The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. (Marcel Proust, on art)

Eric Satie, Gymnopedie - if you can play this while reading, it would make Proust (and yours truly) very happy :)

For weeks, a stubborn writer’s block stood between me and 20 Substack ‘drafts’ (for reasons evident in my other publication, Drawn from Life). Then something shifted. Before I tell you my new story, here is a Substack-style list - I wish I were saying this tongue-in-cheek! - of how I turned overwhelm to creative focus:

1. I seized the opportunity to revive the ‘creative spark’ by joining a couple of writing circles:

   Beth Kempton
   ’s SoulCircle (see her site, ‘Do What You Love’ for virtual workshops, many self-paced) and Julie Bebis’ Writers’ Hour, an opportunity to connect and … just write!

2. I filled the ‘empty’ weeks with Note bursts to stay connected (and discovered that that while notes keep the creativity fire alive, they don’t necessarily lead anywhere).

3. I begun inspecting my Substack from ground zero, to give it a polish. This, by the way, came with a brick wall of its own, as I dreaded what I might find there. It will take a while, but at least I’ve started.

4. All of the above lead to the wild idea of a series of ‘Meta-Stacks’ to keep up writing momentum until I’m back in the right zone for those festering drafts. This is the first one:

Much to my delight, re-reading my first ever Substack, I spotted an object quietly nested inside it, waiting to star in a story of its own:

The Scraps that Make Us reflects on ‘narratives of self’ we can construct by assembling memory triggers. Its argument was precipitated by a bunch of junk I’d saved from recent travels. Amongst venue entry tickets, postcards and shards of coloured glass, there was a tiny sliver of pale yellow wall - the epitome of my surely absurd hoarding. Re-reading that post with the objectivity of hindsight instantly reminded me of a reference to an (apparently iconic!) piece of yellow wall from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I followed the reference (itself spotted in Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap1, a book I recently recommended in Notes), back to its Proustian origin:

The character Bergotte, an ailing writer approaching the end of his life, reads the review of a Dutch art exhibition in Paris. The reviewer mentions a certain detail in a painting Bergotte ‘adored’, and ‘thought he knew perfectly’: Vermeer’s ‘View of Delft’, deemed by Proust himself as the most beautiful painting in the world. The detail celebrated is ‘a little patch of yellow wall’ (a detail Bergotte cannot in fact recall), so skilfully painted that: ‘it was, if one looked at it in isolation, like a precious work of Chinese art, of an entirely self-sufficient beauty’.2

For Bergotte this becomes a seminal moment - the final of his earthly life. Fuelled by enthusiasm, he pulls himself together to visit the exhibition. Standing before Vermeer’s painting, dizzy and unwell, Bergotte:

‘fixed his gaze, as a child does upon a yellow butterfly he wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. "That is how I ought to have written," he said to himself. "My last books are too dry, I should have applied several layers of colour, made my sentences precious in themselves, like that little patch of yellow wall."'

With the predictable, but forgivable, bathos of poetic irony, he breathes his last and collapses in front of ‘View of Delft’.

I simplify here, but Bergotte’s epiphany - somewhat tragically prophetic of Proust’s own final dialogue with art- leads to narratorial weighing of the drive for success vs a life well lived, across time. Ever the philosopher and master of writerly nuance, Proust doesn't offer a straightforward argument and stops just short of judgement. Having dwelled on the point of living this one and only life to the full instead of sacrificing it on the altar of professional success, Proust then satirises Bergotte’s legacy:

‘…the idea that Bergotte was not dead forever is not at all implausible.

They buried him, but all the night before his funeral, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, set out in threes, kept watch like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection’.

There’s an awful lot happening here - from the narrator’s ambiguous tone, at once touching and humorous as it damns the futility of it all, to the implicit reminder that a life dedicated to one’s legacy, even aside from public success (in this case of a creative kind), is actually a life well-lived.

Before writing this post, I was ignorant of the extent to which critics have been fascinated by Proust’s ‘petit pan de mur jaune’, vying to identify exactly which little bit of yellow wall he is exploiting. If you look at Vermeer’s painting closely, as the authors of this site have tried, the quest appears akin to a wild goose chase, in which Proust has the last laugh (very different from his precise, iconic use of a madeleine as memory trigger capable of reversing the decay of time3).

Proust was fascinated by contemporary studies of emotional, or ‘involuntary’ memory - the beating heart of his masterpiece: memory as life-affirming force that counteracts the inexorable movement of the universe, which includes our inner world, towards its own extinction.

To me, Proust’s playful biographical reference to the ‘petit pan du mur jaune’ is akin to Tom Stoppard’s maddening use of Fermat’s Last Theorem4 in Arcadia, a masterpiece of British theatre, where 13 year old Thomasina Coverley, 18th century maths prodigy (and Stoppard’s cheeky namesake), remarks to her tutor that ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem was a ‘joke to drive you all mad’. Like Proust with his yellow bit of wall (therefore art), Stoppard empowers the theorem (therefore mathematics) with a dramatic and symbolic power that links characters, life and art, across time. The spectacle of Thomasina's emboldened mathematical exploration becomes riveting for the audience (yes, Stoppard makes maths exciting!), especially as it leads to her discovery of a ‘new geometry based on iteration’. Through Thomasina’s genius, Stoppard pays homage to Ada Lovelace (‘mother of algorithm’ - take that, AI nerds!), Sophie Germain and other female mathematicians buried ‘in lost time’. Thomasina discovers a way to model nature through maths, a ‘new geometry’ that uses iteration to analyse irregular patterns. Ahead of her time, she astutely observes that ‘If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell.’

