Proust || The Madeleine Scene

In Search of Lost Time has a famous episode where the narrator’s mother dips a madeleine cookie in her tea and gives it to the narrator to eat. Yep.

I reached the madeleine scene quite early on. It surprised me. Not the scene, but that such a famous scene is so early in the book. The scene itself is simple and rather dull, and after I read it I didn’t have any idea why it was so famous.

So I googled it. This essay, To Express It Is To Explain It (somehow subscriber-only content now, but I was able to read it just fine earlier by finding it first through Google), gives an enlightening explanation about Proust’s philosophy as a whole, and I now consider it required reading. In a nutshell:

• If someone feels a mysterious attraction to a person or object, the aren’t attracted to the object itself, but rather to the feeling that the object inspired inside of them.
• The reason why the object inspired the feeling is because it has a sign encoded in it that only the person who feels the attraction can understand.
• In order to decode the sign, the person needs to explore his feelings about it through art.
• The process of “translating” the sign, or making art, allows the artist to re-live the initial experience but with an added bonus: seeing what was important about it and seeing it for what it really is (in relation to the artist, at least).
• The result of creating art about your own particular experience with something is a contribution to the world that you alone can give. If you don’t decode the sign, with your unique set of memories and associations, then the universe misses out on the ability to see things in a new perspective—yours.

This is why even suffering is beneficial. Suffering is rich with signs, and when those signs are explained, the end result is beautiful.

I feel inspired and encouraged when I think about that. The thought makes everything feel special, it turns everyone into an artist bursting with creativity, and turns mundanity into a portal of magical communication. It brings purpose to life.

Besides this revelation, Proust’s philosophy is utterly modern. Big Magic, Daring Greatly, Wreck This Journal, basically everything by Miranda July; aren’t these books encouraging us to see the world through this lens?

So, readers, I took on a lot more with this project than I had originally anticipated. My worldview has shifted so much after just a couple weeks. I believe that creative self-expression is incredibly important for mental health, for being able to organize your thoughts and communicating more effectively with others, for processing and understanding, for preventing feelings from rotting inside of your mid-conscious. Proust absolutely solidified this belief. With belief comes the responsibility of walking the talk. So I suppose that means it’s time to clean up my desk and take out my watercolor supplies.

The Proust Questionnaire

Before I actually start reading In Search of Lost Time, I thought it would be fun to do a Proustylicious activity: answering the Proust Questionnaire about myself! I got this questionnaire from this blog, but it’s derived from the magazine Vanity Fair (which interviews famous people with it). Vanity Fair got the basis of the questions from two separate questionnaires that Proust completed, but he actually didn’t create them. He just made them famous.


What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Living without worry or fear.

What is your greatest fear?
Seeing loved ones too depressed to live with joy.

What I'm Reading in 2016

I like lists because I like collections. I like collections because they bring order to the world, draw connections between things you might not of realized before, help you remember things, and they look pretty. I have countless lists of books saved in my bookmarks list, random word docs, and journals. I really do want to read them all, and Goodreads community lists are a very dangerous area for me.

I had a goal of reading all the Man Booker Prize winners, and I was making progress on it before the prize was opened up to be international. Now that it’s international, I’m less interested… what’s the special connecting theme about that collection?

I watched a TED Talk by Ann Morgan about her year of reading a book from every country in the world. And though for the past year I have been thinking about intentionally choosing books that were written a diversity of authors, her project and subsequent list was very inspiring.

I also became interested in reading the books on Wikipedia’s list of banned books. This list is inherently diverse because it includes authors from around the world, many of them writing from a minority’s perspective, and many of them expose political or religious abuses. Yes, some of the books really are hate speech or similarly unhelpful to the world, but that’s the nature of the collection. I think I want to stretch it out and read one book a month, starting this year.

Take a look at the following list of books or films and try to guess what they have in common.

• Monty Python’s Flying Circus
• 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
• A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
• Little Miss Sunshine
• On the Road (2012 film)
• Vanity Fair (magazine)

They all make Proust references! Proust references flourish, as many a smug article comments, but it makes me wonder: Have all of these people who casually throw around the word Proust actually read In Search of Lost Time in its entirety? Do I know anyone in real life who has read it? Will I understand many other books better if I read it?

I’m guessing the answers are: No, no, and yes.

