or dinosaurs
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.