The world is shrinking. With the snow still lying on the ground and my nasal passages and chest still snuffling and wheezing like a pig hunting for truffles, I'm reluctant to go anywhere. I've shuffled a chair round the kitchen table so that I can sit immediately in front of the Aga. Our Ginger has gone one better, and started sleeping on the warming plate on top of the Aga. A vet once told me that cats don't have many nerves for detecting heat in their skins, so I removed him last night before going to my music society committee meeting, in case he should burn himself without noticing.
Since the grey tabby died, and we are no longer dishing out spoonfuls of cat food on demand to try and keep some weight on her, Our Ginger has been put on a diet. He became a chubby creature as soon as he moved in with us, always happy to finish up any little bits of food left by any of the others, but this winter he has ballooned. Obesity is a risk factor for diabetes in cats as well as humans. Witnessing the grey tabby's 48 hour decline into terminal organ failure has concentrated our minds regarding the Billy Bunter character that is our (now fourth) cat, and it will be easier to stick to regular mealtimes in future, now we're not trying to keep poor grey skin-and-bones going. The other three cats aren't keen on a transition to twice a day feeding, and I am still having to shut Our Ginger either in or out of the kitchen, while dispensing extra rations to the others on the opposite side of the door.
I have begun reading Swann's Way. The initial impulse came from seeing a reference to Marcel Proust in the paper, and reflecting that I had never even attempted to read In Remembrance of Things Past, although I have cheerfully referred to 'Proust's madeleines' in conversation, and only yesterday noticed a Guardian journalist use 'not have to explain that Marcel Proust was not an F1 racing driver' as a way of denoting that you had met someone vaguely educated and at least moderately cultured. It turns out that you can get Swann's way on Kindle, absolutely free. Marcel Proust is out of copyright, and it has been put on Amazon by volunteers. It seemed worth at least giving it a try, though in truth I expected it to be wordy and dull as hell and that I wouldn't get beyond page 50.
Of course on a Kindle you don't have page numbers, because you can choose how large you want the pages to be. My free download has some typos, and the layout is rather peculiar here and there. I don't deny the potential beauty of the book as a physical object (Alexandra Harris's book Romantic Moderns is published by Thames and Hudson on nice quality paper set in an attractive typeface, and I appreciated that all the time I was reading it). Free Proust on Kindle is not even a contender in the physical object stakes. But the narrative turns out to be unexpectedly gripping.
It has no business to be gripping. Virtually nothing happens in the first book, or part of a book (I am so completely unfamiliar with the saga and the edition I'm reading is such a muddle that I'm not at all sure what part of the multi-volume epic I'm on). Proust takes pages and pages to describe waking from sleep, and suffering from confusion until waking further and working out where he is. He remembers his great aunt. Going for walks takes more pages (or screenfuls). And yet I am gripped. Proust describes how his aunts will not say what they mean explicitly, but hedge around it with circumlocutions and are quite unaware that the person they are talking to hasn't grasped their meaning. Haven't we all met people like that? He explains how his relations form an idea of the sort of person the family friend Swann is, and then interpret and filter all future behaviour by and evidence about Swann to fit their existing concept of him. Grayson Perry made the same point in his show (one point at which associations started to buzz in my head). Calling it Cognitive Dissonance makes it sound more scientific, but Proust was already there.
Reading experiments inspired by a mixture of curiosity and a desire for self-improvement haven't always turned out so well. I tried to read Doctor Zhivago and found it, and him, dreadfully boring and irritating, and I've never made it to the end of War and Peace. Well done Amazon for the Kindle, and well done the volunteers who let me try Proust out for free, even if the typography is a bit dodgy.
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