Literary Summits

Usually I think of winter as being quieter than the other seasons.

I just got a new hearing aid, so I’ve been noticing sound this winter. Christmas tunes, snow plows at night, and all kinds of lesser sounds – dog barks, cell phone ringtones, even paper rustling – these are filtering into my head with newly amplified intensity.

Today on the bus I finally finished “Swann in Love,” the middle section of Swann’s Way (Vol.1 of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time). Near the end of this section, the glum Swann is at a party trying to forget his lost love, Odette. Out of the blue, the salon musicians start playing a sonata that Swann had associated with the beginning of his relationship with Odette.

In that moment, his past love “assumed the disguise of this body of sound” and he was lifted up. “He no longer felt exiled and alone…” (361).

Proust goes on for the next three pages, working the metaphor from every angle. My favorite observation comes a page later, when he tries to describe the indescribable – to put music into words and explain the logic behind music’s emotional appeal:

“Swann had regarded musical motifs as actual ideas, of another world, of another order, ideas veiled in shadows, unknown, impenetrable to the intelligence, but not for all that less perfectly distinct from one another . . . .

“He knew that . . . the field open to the musician is not a miserable scale of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard still almost unknown on which . . . separated by shadows thick and unexplored, a few of the million keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity which compose it, each as different from the others as one universe from another universe” (362-363).

Proust uses hundreds of words to get his point across, so sometimes it’s hard to follow what he’s getting at. But in some instances, like this one, he presents with clarity the jumbled thoughts that I never take the time to fully express.

The “immeasurable keyboard” of life – the life of sound – is huge. And the amazing world that comes to us through our ears is a gift. As my brain works to recognize the new sounds delivered by this little device, I realize that there are a “million keys” of sounds that I haven’t heard in quite this way.

But it goes beyond the basic mechanics of hearing. The mystery of music is that it can convey so much without words – whether tenderness, passion, courage, serenity – all the universes of the human imagination.

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, the Creation myth starts with sound, not light. And creation is an unfolding song. I think Proust may have enjoyed that thought.