Days of Reading

from: in pursuit of silence

At several points in Proust’s magnificent essay Days of Reading he suggests that no memento more truly conjures an earlier age than will certain strains of silence. Sounds evolve in ways that silences do not. Reflecting on the books of antiquity that were originally recited aloud, Proust writes of how beyond even the power of great phrases to take us back through history, the rest notes can “trace for us the forms of the ancient soul.” He describes how “between the phrases…in the interval which separates them, there is still contained today, as in some inviolate hypgeum, filling their interstices, a silence many centuries old. Often, in St. Luke’s Gospel, when I come upon the ‘colons’ which punctuate it before each of the almost canticle-like passages with which it is strewn, I have heard the silence of the worshipper who has just stopped from reading out loud so as to intone the verses following…This silence still filled the pause in the sentence…” Sometimes this brings to Proust the scent of a rose, “which the breeze entering by the open window had spread through the upper room…and which had not evaporated in almost two thousand years.”

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