“With unbridled growth and an influx of people from the countryside looking for work, Istanbul now extends 100 kms from east to west.”

My god. 100 kms.

Melton to Pakenham. 100kms. But are we worried about unbridled growth? The loss of cultural heritage? A chaotic city?

“Istanbul…has all the problems of a city that expanded too fast, with little or no control over its development. Istanbul is a chaotic city, now ungovernable, because it has turned into a commodity.”

Istanbul has 15m people.

And then, if you have more mirth left in you, check this one out:

“Some 40kms from the Bosphorous a concrete replica of the straits is being built on the European side….Our idea is to recreate life on the shoreline but at a more affordable price.”

“…a subway is due to be built…”

Imagine building any kind of fixed rail transport in the new suburbs in Melbourne? Laugh! I almost did.

This year, when not reading Proust, I have read Phillip Roth, The Plot Against America, and enjoyed the ideas in it, though not so much the voice and culture he is writing from; Fado, by Andrzej Stasiuk – within two pages or less I had made my judgement that this was superb, right up my alley and would never leave my library (bookdepository sent me another one unasked — idiots); Angel of Grozny, Asne Sierestad, which lead me to Anna Politkovskaya and Nothing but the Truth – a dip in and out type of book (she must terrify journalists; how to live up to her standards of truth telling?).

I have also bought Osip Mandelstam – The Noise of Time, and looked into Journey to Armenia.

Now back to the Verdurins and their little set, bickering and plotting in the house on the hill looking out to the sea…

Proust always has something to say about being sick; and illness is the metaphor he reaches for first most of the time.

The loved one is by turns the sickness and the remedy that suspends and aggravates the sickness.(232)

I am rediscovering my taste for the book. I don’t love this translation as much as the earlier volumes. Translating anything as well-known as this has all my admiration, but somehow the language seems flattened, perhaps bureaucratic. The sentences don’t ring like they do in the first one.

But it is taking my mind off the itch.

Seeing a woman briefly while travelling past; whether stopping would only be a let down; fear of boisterous young women; drunkeness; pursuing your desires; procrastination; monsters and gods — adolescence was the only time we ever learnt anything…

Saturday 15 May:

Francoise reminds me of Laurie Lee’s mother.

Tuesday 6 April:

Going slowly this morning on the bike along my usual route through Carlton I passed, as I must have done 100 times before without noticing it, an old house with ‘Combray’ across its crest.

Saturday 8 May:

“The steps of thought which we take during the lonely work of artistic creation all lead us downwards, deeper into ourselves, the only direction we can advance…towards an outcome of truth.“

Monday 28 June:

Saint Loup tells Marcel an idea that Marcel had previously told Saint Loup.  This is what S. does to me all the time!

Thursday 22 July:

Much of Proust is to do with how we remember the past, but this section of the Guermantes Way (p.388) has been reflecting on how we anticipate the future, and how, when it arrives, it is not what we thought or hoped for.

Monday 26 July:

“The quality of a book, a house, a salon, depends essentially on what you exclude.”

Tuesday 27 July:

My god this has been tedious, this last section, analysing the Guermantes salon and that of the Princess of Parma. Having to stop myself skipping ahead.

Thursday 29 July:

I’m enjoying his detailed explication of Madame de Guermantes’ character. I’ve thought from the start that Proust mocks the idle rich (and others) without rancour, and without the satire falling into absurdity.

Rare train rides or flights make more inroads.

Proust is perfect for short train rides, as I scribbled elsewhere.

Some bedtime work but progress is slower there. Two or three pages under lamplight, then snoring. At that rate…6 volumes…they are all big volumes…

“How is it?” I’ve been asked. For a while I would talk about how he teaches you how to read him. Brings you to him. The slumberous opening is a good barrier — I fell there 2 or 3 times prior. But it gets you fit, and after that…

For a while I also said that the thrill in Proust is what he will think next, not what will happen next.

At the moment, I am realising how important mood is to receiving the text in all its glory.  Some days every page seems full of sparkle and glories.  Others, I am counting the pages as I turn them.

There is some much to read – I have given Marcel so much of my short life. Look at the dying Hitchens, for example. I’d like to ask him if he has regrets…about reading Proust for so many of his days.

But I need to slow down. Wait for the moods.

Is Proust funny? People say so. I’ve laughed aloud two or three times at most. Over that many pages it is not a lot.

I’ve tried the beans in every cafe that offers them (and makes them).

This bit you pay for:

Here is the top three places in Australia to eat beans for breakfast. Reverse order.

3.  A minor place. Brunswick Vic.

Great white beans.  On a buttery slice of sourdough. While converting to gas, count the fixie bikes tethered out front. A hipster peloton.  You won’t see a more risible crowd of beer lao drinkers and fashion photographers outside of Frankie magazine.

2. Babkas. Fitzroy Vic,

The Georgian Beans are dark red and perfect.

1. Cafe Essen, Civic ACT

Canberra’s best cafe also has Australia’s best breakfast beans.  Lovely mixture of beans, beautiful sauce and bread.  Daylight second.

Grim. Grim. Grim.

Static is his favourite. Does it take him back to the recent womb, where most of his memories were made? Is it a muffled hiss that he lived with all those months?

It stops his anguish short, like a plug being pulled, and he looks up to a blank wall and concentrates, just as I would to a song I kind of recognise playing next door, heard through the walls.

Outside, in his first street the scrappy paperbarks are in full blossom. Creamy white.  Only for this brief moment justifying their choice as street-trees.

When he’s finally asleep we go out in the pram. I see every lump and bump in the footpath for the first time. I can hear the city humming.

The author, Milovan Djilas, is a bit of a hero of mine, and I think I’ve worked out why.  He got it right about Communism early on.  And he got it right through deduction and observation.

The New Class does not seem to be an act of opportunism, but rather the final straw for a man very very slowly disillusioned.  There’s a touching humanity about that.

Djilas writes in the intro:

During my adult life I have traveled the entire road open to a Communist: from the lowest to the highest rung of the hierarchical ladder… No one compelled me to embrace or to reject Communism. I made my own decision according to my convictions, freely, in so far as a man can be free… I cut myself off consciously and gradually…

This account may appear strange to those who live in the non-Communist world.

And it does seem strange.  The debates and the struggles are strange because they were deemed redundant long ago in the capitalist West.  That is the thing with Communism, it is not feared anymore, nor mocked, just irrelevant. And the intellectual work of Djilas and his striving fairness, it all seems so irrelevant.

But perhaps he played a part in that?

His clear-eyed thinking leads him to a conclusion that now seems brilliant, spot on for Europe.  Communism will be defeated, he tells us, because of its lack of energy.  The tendency of the world is t0wards unification and it cannot be stopped. Irresistible.

In any case, the world will change and will go in the direction in which it has been moving and must go on — toward greater unity, progress and freedom.  The power of reality and the power of life have always been stronger than any kind of brutal force and more real than any theory.

Communist writing is a crack up these days, isn’t it.  How much intellectual effort did those dudes waste? For what?