I passed the halfway mark in The Guermantes  Way, the third volume in Proust’s great work. I started reading the book the week before Christmas, a rate that suggests that I should finish this volume just around Thanksgiving. Since I began, I’ve bought maybe a dozen other novels & had perhaps another ten or so arrive by the mail. Read one book & discover that you’re now 20-some other books “behind.”

 

I had been reading one volume of Proust roughly every 15 months, but the first two seemed to go much quicker. While each was shorter, neither was all that much more slender – Swann’s Way, the shortest, is 606 pages, compared with Guermantes’ 819. Rather, what has happened is that my reading style has evolved to accommodate the pleasures of the work – rather than reading as an activity of forward motion, it’s become immersive. One doesn’t so much read Proust as one does submerge oneself in the work. There are days in which a single paragraph feels like an evening’s reading – and it’s a fine, completely satisfying evening – and days even in which two or three sentences have that same effect.

 

I’ve come across this before in fictive prose, though really only in the work of three writers: Faulkner, in several of his books; Joyce, in Ulysses; Pynchon, in Gravity’s Rainbow. I’ve had this experience as well with critical prose – and am in fact having it now, both in Robert Duncan’s HD Book, which I’ve been steadily as long as I’ve been doing this blog (it’s mentioned in the very first entry); and Barrett Watten’s Constructivist Moment. And I’ve had the experience with certain poems as well – Pound’s Cantos, Olson’s Maximus.

 

One aspect of immersive reading – though only one – is a desire that the book never end. There is something deeply familiar – I associate it with childhood, early childhood at that – about that sense that a book can be, to use Wittgenstein’s phrase, all that is the case. I’m sure that this is what the Tolkien fanatics confront, going from The Hobbit, to the Trilogy to the Silmarillion, then back again, over & over.

 

I’ve been known to have, even in relatively short books, a sense of grief & despair as I grasp at some point that there are only twenty or thirty pages remaining. & I suspect I’m not alone in that sense that completing a great book can leave one feeling bereft & depressed for days, even if, as does sometimes happen, one also feels great joy to have seen such a project to conclusion.

 

Reading is completely emotional, in addition to everything else it is. They don’t teach that in school, which is a little like not teaching that bullets can discharge to various effects – malpractice by omission.