Shall I begin? Do you find it all funny that even as we are grown-ups in charge of our own schedules we continue to stay up too late, knowingly, as if we were still children? I want to sit and play solitaire, watch the last two episodes of another BBC Masterpiece Theater serial, and continue to putz around. I have to get up at a normal person hour, take the subway and work tomorrow. Hellation.
The fabulous smart-women's reading group to which I now belong is reading Proust. I believe I have mentioned that recently. As we are, those of us who have any leisure, going to a talk at the Brooklyn Public Library on Wednesday, I thought I ought to give the book a look-over again.
I do love Proust when I can give over to his very slow and laborious writing style. The fellow really had some beautiful insights.
"Perhaps the immobility of the things around us is imposed on them by our certainty that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our mind confronting them.'
Oh, so it might just be our moribund and small-minded way of perceiving things that gives us a limited vision of the world, is it? An open mind might allow for some kind of movement? Some greater mobility in the world?
I'll take my madeleine and sleep on that.
I've been thinking a lot about the Andean world view recently, and one of the things some of the writers talk about is how stones are alive. the categories of life and non-life are different. I noticed the same thing about children. They might dress cars up in doll clothes, or have pet stones. Animism isn't just limited to plants. And part of this belief is that the stones move around, or their energy is such that they vibrate, and not just during an earthquake. Proust kept so still during that part of his life when he was writing that he must have been in tune to it...
ReplyDeleteI have not (I admit this) read Proust, but I have always had a sense, increased in 3rd grade when I learned about atoms, that everything is "alive" and in motion. Everything changes. I am quite grateful when I come home and all my stuff, barring minor migrations, stays pretty much still for me. Perhaps, a la Proust, I insist that it be still. And re: Andeans, anyone who has stood beside standing stones, Half Dome, or large boulders, can feel the hum of their presence. Don't know if it's their atom-filled mass, or our minds, overwhelmed by movement inside stillness. They may need help to move, but they're always ready.
ReplyDelete