I have been so comically altered by this book.

If you’ve seen me in the last 3 years there’s a good chance that I’ve had a pastel-colored volume that makes up In Search of Lost Time in my hand or in a bag with me or holding up my coffee as I type away at work. I’ve read this book all around the world, tracing paths in the places that I’ve taken it. And, as a result, the book has traced paths through me. In my life this book has become the bathing Nereids of Habit and Art and Memory. Just so, my interactions with it have been transmuted into Time itself. Over 10% of the Time that’s made up my life, to be specific.

But of course this book paints the idea, in its subtle perfect manner, that time is never just the linear tick of the clock. Time is a big strange homunculus that we bend and morph to our hearts, folding it in on itself until the parts reflect the whole and the area is impossible to calculate. And at the center of this Hermetic panoply of people and moments and love we find ourselves swimming through, we realize that there is a book. There is a book that only we can write and that is doomed to be a mirror for anyone who reads it. In the time that I’ve read the book that was Marcel Proust I’ve been slowly exposed to the idea that everyone has such a book.

And isn’t that a revelation that fundamentally alters the way you see the world? How can you be passive in your life when you know that everything you see, everything you think, everything you feel, and especially everything you smell, is noted down in the ledger that you can be forced to read by something as simple as the taste of a cookie dipped in tea? That passive Habit is such an integral part of the art that flows through existence. Without it there could be no moments of beauty. There would be no contrast that makes them shine like supernovae against the backdrop of our habitual night sky.

I think I can illustrate what I mean with a somewhat self-indulgent metaphor, if it can be permitted. A couple of years ago I visited a set of Roman ruins at the bottom of a spiral staircase in the city of Barcelona. Worn down 2,000 year old streets and sewers of a Roman colony run underneath a plexiglass and steel walkway that lets visitors walk through the whole archeology site. There are big cracked limestone half orbs that used to hold great quantities of wine. There are divots in the ground from where pickaxes struck the marble so many years ago. And running along the wall that delineates the old city limits there are two parallel lines cut into the rock. The lines in the rock formed over years and years and years from a farmer using the exact same path to bring wooden wagons full of his trade into the city. From pure persistence and repetition and habit he sliced through the very rock on which his city was founded using only a set of wooden wagon wheels. When I saw those parallel lines I was strangely saddened. Terrified, even.

How can a person be reduced to nothing more than a couple of lines in the world? What a colossal monument to a life, completely wasted. As I thought back on the ruts I couldn’t help but trace out their metaphor into my life. How much of my own life was scaffolded by nothing more than a set of shabby wagon wheels treading the same path day in and day out? Walking the path to the same damn coffee shop, writing code at the same damn job, riding the train shuttling along the same damn track day after day after day. And not even a twin pair of ruts to show for it.

That was years ago now. And in the intervening time I’ve really been reading exactly one book. It’s the same book I brought with me to Spain and read in the cafe above those ruins. It’s infected me and now I’m doomed to share its romantic view of Time and Habit and Art. Now I let the smell of lavender in a cocktail take me back to my childhood backyard where my Mom had an herb garden that I would wander as a toddler. I let the sound of a song whining out from a tinny speaker walk along the lonely little path from the Blue Line El stop with me as an awkward high schooler. I stop as I walk back from the coffee shop and watch the sun reflect off of the bridge to Staten Island and the ships coming in at Red Hook and the filthy bubbling canal in Gowanus, all the way up to the Self that has formed from the overlay of all these moments. I get swept to a universe that Proust has shown me: the universe of Time.

Now I don’t just think that farmer is the rut that his habits left behind in the world. I think he’s the tune that he whistled on his way to the market. I think he’s the snug comforting fit of a hat that he wore, day after day. I think he’s the momentary half-smiling pause as he watches the beauty of a sunrise over the Mediterranean, tying his gaze to some schmuck in Brooklyn 2,000 years later who can’t think of how to possibly say everything he wants about some silly book that’s forever changed his silly life.

mickey

mickey

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