Done. And on my birthday, too.

Now I can go back and try to catch up on all those New Yorkers...

P.S., A few folks have asked whether they should try to tackle the same task. While I do not hold (pace Botton) that reading Proust will change your life, it is worthwhile. Whether or not it is worth "it" depends, of course, on you. However, I would _not_ recommend reading only volumes I and VII (sorry, Susan!). The middle bits are what make it tragic and funny and frustrating, etc.

And to anyone who gets there, I think the best bit was when Saint-Loup danced across tables and chairs and under electrical wires simply to fetch his friend a coat.

Vol. II, pg. 873:

Six down, one to go. Only 250 pages left.

Vol. II, pg. 738:

Another $0.10 word: objurgation.

A scolding or reprimand (etymologically, to take an action against someone at law).

Vol. II, pg. 684:

There is wickedness here. Not ickiness of the sort that most people fixate on -- I've read numerous accounts by others, describing scenes involving hatpins and rats, all of which I'm sure is quite revolting -- but really hard-core nastiness. Of the sort that I'm honestly surprised others _don't_ mention when they discuss these books. This is...well honestly I don't really know what to say about an allusion to child molestation.

Vol II, Pg. 675:

Five down, two to go.

As must surely everyone at this point, I was totally rooting for Albertine. You go, girl. Kick that bastard to the curb and get the hell out of dodge.

Vol II, Pg. 654:

It occurs to me to wonder whether or not Edna St. Vincent Millay really _did_ read Proust.

"Yes, what she saw before her eyes at that moment, what made her so feverishly anxious to leave, what she was so impatient to see again was that emptied apartment which I had once visited...a luxurious apartment, facing south, but so empty, so silent, that the sun appeared to have spread dust-sheets over the sofa, the armchairs of the room in which Albertine and Andree would ask the respectful caretaker, perhaps unsuspecting, perhaps an accomplice, to allow them to rest for a while. I could always see it now, empty, with a bed or a sofa, that room. ...I had never before given a thought to that apartment which now possessed for me a horrible beauty. The unknown element in the lives of other people is like that in nature, where each fresh scientific discovery merely reduces, but does not abolish. A jealous lover exasperates the woman with whom he is in love by depriving her of a thousand unimportant pleasures, but those pleasures which are the keystone of her life she conceals in a place where, in the moments in which he thinks that he is showing the most intelligent perspicacity and third parties are keeping him most closely informed, he never dreams of looking."

Compare E. St.V. M (Sonnet #23):

This door you might not open, and you did;

So enter now, and see for what slight thing

You are betrayed…. Here is no treasure hid,

No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring

The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain

For greed like yours, no writhings of distress,

But only what you see…. Look yet again—

An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.

Yet this alone out of my life I kept

Unto myself, lest any know me quite;

And you did so profane me when you crept

Unto the threshold of this room to-night

That I must never more behold your face.

This now is yours. I seek another place.

Vol. II, Pg. 519:

"And yet, my dear Charles ___, whom I used to know when I was still so young and you were nearing your grave, it is because he whom you must have regarded as a little fool has made you the hero of one of his volumes that people are beginning to speak of you again and that your name will perhaps live. If in Tissot's picture representing the balcony of the Rue Royale club, where you figure with Galliffet, Edmong Polignac and Saint-Maurice, people are always drawing attention to yourself, it is because they know that there are some traces of you in the character of Swann."

This is almost enough to make me want to find out who the ur-Swann was. Almost, but not quite. I do have 600 more pages to go, after all.

Vol. II, Pg. 378:

Four down, three to go.

For a couple of reasons -- but not the most obvious one -- "Cities of the Plain" (Sodome et Gomorrhe) is the most bizarrely fascinating of the novels so far. For one thing, it's the earliest, and among the most trenchant, critiques of patriarchy I've yet read. That a gay (avant la lettre) frenchman, writing in the 20's, could portray in precise and painful terms how the fundamental premise of marriage could be the utter extinguishing of a lesbian woman's agency is, well, worth turning the page to the next installment.

Vol. II, pg. 270:

"Oh! Thank you, Sir. If everybody had as kind a heart as you, there wouldn't be any poor people left. But, as my sister says, 'there will always have to be the poor so that now I'm rich I can s--t on them.' You'll pardon the expression. Good-night, Sir."

Who would've guessed that Proust would prefigure Davis and Moore's argument in "Some Principles of Stratification" by more than 20 years?

Vol. II, pg. 195:

It was enough to make Elstir, who had met Ski once, feel for him the profound repulsion that is inspired in us less by the people who are our exact opposite than by those who resemble us in what is least good, in whom are displaed our worst qualities, the faults of which we have cured ourselves, who irritate by reminding us of how we may have appeared to certain other people before we became what we now are."

Hoo, boy. Do I ever know how that feels. But I shan't name names.

Vol. II, pg. 150:

Another $0.10 word: edentulous.

Apparently it means toothless. Who knew?

Pg. 1141:

Three down, four to go!

