Proust on Love, Art and Suffering

In Proust, love, art and suffering are inextricably connected.  Love inevitably leads to suffering, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing because suffering leads to art.  For Proust, there is no art without suffering. The pain of grief, over a lost grandmother for example, may provide some impetus to art.  But there is no comparison to the suffering caused by love for inspiring true art.

Love is not a happy thing in Proust.  Of all the many, many relationships portrayed, I can only think of one that could possibly be described as “happy” (the artist Elstir and his wife).  And Proust spends very little time discussing that relationship, so I’m sure with a little more attention he would have found the misery there as well.  Although they’re not exactly relationships, probably the least miserable are the lesbians – they have ongoing sexual friendships that seem to be mostly free of the many downfalls of the other relationships portrayed in Proust.

The common pattern for “love” in Proust is that one partner is madly, passionately and jealously in love and the other partner is, in one way or another, using him or her.  This pattern applies for both heterosexual and homosexual (male) relationships.  The pattern is set at the beginning in Swann’s Way with the depiction of Swann’s disastrous relationship with Odette.  Every other love affair echoes this one.  Marriage is it’s own hell in Proust.  Love is not even expected and infidelity is the rule.  Of course, there’s no denying the appeal of that initial, passionate love that we often feel at the beginning of a love affair.  The uncertainty of it all, the all-consuming need to be with the loved one, and yes, even the jealousy.  But how sad that, to Proust, that is all that love is.  It seems so immature in a way.  Where is the enduring love?  The mutual love built on honesty and respect?  When reading about In Search of Lost Time before and while reading it, I frequently saw commentators describe Marcel’s relationship with Albertine as his “great love.”  But even that love affair follows the typical pattern.  In the end I felt sorry for Proust that he never experienced a deep and fulfilling love, but only these superficial passions based on mutual distrust.  I suppose we can hope that in his personal life Proust did experience more, but that he just didn’t feel a happy love made for very good reading.  And he wanted to make his point about the value of suffering.

"The Easter Parade" - A Tale of Two Sisters

 A couple of years ago in my book club we read Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.  I loved it.  I vowed to read more by Yates, but hadn’t gotten around to it until just now, when I read The Easter Parade.  This is the story of two sisters, Sarah and Emily – how their lives were shaped by the same events but become so different, how each of them struggles to find happiness and ultimately fails.  The sisters are young adults in the 1940s and 1950s, so the story lines are familiar: one sister is a suburban housewife with too many kids and the other is a city career girl who can’t seem to find a good man.

The beauty of Yates’ stories is the way that, with just a few words and well-chosen anecdotes, he creates a portrait of a person that feels incredibly complete.  You really feel that you know the characters.  When he describes how the girls’ mother insisted that they call her “Pookie” and had an obsession with having “flair”, you have a picture of her that fits with everything else she does throughout the story.  He is, quite simply, a beautiful and insightful writer: "But she stopped crying abruptly when she realized that even that was a lie: these tears, as always before in her life, were wholly for herself -- for poor, sensitive Emily Grimes whom nobody understood, and who understood nothing."

As a younger sister myself, I enjoyed the portrait of two sisters.  Carrie and I are, of course, nothing like the sisters in the book.  But when we were younger we were incredibly different, as are Sarah and Emily.  It’s always interesting to look back on our childhood and wonder how we experienced many of the same things, yet turned out so differently.  As we’ve gotten older, though, it seems like we are more and more alike.  I think it’s because we’ve both mellowed a bit and become less extreme versions of ourselves.  The masks we put on to cope with the teenage years and young adulthood have become less necessary and we’ve become more comfortable in our skin.  And as it turns out, our skin is more alike than we thought.  In the book, Sarah and Emily never come to that sense of sameness.  It’s just one of many things in the book that made me sad.

Both Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade have a sense of life that is ultimately unhappy.  Characters make bad decisions, but that is not the only reason they are unhappy.  There is a real feeling that happiness is illusory and no matter what decisions one makes, one can never achieve it.  When I read Revolutionary Road a few years ago I was very unhappy.  My sense of life was also that happiness was unattainable – something that people talk about but no one actually has.  So Revolutionary Road really resonated with me.  But, luckily for me, I got out of the various situations that made life seem so hopeless at that time.  Now I’m in a caring, respectful and peaceful marriage, I have a beautiful daughter, and I no longer work at a hellish job.  Life is good!  So as I read The Easter Parade, I found myself mostly just feeling sorry for the characters.  But I didn’t feel like one of them anymore. 

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I think life is going to be all roses and sunshine from here on out.  And it’s not right now.  Moving across the country to a city where you know no one is very stressful.  And having a baby that doesn’t sleep is exhausting to the point of being almost unbearable.  But my outlook on life is positive, whereas three years ago it was hopeless.  That makes a big difference.

