EX LIBRES

JESUS A. MANGALINDAN, JR.

In Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, there is a passage that gets close to the core of what a literary education should be about. The passage offers a deep sense of what we can ask from a consequential book. Proust speaks with the kind of clarity that is peculiarly his about what he hopes his work will achieve. In particular, he reflects on the relation he wants to strike with his reader. “It seemed to me”, he observes, “that they would not be ‘my readers but readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician at Combray used to offer his customers-it would be my book but with it I would furnish them the means of reading what lay inside themselves. So that I would not ask them to praise me or to censure me, but simply tell mme whether ‘it really is like that “I should ask whether the words that may read within themselves are the same as those which I have written.”

What Proust is describing is an act of self-discovery on the part of his reader. Immersing herself in Proust, the reader may encounter aspects of herself that, while they have perhaps been in existence for a long time, he remained unnamed, undescribed, and therefore in a certain sense of unknown. One might say that the reader learn the language of herself; or that she is humanly enhanced, enlarging the previously constricting cycle that made up the border of what she’s been . One might also say, using other idiom, one that has largely passed out of circulation, that her consciousness has been expanded.

Proust’s professed hoped for his readers isn’t unrelated to the aims that Emerson, a writer Proust admired, attributes to the ideal student he describes I “The American Scholar”: “One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, ‘He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies.’ There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention , the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.”

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The author is SST III at Sto. Tomas, National High School, Sasmuan