous changes wrought by the gay-rights revolution of recent decades. Although Proust's narrator, Marcel, wears hetero garb in the novel, his world, as White's short biography makes very clear, is complexly coded to the author's passions for various young men, the most noted example being the partial modeling of Marcel's great love, Albertine, on the figure of Alfred Agostinelli, Proust's lover and chauffeur.

Linked with the novel's receding from us in time has been the rising tide of nostalgia -- not just for Proust's period, but for the whole unrecoverable then. In our era of hyper-progress, every passing year exponentially increases the gulf between us and what went before. At mid-century Proust's novel was still part of a world remembered; now it is a chronicle of Atlantis, and the author's portrayals of the society of his day seem locked away in amber. As Edmund White puts it, "He is read more as a fabulist than a chronicler, as a maker of myths."

For I must be honest here. The history of my reading of Proust is a comic chronicle of lofty intentions foundering in the face of finite endurance and chronic distractedness. I once spent a long summer sitting in a canvas chair in a remote Italian village, with nothing to disturb me dawn to dusk but the rustling of the neighbor's chickens, and still I could not get past The Cities of the Plain (the fifth of the novel's eight books). I blame my finicky reading habits. I blame Proust for writing so many of those sinuous sentences that swirl you about in the pleasurable grip of their clauses, only to leave you goggle-eyed when the period comes, forced to look back for the antecedent, and then, invariably, to read the thing again. I blame my beleaguered eyes and the print of the old standard two-volume edition -- the original Moncrieff translation, with its evocative sonorities and somewhat mannered dialogue -- that might still be propping up a window somewhere north of Rome.

The man is here to stay. The question, then, for all of us who still profess ourselves readers, is how to proceed. The obvious way, of course, is (pace Peter Pan) straight on til morning. Easy to say, a bit harder to do, especially if one is not yet retired and does not feel like sacrificing all reading projects for the next six months to the task. To all of us I commend Proust's Way.

My point is that I didn't finish. By the time I got back to the States I had lost my drive, positively craved magazines and glib novels. I have returned, to be sure, have read Swann's Way a number of times now, but when Proustians get to talking --

Some common words found in the essay are:
Cities Plain, Edmund White's, Marcel Proust, Lewis Clark, Terence Kilmartin, Remembrance Past, Edmund White, , Agostinelli Proust's, Selective Memories, marcel proust, edmund white's mini-biography, white's mini-biography, reading proust, proust --, novel world, edmund white's, search lost, narrator marcel,
Approximate Word count = 2083
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)