Proust people have actually opinions about books and painting and music and architecture and James people hang out in rooms with those things, like influencers.
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Could these immoderate statements reflect wanting to live in a Proust place but realizing we live in a James place—fragile civilized things and getting more fragile every day. I also wish I were living in Proust right now!
Tho I'm a third of the way through Portrait of a Lady (Archer is just about to turn down Goodwood for the 2nd time) and noting that class wise no one's feet in the novel have ever touched ground + the bits about the English lord's political liberalism never evidence any specificity. +
At least in the narrow space of comparison this James to this Proust, the latter just has at eye more discerning capacious and at the same time roaming. He's also as good as upstairs downstairs humor as Dickens. He's often funny!
Along the Hegel line, I remain in awe of Brandom’s Spirit of Trust, a magisterial and lucid paragraph-by-paragraph close reading of Phenomenology of Spirit… It’s a Big Read in itself…
all i know is, i sure hope i'm logged in here on that fine day in the near or distant future when you get to the bit in james's princess c. when they're name-dropping ruskin on venice
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10 days into the 10 pages a day of CAPITAL plan
And now onto the February letters in Richardson's Clarissa
Q is which big book after Capital? Hegel and Kant are too hard for 10 pages a day I think, Mike Davis too engrossing. The Enneads?
all i know is, i sure hope i'm logged in here on that fine day in the near or distant future when you get to the bit in james's princess c. when they're name-dropping ruskin on venice
My first thought: “The Verdurin set read early James”