Nests

I’ve been revisiting Proust. I read A la recherche du temps perdu in 2020; I started on 1st January with the aim of reading ten pages a day in French and completing it by the end of the year. I finished after 361 days but admit there were times later in the novel when the Narrator (let’s call him Marcel) was so insufferable and his jealousy so delusional, that I read some parts in English, otherwise I would have been totally catatonic. But, like the little girl with the little curl right in the middle of her forehead, when he is good he is very, very good. So much so that despite some of the horrors of La Prisonnière and Albertine disparue, I keep coming back to his incredible vision of the world, his phenomenal descriptions, his language, his modernity and his humour (Proust is very funny), all of which have lodged in my mind.

It’s well known that Proust spent a lot of time in his bed, as does Marcel in the novel. What’s not so well known (maybe I should say ‘discussed’) is that Proust is also one of the world’s greatest list-writers. The novel is packed with wonderful lists: of stations on an imaginary railway journey, arguments for pink being the best colour, domestic smells, similes for hair, reasons why a lift-boy might not talk to you. One of my favourite lists comes early in the first volume when Marcel explains the various materials - mille petits détails inutiles/a thousand useless details - he uses to weave his ‘nid’, or bed-nest:

• un coin de l’oreiller/a corner of the pillow

• le haut des couvertures/the top of the blankets

• un bout de châle/a piece of shawl

• le bord du lit/the edge of the bed

• un numero des Débats roses/a copy of the Débats roses*

et,

• on finit par cimenter ensemble selon la technique des oiseaux en y s’appuyant indéfiniment/one finishes by bringing it all together as birds do, by constantly pressing on it

I just love this, and see parallels in my own domesticity. It amuses me that when I get up and walk away from my spot on the settee, I can see exactly where I have been and what I’ve been doing. In fact, it looks just like an empty nest. A stuffed, quilted, knitted, cushioned nest, strewn or lined with all the things I have surrounded myself with: books, balls of yarn, newspapers, knitting, scissors, laptop, papers, pens, my glasses, diaries, mugs, stitch markers, more books.

Last year I was given the beautiful book on Nests by Susan Ogilvy which contains a collection of her brilliantly detailed watercolour paintings of nests. The differences between very neat nest-builders and apparently very slapdash birds make me laugh, and it’s made me look much more closely at nests. We often see moorhens’ nests on Hobson’s Conduit which look like tiny floating bonfires or Huckleberry Finn’s raft (Susan Ogilvy describes them as ‘scanty platforms’), yet they are still there long after the ducklings have paddled off. I am also fascinated by the high-up nests full of gregarious, noisy rooks in the rookery which can be observed from the platform at Ely station, and I watched soothing videos of weaver birds building their nests with incredible skill when I was ill with Covid.

[house sparrow’s nest by Susan Ogilvy]

But if I had to choose a nest to compare my own with, it would be the house sparrow, all feathery, soft, cosy, comfy, and a bit of a tip.

[Henri Matisse]

[Mark Twain]

All of this is a preamble to saying that, like Proust - and Matisse and Twain - I could probably spend far too much time indoors and, if not actually in bed, at least in my house-nest. I’ve spent more than thirty years working from home, and the pandemic restrictions and lockdowns made it all too easy to take this further. I am fascinated by the long-term effects of Covid on habit (l’habitude has a lot to answer for according to Proust, and he argues his case convincingly), and I think it is taking longer than expected for many people to reconnect fully with the world after such a psychologically strange and sad time of disconnect and loss.

[2.5 hours, 1 pot, 1 spectacular mess]

But now it’s time to get out more. I’m giving talks on stained glass after several years of being unable to get into churches and thus putting the subject to one side, joining interest groups, spending time at Kettle’s Yard, trying out extremely splattery pottery despite preferring dry crafts, and signing up for Cambridge Open Studios (‘studio’ being something of an overstatement in my case).

I’m also putting myself beyond my own world by writing this newsletter which is quite a surprise as I truly thought the written word had deserted me. It’s a privilege to go directly into so many people’s in-boxes on a Sunday morning - it feels quite different to a publishing a blog which readers had to find - so thank you for subscribing.

Bon dimanche!

*a moderately liberal evening newspaper, printed in Paris on pink paper, introduced in 1893 by the morning Journal des débats (1789-1944). But the title is lost in English translations; one version says it’s a ‘copy of an evening paper’ which Marcel reads in bed, another says a ‘children’s paper’. It’s a tiny but significant omission, given the young Marcel’s literary precociousness, his predilection for pink, and the fact that real newspapers, which give important historical and social context eg the Dreyfus Affair, abound in the work. It makes me wonder how much more is lost over the course of the trillion pages of his search.