And yet, what would The Easter Parade be with a happy ending?  Definitely not the right book.  I haven’t read anything else by Yates, but given his writing style and subject matter, I would never pick up a book by him and expect a happy ending.  In fact, most serious literature does not have “happy endings.”  The ending might not be all bad, though: there might be redemption, a new understanding or awareness, a breaking with the past or a new beginning.  But I can’t think of a serious book, particularly more modern fiction, with what we might call a happy ending.  (There’s always a happy ending in Jane Austen, but that seems somewhat antiquated to the modern reader.)  Why is this so?  Does it more accurately reflect our reality?  Life doesn’t come in book-sized packages; there’s always more to come at the end of the story, and it might not all be good.  Maybe that’s why we prefer an ending that leaves room for ambiguity or a new perspective. 

But maybe the lack of happy endings is a reflection of the personality types of the majority of authors and readers of serious literature.  Is the unhappy artist to blame?  This is starting to relate to a post I’m currently working on about Proust on Art, so I’ll leave it at that for now.  More to come soon!

"This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession"

Adeline and I go to a music class called Music Together.  During “class” parents and their babies (of all ages) sit around a room and sing, bang on drums and other baby friendly instruments, and move their bodies and get up and dance.  It’s a great time.  The philosophy behind the class is that, until very recently, families and communities regularly made music together and everyone was a musician as well as a listener.  These days most people don’t regularly make music and they feel that they’re not able to do so.  Exposing babies to this kind of group music-making early on will give them a better chance of becoming musical as they grow.

These ideas feature prominently in the book This is Your Brain on Music.  Levitin often returns to the idea that all people are capable of making music, and it is only recently that most of us have become passive listeners instead of musicians.  He also focuses on the idea of movement and music as being one. In many of the world’s languages the word for “to sing” is the same as “to dance” – “there is no distinction, since it is assumed that singing involves bodily movement.”  And moving in time with the music is something that all of us can do, but it’s not as easy as it looks.  Levitin notes that tapping your feet in time with the music is “an activity that involves a process of meter extraction so complicated that most computers cannot do it.”

I’ve always been musical.  When I was young, my grandpa would play the piano and we would all sing along.  Add to that 10 years of piano lessons and 11 years of camp – a community where music making was an integral part of nearly every activity – and I’m a music-lover.  I did high school musicals, humorology in college and even the law school musical.  I sing and dance with Adeline all day long, both songs we know and songs I make up as we go.  My next goal is to get a little upright piano so I can brush up on my (very modest) playing and play songs for her.

But I’m certainly not alone in loving music.  Consider the “30-day Song Challenge” currently making the rounds on Facebook.  For 30 days, the participant picks a different song every day to fit into a very specific category. As Levitin points out throughout the book, we are all experts at knowing what we like.  And not just what we like, but what we like for any given mood, what makes us happy, what makes us dance, and what we definitely do not like.  Music is an incredibly important part of life for many of us.  In this book, Levitin tries to figure out why.  His answers are fascinating.

I remember the first time I discovered “90s on 9” on XM radio.  We were driving up to visit my parents, so we listened to it for hours.  It was all songs from junior high and high school and I knew almost all the words.  It wasn’t necessarily music I loved, but it was my music.  Levitin talks about that sense of attachment to music from our teenage years.  One part is that those were emotionally charged years for most of us, and we attach music to that emotion and it sticks with us.  But he also describes the neuroscience behind it: that age is the time when neuron connections are finalizing and “our musical brains [are] approaching adultlike levels of completion.”

He talks further about the way that music is connected to memories. “Have you ever been walking down the street and suddenly smelled an odor that you hadn’t smelled in a long time, and that triggered a memory of some long-ago event?  Or heard an old song come on the radio that instantly retrieved deeply buried memories associated with when that song was first popular? . . . [M]emories are encoded in groups of neurons that, when set to proper values and configured in a particular way, will cause a memory to be retrieved and replayed in the theater of our mind. . . . [T]he problem is finding the right cue to access the memory and properly configure our neural circuits.”  This sounds like Proust by a scientist.  That odor or bit of song that triggers the long-lost memory is exactly what Proust means by finding “lost time.”  And his explanation of how that trigger happens is a more beautiful rendition of the “finding the right cue” explanation.  Almost 100 years ago Proust knew what science has finally confirmed.  And that, my friends, is just one example of his genius.

