On Proust's Wasted Time

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Past seasons have focused on Finnegans Wake, 1,001 Nights, the Hebrew Bible, Journey to the West, the American short story, and The Brothers Karamazov. This season: Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

The “lost time” of In Search of Lost Time can connote “wasted time,” and Marcel Proust’s narrator does confront wastes of time, through pretentious conversations and moments when habit takes control. But the novel makes much of this waste, and we glimpse something beyond wasted time when involuntary memory prompts the narrator to consider existence beyond a drably habitual scheme.

Christine Smallwood reads here from her book La Captive, where, reflecting on concepts of art and wasted time that the narrator considers, she writes, “Art is a record of the waste. It holds the waste, and changes it. Its material is time, and it makes time material.” In this episode, you’ll hear how wasted time, the time of dull habits, gets remixed and reworked by Proust. And you’ll hear readings from the third and fourth volumes of the novel: The Guermantes Way and Sodom et Gomorrah.

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Guests for this season of The Cosmic Library:

Hannah Freed-Thall, author of Modernism at the Beach

Joshua Landy, author of The World According to Proust

Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm

Alex Ross, writer at The New Yorker—see especially “Imaginary Concerts”

Christine Smallwood, author of La Captive

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