lost time

It turns out reading Proust isn’t as easy as reading a teen novel. It turns out Proustian scholars use big words and I have to stop reading and look them up. I spent some two hours (with interruptions) with Swann’s Way yesterday and got (including the introduction with the big words) all the way to page nine of the book.
Then again, it is Proust, and unless you kind of fall into it like a dream, there’s not a lot going on. I mean I’m ten pages in and he’s still discussing the nature of falling asleep, dreaming, thinking he’s awake, thinking he’s awakening as a child, or as an adult or as an older adult. Sure it’s tricky and it’s the nature of the book, in a thoughtful way, yet there isn’t a whole lot going on. By page ten of the gossip girls, someone had gotten drunk or almost had sex.
Then again, In Search of Lost Time isn’t really that different than the Gossip Girls: rich people drink and sleep around and care about surface things like cloths and appearances. The main diffence is In search is ALL inner life and the Gossip Girls is NO inner life.

Is it possible for a human to have no inner life? My friend’s brother once bashed two of his previous girlfriends by saying they had no inner sense of irony. I’m not sure if that was an accurate description of those people, but it could have been.

We can never know what anyone else's inner life is, because in order for them to express it, it then becomes outer life.

Proust writing about his life is taken by his inner thoughts, but as soon as it hits the paper, it's outside of him. Certainly me reading his books a century after he conceived of them, has nothing to do with his inner life and much more to do with a public perception that his actions of describing his inner life is a seminal change in literature which changed fiction (and now non-fiction memoir crap) into what we think of the modern novel. Virgina Woolf, in her diaries, cites reading Swann's way as the catalyst that helped her to understand how and why she was writing To the Lighthouse, but maybe I'm wrong now I can' t find where I read that.