Another topic that I particularly enjoyed was his discussion of babies and music. Studies show that “a year after they are born, children recognize and prefer music they were exposed to in the womb.”  How neat!  I sort of knew that when pregnant, but didn’t really get around to doing the whole “play the fetus Mozart” thing.  She’s going to love folk music though.  More fascinating was this quote: “[A]t a very early age, babies are thought to be synesthetic, to be unable to differentiate the input from the different senses, and to experience life and the world as a sort of psychedelic union of everything sensory.  Babies may see the number five as red, taste cheddar cheeses in D-flat, and smell roses in triangles.”  I’ve often said that being a little baby must be like being on an intense acid trip.  Looks like I was right!  (Also, my sister sees colors associated with letters and words – a condition called synesthesia in adults.  I guess her brain is still “baby-like” – or more positively, it never became limited in the way the rest of ours did.  She’d also be happy about this quote from the cited article: “The condition, which is genetically transmitted, seems especially prevalent among highly talented and gifted persons.”)

The book is full of other really interesting discussions of music and neuroscience.  I could go on and on, but this post is getting a little long.  So I’m off to listen to some of my favorite music. 

Lions and Tigers and Children’s Books, Oh My!

This topic is a little silly, but I have been spending quite a bit of time lately reading children’s books, so it seemed appropriate.  Adeline doesn’t really like to sleep, so each nap and bedtime requires a soothing ritual before she’s calm enough to even potentially sleep.  We read three stories before each nap and three stories at bedtime.  And then there are all of the fun books that she likes to play with throughout the day.  Basically, we spend a lot of time with books, which I’m obviously ok with.  So here are my thoughts on the books we’ve been reading.

I definitely don’t claim any expertise on this topic.  I realized what a huge industry this is when I walked into a Barnes & Noble children’s book section and it was almost as big as all of the rest of the sections put together.  In my mind that’s a sad commentary on the state of American reading.  On the other hand, children’s books have to be in hard copy, whereas a lot of adults may be getting their reading on Kindles and Ipads at this point.  I can’t bring myself to give up the book, though, so the demise of the bookstore is heartbreaking to me.  At any rate, I digress. 

I walked into the children’s book section and was instantly surrounded by bright colors, cartoon animals and a plethora of abc’s.  It would be pretty easy for a person to get overwhelmed with all of the options.  Luckily for us, David’s sister runs a children’s bookstore.  For Christmas this year she and her partner sent us a big box full of beautifully wrapped books and a bookshelf to put them on.  Awesome!

Upon opening all of the books, I discovered an unusually large number of books by one Sandra Boynton.  I was skeptical.  Clearly this woman has a children’s book empire, and I tend to be wary of anyone who seems just a little too popular.  But, it turns out, they actually are pretty great.  Our favorite is Moo, Baa, Lalala, which involves lots of animal noises and singing pigs.  I’m also partial to But Not the Hippopotamus, which is about a hippo who doesn’t get asked to do anything and then finally does get asked.  Poor hippo.  But then there’s a happy ending.  Yay!  (I won't even get into what my liking of this book says about my popularity in high school.)  The Going to Bed Book is also a favorite for bedtime.  The silly animals brush their teeth, get in their pajamas, and then go exercise.  What?  But then they go to bed, so it all works out.  We have a bunch of other Sandra Boynton books as well.  She throws in some humor for mom and dad, which makes them more fun to read.

Of course there are a lot of other good ones.  One of my favorites is a Spanish/English book called Lola about a hen who decides that she’s not happy being one of many hens clamoring for the rooster’s attention, so she goes off on her own to find true love.  You go girl!  (Not to mention that Lola is Adeline's middle name, so it's especially fun for us.)  It’s a little bit long for Addie right now but I still read it to her a lot.  Her favorite part is when the rooster crows and I make a funny face and do the Spanish rooster sound – “Kikiriki!”  She rewards me for that with her adorable little laugh.  Come to think of it, her favorite part of any book is animal sounds and the faces I make when I do the sound.  Another Spanish book we have is La Arana Muy Ocupada (The Very Busy Spider) – every page has another animal making its noise and she giggles with every sound.  It’s pretty much the cutest thing ever.  At least in my humble opinion. 

I’m also partial to a book called Peek-a-Boo.  I like it because it’s actually a poem and I feel like it’s nice for Addie to get exposure to the rhythm and meter of poetry.  A lot of the other books have rhyming as well, but this one is a little more sophisticated.  The other thing babies like is repetition, and for repetition there’s nothing like the Brown Bear series of books.  I know they’re classics and they are adorable, but after asking “What do you see?” for what feels like the hundredth time in a day, I start to wish we didn’t have these books.  I’m sure that feeling will only get more intense as she gets older and starts demanding that I read the same book over and over and over again.  Fun times!

I know I’ve only scratched the surface here.  Do any other parents have favorite books that I should check out?