Like all pre-19th century mathematicians, Thomasina’s genius was stunted by the limitations of pencil and paper. She had the vision, but without the necessary material context, she couldn’t reach the proof of what we now know as fractals, chaos theory and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This technical limitation was a problem of humanity eventually resolved by Ada Lovelace through her real-life breakthrough in algorithm and computation. Sometimes when I teach this play I invite in a Maths teacher so my students can witness the complex graphs that result from inputting equations like Thomasina’s into a calculator.

Without spoiling the extraordinary plot of Arcadia (an engrossing and entertaining read if you can’t locate a production): by the end of this play in which past and present waltz in vertiginous quest for the meaning of human endeavour through time, pencil and paper re-enter the stage: this time, with the perfectly pitched bathos of life turned art (and mathematics).

Like Proust, Stoppard is also a master of nuance, ingenuity, wit and surprise, except he makes us laugh out a bit louder, even as we cry at the behaviour and demise of his characters. And also at existential futility, at the magnificent, often foolhardy, human capacity for discovery; at the precious - but not necessarily irreplaceable - legacy of curious, creative thinking: ‘it is wanting to know that makes us matter’, Thomasina’s tutor tells her. Consolatory, Stoppard proposes that it’s not tragic if genial breakthroughs (like Thomasina’s) are lost to time, because someone else, somewhere else, will be certain to rediscover the same thing again: ‘we shed as we pick up… and what we let fall, will be picked up by those behind.’ (And if Stoppard’s wisdom and wit aren’t enough, what do you make of this cosmic coincidence: Arcadia premiered a year before Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s Last Theorem?)

Other than in mathematical quests, pencil and paper have never limited humans of any age, epoch or inclination. We marvel at draughtsmanship on display in museums, at quick pet portraits and everything in-between:

Look at us splashing out (or is it investing?) in bath crayons for toddlers or the apparently ‘best pencil in the world’, the Blackwing, used by writers and cartoonists from Steinbeck to Sondheim and Chuck Jones. (Oh yes, I have a couple too, in the more affordable revival by Stilo & Stile in Rome, the Blackwing Palomino, which offers a sensorial writing experience of the kind Proust would have adored, coming as close to the feel of fountain pen as a pencil might).

…And look at us still reading, writing and generally feeding off Proust’s words! For a comprehensive, elegant and thought-provoking exploration of the length to which his legacy can still nourish and entertain us, even without reading his oeuvre, read Alain de Botton, 'How Proust Can Change Your Life':

All this is to say I’m grateful for my own tiny piece of yellow wall:

• for its intrinsic value - back to human endeavour, the labour that conjured it into being; the physical and sensorial dimensions of memory it signifies, especially fascinating when complicated by the passing of time

• for its personal value - the journey on which it has taken me (and you, my reader) to this ‘here, now’, from the place where I found it on some ‘island of the day before’5, to which presumably I expected never to return.

In ‘The Art of Travel’, Alain de Botton momentarily dwells on the psychological enrichment that results from factual knowledge (which I extend to memories), garnered particularly through travel. He draws inspiration from Nietzsche’s 1873 essay ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, which proposes that the real challenge of collecting facts is ‘to enhance life’, by contrast to academic or scientific fact-collecting for ‘sterile’ knowledge (although I am yet to hear of an expert not passionate about their field of inquiry and thus lacking a personalised stream of psychological enrichment! Also, is knowledge ever sterile?)

Surprise and wonder are vital to the experience of a life well lived. As two of Stoppard’s young male characters unknowingly concur across their temporal divide, ‘when we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.’ This is why the legacy of writers, artists, actors, scientists, other creatives and academics, will always be of value. All the more so when at the cost of their own experience of, or chance at, a life well lived.

On the night before he died, in a moment of meta-inspiration that harked back to fictional Bergotte’s own demise, Proust allegedly6 dictated his final sentence, to his secretary, carer and housekeeper, Céleste Albaret:

“There is a Chinese patience in Vermeer’s craft.”

A patience that persists, too, in Proust’s own craft: bedridden for the final years of his life, he must have found life-enhancing solace in crafting his meticulous, often very witty, if painfully drawn (and drawn out) five volume novel which we struggle to read cover to cover, but which continues to inform, comfort and inspire our understanding of the vicissitudes and complex beauty of human life.

It’s unlikely that Proust had in mind the astonishing Chinese art of painting and carving into rice grain when he referred to Vermeer’s patient, meticulous craft. But that’s what comes to mind when I think of his own wielding of the writerly brush as he conjures for us an instance of his inner universe: the sheer expanse of it, estimated at 1,267,069 words, every single one of them in ‘search of lost time’.

While during his lifetime Proust was seen by many as a hypochondriac, modern medicine established from his symptoms that ‘he was not only genuinely ill but far sicker than even he believed, most likely suffering from the vascular subtype of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome’. A kind of diagnostic error ‘clinicians still routinely make today, shedding light on the plight of patients with rare illnesses.’ (National Library of Medicine)

I think of other men and women, known or unknown to us7, who, under duress of illness in bedrooms anchored by earthly time, also experienced their ‘doors of perception cleansed’, also allowed in visions of ‘the world in a grain of sand’, of ‘eternity in an hour’8 . I think of life-enhancing dreams, the private, quiet ones, and those painted out loud in words or numbers, images or musical notes, for our delight.

'If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite'     
        (from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
------
To see a World in a Grain of Sand, 
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, 
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, 
And Eternity in an hour.  
        (from Auguries of Innocence)'