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Man at the Center of the Universe (Close Reading of Proust) (Patreon)

Published:
2021-06-27 09:14:29
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Our slow read of pages three and four of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time seeks to cover a lot of ground.

We're in a magic chair, hurtling out of orbit. 

Below the timestamps, we have a couple of questions to enrich your reading.

Video Timestamps:

  • 0:00 page three of Proust
  • 1:00 “when a man is asleep”
  • 1:20 reading and listening to Proust aloud
  • 2:00 temperament and learning
  • 2:20 my personal approach to Proust
  • 2:40 reason vs imagination
  • 3:50 Dostoyevsky vs Proust
  • 4:40 how Proust makes you see the unseeable
  • 5:10 fallen man, magic chairs, and the Ptolomeic universe
  • 5:40 individuals carry the crises of our history
  • 6:30 have you ever awoken and not known who you are?
  • 7:10 my personal distressing Proustian identity crisis experience
  • 9:00 man at the center of the universe
  • 12:00 the Great Chain of Being
  • 14:00 man as supplement for ordered creation
  • 15:00 man ordains his own limitations
  • 17:00 imagining Marcel telling us the story
  • 18:00 Sartre’s existential nausea
  • 19:20 conception of self tied to planetary rotation
  • 20:00 sleep, earth rotation, and circadian rhythms
  • 21:00 Proust the insomniac (and my sleepless experiment)
  • 22:20 Hartmann’s thin/thick boundary spectrum (and mysticism)
  • 23:00 consistently reimagine conception of our selves
  • 24:00 how to tell if you’re thick or thin-boundaried
  • 26:00 Freud, the Great Goddess, and her counterparts
  • 26:30 inflicting the parental love-wound and eternal recurrence
  • 27:00 the trauma of realising our parents are not infallible
  • 29:00 reading the third and fourth page together aloud
  • 31:00 the difficulty of Proust

Questions to ponder:

1) Are you more thin or thick-boundaried? Those on the thinner part of the spectrum are more likely to indulge in vivid daydreams. At its extreme, these individuals become mystics. In mild cases, they can appreciate Proust.

2) Have you ever woken up and not known where you are or who you are? Is your conception of self constant across time or do you need to constantly reevaluate and recompose it?

Happy reading!

Files

Previews only

Man at the Center of the Universe - Proust's In Search of Lost Time (Pages 3-4)

0:00 page three of Proust 1:00 “when a man is asleep” 1:20 reading and listening to Proust aloud 2:00 temperament and learning 2:20 my personal approach to Proust 2:40 reason vs imagination 3:50 Dostoyevsky vs Proust 4:40 how Proust makes you see the unseeable 5:10 fallen man, magic chairs, and the Ptolomeic universe 5:40 individuals carry the crises of our history 6:30 have you ever awoken and not known who you are? 7:10 my personal distressing Proustian identity crisis experience 9:00 man at the center of the universe 12:00 the Great Chain of Being 14:00 man as supplement for ordered creation 15:00 man ordains his own limitations 17:00 imagining Marcel telling us the story 18:00 Sartre’s existential nausea 19:20 conception of self tied to planetary rotation 20:00 sleep, earth rotation, and circadian rhythms 21:00 Proust the insomniac (and my sleepless experiment) 22:20 Hartmann’s thin/thick boundary spectrum (and mysticism) 23:00 consistently reimagine conception of our selves 24:00 how to tell if you’re thick or thin-boundaried 26:00 Freud, the Great Goddess, and her counterparts 26:30 inflicting the parental love-wound and eternal recurrence 27:00 the trauma of realising our parents are not infallible 29:00 reading the third and fourth page together aloud 31:00 the difficulty of Proust

Comments

Tom Pearsall

I remain in awe of Proust’s prose. I have read, reread, listened and re-listened on Audible, read aloud, reread aloud -- and I don’t think I have encountered such beautiful crafting of sentence and paragraph. Every word seems perfect. I would have to read other translations to determine how much I owe to Moncrieff, et al. I do not really find the text difficult although one can get kind of lost in his flow of observations and imaginings. At the moment I am trying to memorize The Waste Land by T.S.Eliot. I have never tried to memorize a long poem. I do feel like the beginning of the poem is similar to waking up out of a slumber as is the section you discuss in this lecture: “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain. / Winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow, feeding / A little life with dried tubers.” As Nature reinvents itself each Spring, so do we when we awake and start mixing our memories and desires back into our identity. Proust seems a little more eager to return from the “abyss of non-being” than Eliot. Both Eliot and Proust were aware of what was being lost as we entered the Modern Age. Ironically, with each advance in science and technology there is less space for our collective imagination in constructing how we fit in with our vast universe. Proust seems intent on holding on to an age when we had no choice but to creatively fill in our gaps of knowledge, both identity and worldly knowledge. I think I am rather “thick” boundaried but trying to thin out some, and I think Proust is very helpful with this.

Tiffany Gallaher

I've spent several days going over the passage of focus in this video. Among the things that immediately came to mind when reading it were first, the truth of the statement that "when a man is asleep he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly bodies. Instinctively he consults them when he awakes..." I would have been less aware that the above is very true if it wasn't for my experience caring for my father, who suffers from increasing dementia. He is getting to the point where the usual triggers, like daylight or darkness, that we use to assess time of day, no longer work for him and he has to rely on questioning others. The date, the day of the week, the time of day are his preoccupations and repeated questions at night before he can allow himself to rest into sleep and also in the morning as soon as he wakes up. These things and the habits that go with them (It's Monday, it's garbage day; it's Tuesday, I have a shower) are his anchors for everything. The passage about half waking and not knowing who you are, trying to determine your identity and where you are by the position of your body in bed, makes me think of my son, who is autistic. Because he is nonverbal, the way his mind works has always been a bit of a mystery for me but his proprioceptive sense of where his body and his various limbs are in space is not like the majority of people. He hits himself, taps things, requests pressure through squeezes, in order to have a better sense of his body and where he is. The phrase "perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them" also makes me think of the way my son perceives the world. He prefers not to talk but when he does, he uses his own personal word associations to communicate instead of the commonly accepted meanings for words. So words like yogurt and ketchup, for instance, come to have a whole host of alternative meanings. Temple Grandin described this in her book "Thinking in Pictures" about her own experience as an autistic person. "An autistic child might say the word 'dog' when he wants to go outside. The word 'dog' is associated with going outside." Temple Grandin thinks differently, she thinks in specific images taken from her memories, and thinking as a typically developing person has been for her like learning a second language. She does not naturally use the same broad classifications we use for things, e.g. a generic abstract "chair" to represent all the specific chairs we have seen in our lives. Instead, her "chairs" are a card catalogue of all the chairs she has ever seen, which she continually adds to as her experience broadens. You could say that in several ways, the experience of being autistic is one of having thin boundaries or alternative boundaries from those we are familiar with. The body is different, the language classifications which shape understanding of the world, are different.