Upon Finishing Proust

Upon finishing Proust, I inscribed in the cover the date. And then my mobile phone rang, and due to the complex emotional and social circumstances, and a question of timing, I answered it and spent a few minutes on the phone making plans for later this evening. I was thus deprived, in some ways, of that moment of reflection, of pause, of pondering that follows finishing a book. But how perfect, how poignantly Proustian, the entanglements of desire and social obligations with the need to work, to find a flat, to attend to needs mundane and more substantial. Capital-'h' Habit, the power of the Will, time extended and time condensed, Time lost and found, and as Michel Bernstein would put it, the "Star-Making" machine of desire thwarted, of the moment of almost comically inconsequential rejection.

Phew. Got the worst of my delight and dismay out of the way there. My (nominally re-)reading of Proust over the last year has followed, a bit too nicely, the course of my own life. From desire to renunciation. But is academic work, particularly sans institutional context, necessarily a renunciation? Requiring a withdrawal from the social world, the dinner parties without starched collars and feathered plumes that were my milieu before being replaced by rather ordinary bars on rather ordinary evenings? To some extent, yes. But my work is neither behind me (although hardbound in blue with gold lettering proclaiming my name and degree and the year 2004, looking down at me and reading over my shoulder from a shelf) nor only ahead of me, ungrasped and un-started. Instead the despair- or joy-filled realisation that it is always ongoing, always the present. That for my work to be bigger than me, bigger than my physical life in space and time, but to be formed of my mental life, that it must always be here, be now, and be on the horizon. I've already started working again, and the follow through is no different than the beginning. It's just a moment.