My page today on Proust

Reading pencil in hand, he pauses long enough to underline the words that sketch a scene of light across the page, an image transferred letter by letter from the impression of another mind. It is a small moment; it is hardly worth noticing. It is not the moment of magical madeleines dipped in tea that creates a theory of memory, about which Merrill would later quip in his memoir A Different Person, that it revealed a similarity between Jesus Christ and Proust: “Like Proust he [Jesus] had dipped, with miraculous consequences, a cookie into a restorative cup” (Collected Prose 633). Nor was this small textual moment equivalent to when Merrill paused in reading Remembrance of Things Past to note in the margin: “metaphor of death—grandmother’s eyes shooting stars” (II.34). Instead, what strikes James Merrill in reading this passage by Proust is the detail of this particular day’s light: “the grey day stitched its shimmering needlework of light and shade. . . .” (II.56). It is the change of light, small and insignificant to any other reader, that catches his eye.

Of course, Merrill at that moment is reading for a purpose. He is writing his college thesis on Proust and Impressionism, so he notices the subtle descriptions of light as they alter upon the page. He writes earlier in the margin of volume two: “matter becomes personality, personality becomes matter thus the two disparate topics are bound together. A law of impressionism, illusion, one thing in terms of another” (II.105). While Merrill may have been surveying Proust’s words in terms of their Impressionistic value, his attention and sensitivity to light and changes of light were a theme long before his reading In Search of Lost Time and long after.