Pg. 1080:

Of course, if he portrays women as simply snuff-boxes to be put into cabinets, the men are not always portrayed well:

"That Rachel was speaking to me about you, she told me that young Saint-Loup worshipped you, that he was fonder of you than he was of her," said Prince Von to me, devouring his food like an ogre as he spoke, his face scarlet, his teeth bared by his perpetual grin. "But in that case she must be jealous of me and hate me," said I." "Not at all, she told me all sorts of nice things about you. The Prince de Foix's mistress would perhaps be jealous if he preferred you to her. You don't understand? Come home with me, and I'll explain it all to you."

...But the bulging eyes in his course though handsome red face frightened me and I declined."

Um, yeah. Doesn't feel quite so nice to be regarded as a snuff-box to be, um, snuffled up by an ill-mannered ogre, now does it?

Pg. 969:

If any young woman ever asks me what "patriarchy" signifies, this paragraph might illuminate the matter:

"Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps or old snuff-boxes, even to pictures or statutes. Only the sexample of other collectors should be a warning to us to make changes, to have not one womean only but several. Those charming suggestions in which a girl abounds of a sea-beach, of the braided hair of a statue in church, of an old print, of everything that makes one see and admire in her, whenever she appears, a charming composition, those suggestions are not very stable. Live with a woman altogether and you will soon cease to see any of the things that made you love her...But I am anticipating the course of years. Here I need only state my regret that I did not have the sense simply to have kept my collection of women as people keep their collections of old quizzing glasses, never so complete, in their cabinet, that there is not room always for another and rarer still."

Gack. Women as simply objects to be collected by a discerning aesthete. Thank heavans for the women's movement.

Pg. 878:

Another 10-cent word: drolatic.

"You can't imagine," went on Mme. de Guermantes to M. d'Argencourt, "anything more ridiculous."

"In fact, it was drolatic," put in M. de Guermantes, whose odd vocabulary enabled people in society to declare that he was no fool and literature people, at the same time, to rgard him as a complete imbecile."

I gather, from some internet sleuthing, that it signifies a neologism or forged word.

Or -- if www.drolatic.com is to be believed -- a line of French women's wear on the American Apparel end of the skank spectrum.

On or about page 800:

Finally looked in my January issue of Footnotes, the newsletter for the American Sociological Association. And what do I find?

An obituary for Mr. Richard Nadeau, the fellow what owned the very pair of books I happen to be reading:

http://www.asanet.org/footnotes/jan09/obit.html.

Would that we could each lead such a full life.

Pg. 785:

He does go on a bit. That said, every once in awhile he says in one (longish) sentence what it takes others -- Max Weber, Michele Lamont -- entire monographs to say:

"I found there several of his friends who dined with him regularly, nobles except for one or two commoners in whom the young nobles had, in their school days, detected likely friends, and with whom they readily associated, proving thereby that they were not on principle hostile to the middle class, even though it were Republican, provided it had clean hands and went to mass."

Provided it had clean hands and went to mass. Hunh. If ever there were a way to understand the difference between class and status, that would be it.

Pg. 714:

Two down, five to go.

I understand that everyone is sad when their junior year abroad(or, in Proust's case, summer by the seaside) is over. I, for instance, found myself sitting in the movie theatre in Leicester Square, weeping with homesickness at the opening credits to "Philadelphia." A singularly odd behavior, not least because at the time I had never been to that city at all.

But to describe the end of adolescence thus?:

"And for months on end, in this Balbec to which I had so looked forward because I imagined it only as battered by the storm and buried in fogs, the weather had been so dazzling and so unchanging that shen she came to open the window I could always, without once being wrong, expect to see the same patch of sunlight folder in the corner of the outer wall, of an unalterable colour which was less moving as a sign of summer than depressing as the colour of a lifeless and composed enamel...as dead, as immemorially ancient as would have been a sumptuously attired dynastic mummy."

Dude, adulthood isn't all _that_bad. Yeesh.

Pg. 669

Again I noticed a phrase from someplace else:

"Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake."

Thus in 3 sentences Wallace Stegner (pg. 3, Crossing to Safety) summarizes the first five pages of Swann's Way. Perhaps it is too much to draw a parallel between his cataracts and Proust's magic-lantern, but then again he refers to a stereoscope in the same paragraph.

Pg. 585:

I began noticing, every so often, a phrase or two I've read elsewhere. Such as:

"That is why the better part of our memory exists outside ourselves, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate." (pg. 488). There are hints here of phrases from at least three of E. St.V. Millay's sonnets. None of them direct, of course -- just echoes: "but the rain is full of ghosts tonight," "an empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless," "like bittersweet upon a broken wall, or brushwood smoke in autumn."

Or, "In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we are barely conscious of tranquility" (pg. 553). This is evidently not the source of the title for the film with Sir Ian McKellen and Brandon Fraser; rather Bride of Frankenstein is. At least according to Wikipedia.

Pg. 517: it turns out that, yes Virginia, there are some words that even a PhD from Harvard University does not know.

Like "buccal." As in "buccal protuberance."

Silly me. I forgot the first rule of etymology: think of a homonym and see if it fits. A homonym... let's see. As in Bucca di Beppo?

I also forgot the second rule of etymology: when in doubt, ask your mother. She (MA in English, U of Chicago) knew the word instantly.

Pg. 497: already done with "Swann's Way" and "Madame Swann at Home." Two remarks:

a.) I hope other people laughed as hard as I did at the notion of "doing a cattleya."

b.) What on earth was the rude gesture that Gilberte made?