Marcel Proust’s noise fatigue

Philippe Soupault’s recollections of Marcel Proust are wonderful and explain a lot about the author.

At the time he was writing A la recherche du temps perdus, Proust was “terrified” by noise. (Soupault uses the word “terrified,” though that isn’t the right word.) When Proust would stay in a hotel, he would rent out five expensive rooms: one to live in, four to “contain” the silence. In the evening, at sunset, a rattan armchair would be placed on the hotel terrace for him. I imagine him approaching the chair, parasol in hand, circling it, getting a little closer with each pass. Then he would sit in the chair and watch the dusk settle over the roofs of this or that quaint seaside village. Behind him, the bellboys and other hotel staff would tiptoe around, communicating only with hand signals.

We understand that he needed silence (and probably the ritual) to sink into his remembrances of things past.

As Proust got older, he always spoke in a low voice and seemed permanently exhausted. Perhaps it was the prodigious work that had exhausted him, but one likes to think it was noise. Years of avoiding noise had given him a neurotic hypersensitivity, and now it taxed him greatly. In one recollection, Proust sends his driver to summon Soupault into his carriage. There, Proust hands Soupault a letter to express gratitude for the gift of some book. To avoid a brief verbal exchange he wrote a letter and then drove over to deliver it in person.

Also wonderful: the younger Proust had a habit of asking waiters very precise questions, such as, “What time of year, exactly, do the cherry trees bloom in the orchards of Cabourg. Not the apple trees, the cherry trees?” One likes to think that Proust has his methods for tapping into his lost memories. He knows that an unexpected but concrete detail could unlock new vistas.

Parlour games played by Napoleon during his final exile on St Helena

• Blind man’s bluff
• Billiards
• Chess
• Whist (at which he cheats)
• “Puss in the corner”
• Keep-away with Miss Betsy’s ball dress

As recorded by Betsy Balcombe in her charming memoir.

A few memoirists have noted that Napoleon detested gambling and yet cheated at cards. This seems like a paradox until you realise he just liked to see if he could get away with it. Lord Roseberry (the Earl of Primrose (!)) writes:

At all games he liked to cheat, flagrantly and undisguisedly, as a joke; but refused, of course, to take the money thus won, saying, with a laugh, “What simpletons you are. It is thus that young fellows of good family are ruined.”

It tickles me pink to imagine Napoleon playing board games.

His chess was reportedly quite mediocre. Horowitz called his style “lively if unconventional” (All About Chess, 1958). In fact, there is a (rarely played) chess opening named after him:

The Napoleon Opening is named after the French general and emperor Napoleon Bonaparte… The name came into use after mid-nineteenth century publications reported that he played this opening in an 1809 game which he lost to The Turk, a chess automaton. The name may also be a slighting reference to Napoleon’s empress, Josephine and her scandalous infidelities, hence Napoleon’s inability to keep his Queen at home.

His three recorded games can be found at chessgames.com. They’ve titled the above-mentioned match with the Mechanical Turk as “Napoleon Torn Apart,” which is a little unfair as eyewitnesses suggest Napoleon was deliberately testing how intelligent[^1] the “machine” was by breaking the rules of the game:

In a surprise move, Napoleon took the first turn instead of allowing the Turk to make the first move, as was usual… Shortly thereafter, Napoleon attempted an illegal move. Upon noticing the move, the Turk returned the piece to its original spot and continued the game. Napoleon attempted the illegal move a second time, and the Turk responded by removing the piece from the board entirely and taking its turn. Napoleon then attempted the move a third time, the Turk responding with a sweep of its arm, knocking all the pieces off the board. Napoleon was reportedly amused.

These days Napoleon is a bunch of board games.

[^1] I’m crediting Napoleon with being forward-thinking enough to understand intelligence as contemporary AI researchers now define it: the capacity of the machine to be flexible when faced with unexpected behaviours. In this case, when challenged by moves outside the narrow range of those permitted by the rules of chess.

Hyundai poem

When people are in the market for a car they say the most ridiculous things. My brother sent me a text message and I sent him back this poem.