But the fact that so many books who reference Proust have stayed with me makes me think that I need to push past my fear of not understanding big books (2015 was a year of conquering that fear! What with Anna Karenina and The Fountainhead) and give him a solid try.

It takes about 60 pages per week to read the whole of In Search of Lost Time in a year, which really is not much for me. I’ve also read that he makes a ton of references to visual art and music, so I want to Google that sort of thing while I’m reading. I’d like to give updates throughout the year on this blog: reflections, pop culture stuff, anything interesting that turns up in the course of my reading and internetting. I promise nothing too dense or scholarly, but I am still a nerd at heart.

Proust, banned books, and the Bible will be my 2016. So, my blog's tagline of "snippy reviews of mostly YA lit" is deff going to have to go. Onward!

2015 Year in Review

So, it’s been awhile since my last post. Here’s what I’ve been up to:

Running. A lot more. I bought a gym membership because running is just plain hard to do on a regular basis if you don’t have a car in São Paulo. A gym has given me access to physical safety, controlled temperature, weights, and convenience. So worth it for my overall mental health and well-being. I plan to run a half marathon in 2016.

Proofreading. I’m taking a course, practicing, and studying. I want to transition some of my teaching hours into proofreading hours.

Studying Portuguese. No news here, I still suck at it.

Reading. I have been reading! But mostly books that I didn’t feel like writing book reviews for—either they were nonfiction, or audio (it’s harder for me to write reviews of audiobooks because I have a poor memory), or classics which don’t need another introduction.

Now that I feel like I sufficiently excused myself from blogging regularly, I'll progress on to the purpose of this particular post—doing a bookish recap of 2015!


My goal is always to read 52 books in a year, but I never make it. I don’t beat myself up over not reaching my goal, but I know that if I didn’t set any goal I would read half as much as I could. In 2015 I read 48 books. Many of these were graphic novels. Many of these were tomes. I am satisfied with how much I read.

I had another goal this year, which was to get over my prejudice towards self-published books. Honestly, I still have a prejudice when I think about buying self pubs, but this year I was so delightfully surprised by the level of quality in the books that I did read. Seriously impressed.

And finally, do you remember that I was casually doing the Pop Sugar Reading Challenge? Neither did I. But I got most of the categories without intentionally trying.

I changed the focus of my blog a lot in the past year. I was experimenting with different things, entertaining myself, and well, it’s my blog and I can do what I want. I did a lot of stuff with the book-blogging community in the first half of the year, grabbed a lot of advanced review copies from Netgalley, and honestly had fun. I got burnt out on that and decided to use my blog as a way to improve my own writing about books—insightful critiques, drawing parallels to other books or things out and about in the world, honing in on one specific problem I had with a book and trying to correct it. The latter sort of post naturally comes less frequently than the former.

As I’m writing this post and scrolling back through my blog, I’m proud that I kept this record this year. I’m so happy that I included book photos that I took myself (I’m going to continue doing that, and not be so lazy with it in the future). I am glad that I wrote all different types of posts. This blog is certainly more flavorful than my Goodreads list alone, and a year of book blogging has encouraged me to keep with it in 2016.

Blessed new year, friends!

1. Piteco: Ingá by Shiko
2. Landline by Rainbow Rowell 
3. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
4. City of Lies by Ramita Namai
5. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
6. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
7. The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft
8. Astronauta: Singularidade by Danilo Beyruth
9. Bidu: Caminhos by Eduardo Damesceno
10. Orhan's Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian
11. Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Greene and David Leviathon
12. A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
13. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami 
14. A Bride's Story, Vol 1 by Kaoru Mori
15. Belzhar by Meg Wolitzer
16. The Calling by James Frey
17. A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab
18. Akira (complete series of 6 volumes) by Otomo Katsuhiro 
19. The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma
20. Cleo by Lucy Coats 
21. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
22. Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare
23. Salad Anniversary by Machi Tawara
24. Wayward, Vol 1 by Jim Stub
25. Low, Vol 1 by Rick Remender
26. Fragile Bones by Lorna Schultz Nicholson
27. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy 
28. The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
29. Neverland by Shari Arnold
30. Penadinho: Vida by Paulo Crumbim
31. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
32. Welcome to My Country by Lauren Slater
33. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury 
34. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
35. The Books of Magic by Neil Gaiman
36. So Long, Insecurity by Beth Moore
37. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
38. What's So Amazing About Grace? by Philip Yancey
39. Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
40. The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood
41. A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches by Martin Luther King Jr.
42. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
43. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen 

*Bold means the book impacted me in a significant way.

