Work from Memory: In Response to in Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Dan Beachy-Quick and Matthew Goulish set up a room in Marcel Proust's house of memory in which poetry and prose could enact a dialogue, structured as a parallel weave, on several subjects from Proust's novel, as a way of extending their experience of reading. They selected three aspects or elements from Proust's work and wrote in response to them, on alternating pages that also responded to what the other had written. These were the first book, Swann's Way; the in/famous "long sentence" in Sodom and Gomorrah; and the idea/concept of captivity as marked in the moment in The Captive when the narrator watches Albertine as she sleeps. The result, on face-to-face pages, asks the reader to figure out what to privilege in the reading, a work that requires both memory and audacity (how return, how move forward, to read everything, or to privilege one form over another). "I will recall passages from this book like the stanzas of songs I heard on the radio during my childhood, word for word at the most unexpected times. Or, I will forget the words of this book entirely only to experience what the book describesall of my faculties working together simultaneously unaware that they are each part of a cosmos. Let us navigate this multi-verse by appending the names of favorite authors to newly discovered constellations. Let us imagine that each book we've read is the same book, one read to us long ago by a beloved caretaker who satisfied our every need before we could recite the alphabet. This book."Gregg Bordowitz