Day 0008

I finished listening to the audiobook of Sodom and Gomorrah today. I've loved having Proust in my life for the past few months, and I'm so glad I've got three more books of Remembrance of Things Past left to enjoy. Like Tolstoy's War and Peace, books of this length and magnitude completely envelop me and take over my thoughts so that I feel like I am actually living the story, not just reading it.

Proust has again struck a chord with something I have been thinking about a lot in 2015. Towards the end of the book he draws the narrator's attention to how his own growth as a person is framed and contrasted by the unchanging constancy of the physical environments he finds himself in. He changes, the ceiling and bookshelves do not, yet the meanings they hold for him change even though they themselves do not.

"I became aware of my own transformations as I compared them with the identity of my surroundings. We grow accustomed to these as to people and when, all of a sudden, we recall the different meaning that they used to convey to us, then, after they had lost all meaning, the events very different from those of to-day which they enshrined, the diversity of actions performed beneath the same ceiling, between the same glazed bookshelves, the change in our heart and in our life that diversity implies, seem to be increased still further by the unalterable permanence of the setting, reinforced by the unity of scene."

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

It is the same experience as re-reading a book after many years, and it is the same thing as returning to an old, familiar place or seeing a work of art again after a long absence. I love the idea that the selfsame painting, sculpture or building will see me at different points in my life, each time as a changed man. Yet if we moved back the clock the same physical me would be standing in the same place looking at the same thing, occupying the same space. Our relationship each time will be different, yet the work of art will be the same.

That is not to say that I subscribe to the fallacy of art as eternal, but that I think it is eternal enough (i.e. most of it will outlast me).

Reflections on today's drawing

This is again taken from a painting at the Met, which I stood in front of for about an hour today. It is Ruben's Portrait of a Woman, Probably Susanna Lunden. It is a tonal pencil drawing that I enjoyed doing but, as ever, doesn't look anything like the original. I was constantly reminded of Raphael's La Donna Velata, with her beautiful hands emerging from the billowing folds of the veil.