After our conversations about our attitudes towards reading in class on Thursday, I was definitely more intentional and considerate about my reading patterns and behavior while I read Combray. In my contemplative state during my reading, I actually picked up on synchronicity between the conversations we had in class and the author’s attitudes towards reading and theatre. In this story, Marcel seems to find comfort from reality in literature and theatre, which he discusses passionately several times, unlike several of us who suggested that reading is an anxiety-inducing process sometimes. This was interesting to me since we had just discussed our own attitudes towards reading and I suppose it made me more aware and considerate of reading as an active practice that has different meanings and purposes for everyone.

The video about this reading discussed the story as a piece of reflection and recollection and prompted the question about the purpose of this style of writing. The memorial elements of this story reflect an important purpose of literature as a form of testimony. A motif of illness, death, and anxiety recurs in this story, and to me, it seems to act as an indication of the purpose of this story as a piece of testimony. The conscientiousness of death and illness to me seems to work as a reminder to the reader that while art is immortal, we are not, yet through art Proust immortalizes his experiences. Another motif that I noticed was the sky, but I wasn’t sure what to make of it, does anyone have their own interpretation of what it might represent?

The detailed descriptions of architecture seem to additionally hold significance. Proust takes care to describe windows, cathedrals, and significant buildings, things that don’t seem like important details that we would keep in our long-term memory, leading me to consider what his intentions may have been with this. To me, it seems that he is attempting to highlight our insignificance as individuals and reinforce the power of art, however, that interpretation seems to go against the individualist element of modernism that views us as important and interesting actors in society, so maybe I’m wrong.

Overall, this is the message I took away from the story; while our memories are fragmented, unreliable, and sometimes unsettling, there is comfort, reliability, and escape in art. For example, reading about Proust’s childhood attachments with his parents it is evident that this was a confusing and arguably traumatic time for him, but reading provided him with the opportunity to escape this difficult reality, and writing his own literature also worked to help him to retrospectively deal with these traumas. Overall, this reading reinforced our discussions on Thursday about the purpose of literature and reading and it was interesting to see our thoughts reflected in this story.