My candidates for the “great” (eg. defining, emblematic) American novel

Apparently the American century is over! Let’s remember them through their fiction. These are my picks for the Great American Novel for the Great American Century:

• Pre-WWII: Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
• Post-WWII: Underworld by Don DeLillo

Wittgenstein, primary school teacher

Two pages of handwritten lesson plans from Wittgenstein’s brief career as a primary school teacher:

In the top left corner are some mathematic equations for solving:

$x + a = b$

$x a = b$

$8 x = 528$

$g x = 756$

$7 x = 1428$

$4 x = 1524$

Between WWI and the publication of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein was briefly a primary school teacher in the small Austrian villages Trattenbach, Hassbach, Puchberg and finally Otterthal. His feelings about the provincials seem to have vacillated between Tolstoyan romanticism and repulsion (“These people are not human at all but loathsome worms”).

Wittgenstein’s brief career as a schoolteacher ended when he lost patience with an 11-year old boy and clobbered him so hard that he fell unconscious. History remembers this as the Haidbauer incident.

ISIS, 1885

The Mahdi uprising of 1881-1899 was a Muslim revolt that captured Sudan from the British & Egyptians, and established a vast caliphate replete with strict Sharia law. The most dramatic moment was the 1885 fall of Khartoum and the murder of dashing British national hero General Charles Gordon.[^1]

Causes: Alan Moorehead’s reflections (in the White Nile) on the environmental causes of fanaticism are fascinating in the light of the recent (and distant) history of the Middle East:

Perhaps it is the very austerity of life in these arid wastes that predisposes the people to worship. Mecca lies only a short journey away across the Red Sea, and the Prophet Mohammed himself lived and received his inspirations in just such an environment as this. An immense silence possesses the surrounding desert. The heat is so great it stifles the appetite and induces a feeling of trance-like detachment in which monotony dissolves into a natural timelessness, visions take on the appearance of reality, and asceticism can become a religious object of itself. These are ideal circumstances for fanaticism, and a religious leader can arouse his followers with a devastating effect. All at once barriers are swept aside, revolt becomes a holy duty, and it can be a shocking and uprooting thing because it makes a sharp break with the apathy that has gone before. The long silence is broken, the vision is suddenly translated into action, and detachment is replaced by a fierce and violent concentration.[^2]

Of course, there were also assorted political circumstances. Sudan was huge, desperately poor, anarchic (endless tribal warfare) and perpetually being pillaged by Arab slave traders. (Some of these slave traders commanded small private armies, and traveled from village to village destroying and enslaving). In 1881, Sudan was a part of Ottoman Egypt but, due to the complicated politics of Egypt, it was administered by mostly British governors. The locals viewed the occupiers as corrupt (Egyptians) or infidels (British), and the administration had alienated the locals with frequent (and exasperated) resort to brutality as a means of controlling the constantly warring tribes.

The uprising: The demagogue of the day was Muhammad Ahmad ibn as Sayyid Abd Allah. Reportedly, he was a man of extraordinary charisma and magnetism who inspired fanatical reverence amongst his followers. “There was a strange splendour in his presence, an overwhelming passion in the torrent of his speech.” He was described by European prisoners as always wearing a pleasant smile and with a “mode of conversation that was exceptionally pleasant and sweet.”

Muhammad Ahmad declared himself to be the Mahdi, a prophesised redeemer of Islam who will rule briefly before the Day of Judgement. Then, in 1881, he raised the cry for a Jihad. Like a sandstorm, the cult of the Mahdi swept across the Sudan, capturing each of the administrative regions (Darfur, Equatoria) and each of the major administrative strongholds and towns, butchering or enslaving the inhabitants and executing any Europeans who wouldn’t convert to Islam. By May 1884, the Mahdi controlled a region the size of France, Spain and Germany combined. A modified version Sharia law was imposed and trivial offenses (eg smoking, drinking) were punished with amputation or death.

[^1] With infinite stiff-upper-lip, Gordon held out through a year-long siege. The tragedy took on an added poignancy when the British rescue force arrived only two days after the city was sacked & he was murdered.

[^2] There’s more good stuff: “It would seem there is little enough to thank God for in these appalling deserts, and yet the poorest and most wretched of the inhabitants will be seen throughout the day to prostrate themselves upon the sand with a simple concentrated fervour that is hardly known in the green delta of Egypt. No village lacks its minaret even if it be nothing more than a ramshackle scaffolding of poles, and the muezzin, calling the people to prayer, at once brings to a halt all sound and mvoement on the ground below. Here very precept of the Prophet, every injunction that governs the great fasts and feasts, appear to be observed to the letter.”