How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel

Can an inward turning figure be an activist? What revolution would Proust lead? There has famously been a conservatism to great 20th  Century modernism, Ezra Poind ended up in St. Elizabeth’s in the wake of his fascist broadcasts during the Second War. Tolstoy is an exception particularly with regard to the Christianity which infused his writing in the latter part of his career. Andre Malraux, a Gaullist political figure, wrote both Man’s Fate and Man’s Hope (if manifest content is significant, the titles tell part of the story). Camus, the editor of the famed resistance paper Combat, was the author of The Stranger, a unique combination of interiority with intention and there were Koestler, Silone and, indubitably, George Orwell whose complex convictions are an essay in consciousness itself. Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Save Your Life  fuses the how-to genre with a Proust's excavations of memory in both its voluntary and involuntary forms (as exemplified by the iconic madeleine). The potential humor and even silliness of the endeavor is belied by acuteness of the author's insights.

Read "Boudu Saved From Drowning" by Francis Levy with a painting by Hallie Cohen in The East Hampton Star

The Full-Service Replacement Division of Andersen

 

Plato

You may have seen the television ads about the years of training installers of The Full-Service Division of Andersen receive. There are is also the PhD and of course the post graduate division located in Frankfurt where famous for philosophers like Herbert Marcuse whose notion of "repressive desublimation" is an important element of his One Dimensional Man. Can a one-dimensional man install a three-dimensional window? As was once said about Clairol, "only your hairdresser knows for sure." In their first year most students will take Contemporary Civilization, a survey of Greco-Roman and classical culture that plays a major role in the kind of installing that clients enjoy. If nothing else a graduate should be able to converse freely with the kind of highly educated customer who can afford a top quality window replacement job.

Read "Boudu Saved From Drowning" by Francis Levy with a painting by Hallie Cohen in The East Hampton Star

The Great Dictator

 

Cut to the famous scene in the Charlie Chaplin classic where Chaplin, impersonating Hitler, is throwing the world around like it's a rubber ball. Trump vows to nationalize elections in violation of the constitution. He declares war on Venezuela and Iran without the consent of congress. He attempts to grab Greenland, a relatively minor gambit whose failure he sloughs off. Emoluments. His current earnings as president are nearing 1.8 billion and he has sent the FBI into the office of Fulton County to illegally vet ballots. Is that Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, making a guest appearance? The FBI under $Cash Patel and the DOJ under Pam Bondi, whose past role was in Surfer Girl, have now been merged with The White House, whose East Wing has been torn down to build a $300 million ballroom, without wasting time to confer with the NCPC (National Capitol Planning Commission). Who cares?

The Phone

"Midway upon the journey of our life
  I found myself within a forest dark,
  For the straightforward pathway had been lost."--Canto I, The Inferno

"Lasciate ogni speranza, voi' ch'intrate"--reads the sign above the gate--Canto III

But what is hell? Is it everyday life with its disillusion, disappointments and boredom? And with the ephemeral pleasures of the flesh like eating and passion. Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso all have 33 cantos each. So hell doesn't dominate existence, but for the unrepentant sinner it's the last stop. Tolstoy ran away from Yasnaya Polyana and died alone in the Astopovo Station "He who is without sin cast the first stone"--John 8:7 . Waiting is the human predicament. No one is free of it and salvation is rarely what is sought.

Life

At birth, one is sentenced to life with no time off for good behavior. Parole? It’s the one case where it would not necessarily be desirable. Commutation is tantamount to death.  No one has the benefit of awareness of the birth or death which bookend existence. Supernal events inevitably convey mystery since they traffic in both the invisible and ineffable. Time is a light spectrum filled with signposts such as the advent of consciousness—which however elusive tantalize with their potential knowability. Personhood follows the vacuum which leads to nothing.

Read "Boudu Saved From Drowning" by Francis Levy with a painting by Hallie Cohen in The East Hampton Star

Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson

Here is what Boswell says about Samuel Johnson: "He had, from the irritability of his constitution, at all times, an impatience and hurry when he either read or wrote. A certain apprehension, arising from novelty, made him write his first exercise from College twice over; but he never took that trouble with any other composition; and we shall see that his most excellent works were struck off at a heat, with rapid exertion." Much is made of rewriting, but the fact is most writing is unconscious, occurring not in the mind but the fingers. The idea is to get ahead of the reasoning function which buries thought in notions.  Encapsulating a creative impulse is akin to taming a wild horse. The manageability is inversely proportional to its richness and unpredictability. 

read "Boudu Saved From Drowning" by Francis Levy (with a painting by Hallie Cohen), The East Hampton Star

Nabokov's First Poem

 "A moment later, my first poem began. What touched it off? I think I know. Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordite leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando dow the center vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent."--Speak, Memory. Nabokov would go on to write Pale Fire, a 999 line novel in poetry form by the fictional John Shade, with commentary by Shade's neighbor, Charles Kinbote--the Boswell of the tale. Nabokov's own description of his first prosody sounds a bit like Stephen Hawking: "Tip, leaf, dip, relief--the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes..."

read "Boudu Saved From Drowning" by Francis Levy (with a painting by Hallie Cohen), The East Hampton Star