On Finishing the Second Volume of A La Recherche…

Like being thrown into the sea and having to learn how to swim,
All by yourself, reading Proust is also like being forced to learn
How to read all over again, how to write as well, even how to think,
In all its garishness and precision and imprecision and beauty
And boredom and everything else besides. It is also about learning
How to live, or how to have lived. Layers of life, like Salomé’s veils,
Adorn the words, which even as they are read I know will make
Another sense when I have become another Anthony, in the
Life which will be when I am become him, changed in
Perception of love, desire, selfhood, words, thought.

So, at this Australian point, as opposed perhaps to a
Previous Greek point, the process of reading Proust
Feels like part of a life’s work, a search for the time to
Come, those subsequent chapters to be revealed.
A life’s work, which is the life of the writer himself, the
Dedication to the completion of a strand of thought, which
May be Marcel’s strand of thought, or may turn out to be my own.