Grace and 'The Goldfinch'

I am two years late to The Goldfinch’s party, but I am not so insecure as to let that bother me. Donna Tartt’s tome still takes up a good amount of real estate in bookstores and libraries, and for good reason—the novel really is what many critics call a modern-day Dickensian tale.

A photo posted by Polly Fern © (@pollyfern) on Sep 1, 2015 at 8:40am PDT

In short, the protagonist Theo Decker gives an account of how he came into possession of The Goldfinch, a small painting by Dutch Golden Age artist Carel Fabritius, and how that possession turned into a lifelong obsession which drove him to extraordinary adventures and contemplations of the role of fate. It’s basically Great Expectations with drugs, PTSD, and fine art.

A photo posted by Polly Fern © (@pollyfern) on Oct 14, 2015 at 12:52am PDT

Although I did enjoy the story despite it having many passages filled with my pet-peeves— descriptions of dreams, drug-induced hallucinations, and drunken misadventures—the character development is what made this story great.

I fell in love with all of the characters to the point where I could overlook their flaws (their human flaws, not flaws in the writing), even in Theo’s closest pal Boris, who always shows up with bad decisions in his pockets. The characters are so well thought out that they effortlessly carry themselves through the nearly 800 pages. They lean a little towards the romanticized, this is being told through Leo’s foggy worldview remember, but never to the point that I stopped believing they could be real people.

A photo posted by Polly Fern © (@pollyfern) on Aug 16, 2015 at 5:50am PDT

When reading a book review, I often think “blah blah okay character development is nice” and don’t give it the importance that I should. I should know myself better: I don’t like plot-driven stories, and I detest when it is obvious that the author doesn’t actually know how real people in the real world act. Give me characters or give me a blank notebook, I’ll write my own story thankyouverymuch. The reason why I am able to read and enjoy stories from so many different genres is testimony to this. Characters, no matter how different their personality is from my own, give me an idea as to how I would react in their situation and how to show grace to real people like them.

A photo posted by Polly Fern © (@pollyfern) on Aug 3, 2015 at 5:47am PDT

The Goldfinch is not a perfect book. It shows human depravity, and what’s worse, at the end it preaches that perhaps sinning isn’t really anyone’s fault and we should just focus on the good things that happen.

So, why not stop then? I said.

Why should I?

Do I really have to say why?

Yeah, but what if I don’t feel like it?

If you can stop, why wouldn’t you?

Live by the sword, die by the sword, said Boris briskly, hitting the button on his very professional-looking medical tourniquet with his chin as he was pushing up his sleeve.

And as terrible as this is, I get it. We can’t choose what we want and don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us. We can’t escape who we are.

I get the feeling that The Goldfinch embodies the mainstream beliefs in our culture now (it did get the Pulitzer, after all), and that Theo is a representation of us Millennials. That our duty in life is to drift along, to try to make good decisions but shouldn’t be blamed if we end up making bad ones, and if two wrongs make a right…. then so be it. I completely disagree with this premise. So does the ancient wisdom written by Saint Paul:

All that passing laws against sin did was produce more lawbreakers. But sin didn’t, and doesn’t, have a chance in competition with the aggressive forgiveness we call grace. When it’s sin versus grace, grace wins hands down. All sin can do is threaten us with death, and that’s the end of it.

Grace, because God is putting everything together again through the Messiah, invites us into life—a life that goes on and on and on, world without end. So what do we do? Keep on sinning so God can keep on forgiving? I should hope not! …

As long as you did what you felt like doing, ignoring God, you didn’t have to bother with right thinking or right living, or right anything for that matter. But do you call that a free life? What did you get out of it? Nothing you’re proud of now. Where did it get you? A dead end. (Romans 6, The Message)  

We are not slaves to fate. We do not have to do something bad to force karma to tip the balance of the scales in the world and create something good. On the contrary, I think we have to work all the harder to not only correct wrongs, but prevent them in the first place. And when our humanity fails us, which it will, we have grace to catch our fall.

Even though I think the message of the book is decidedly false, I would absolutely recommend this book. For,

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

- Aristotle

A photo posted by Polly Fern © (@pollyfern) on Aug 6, 2015 at 2:18am PDT