In the beginning

For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say to myself: "I'm falling asleep."

So begins the book (via Moncrieff/Kilmartin; 1982 Vintage Books edition), and so begins this blog. I am reading Proust on my own, and have been for a couple of years at this point. I'm nearing the end of Sodom and Gomorrah now, and have been meaning to collect some of my favorites sentences and/or passages in one place.

So I'm going back to the beginning, the first volume, and will post some lines here maybe every day, or every few days, or when the mood strikes, perhaps with comment, perhaps not. I will proceed in order, from Swann's Way onward, but idiosyncratically, skipping only to sentences that caught my eye and ear, for whatever reason. And I might occasionally go backwards, if I miss something, or discover something after the fact.

Reading Proust is a prodigious undertaking and seems to require more than simply closing the cover when done. So this is what I will do. But I am no scholar. Just an interested reader with a decent education behind me. And a lot of Proust, still, ahead of me.