The Cosmic Library Hears Imaginary Music

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.

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time lifts off on page after page, but it always returns to earth, back to the narrator’s memories and thoughts and experiences. Somehow, this seven-volume French novel from the early twentieth century covers a vast range of possibility and surprise while still concerned completely with the thoughts and feelings of a single person—the narrator, whom we might or might not call Marcel, and who famously lights up when the taste of a madeleine reveals a world of memory.

In this season of The Cosmic Library, we talk about the way À la recherche du temps perdu soars beyond limits while staying true to the narrator’s limits. Artistic discovery pulses through this novel, even though it’s full of encounters with society’s cliches, with bad habits, with jealous obsession, and with wasted time, all of which are experienced by the narrator as he grows up.

In this miniseries, we’ll hear passages from each volume of In Search of Lost Time, so you can consider the series an unusual adaptation of Proust’s novel. Along the way, we’ll talk about the novel’s notions of music, of self-discovery, of bad habits, and more. In this introduction, we hear from the first volume, Swann’s Way, and especially get into the subject of music, which activates the narrator’s thinking and that of the narrator’s family friend Charles Swann. Alex Ross, music critic at The New Yorker, explains here how the novel is “very observant about how music comes into our life and how it can obsess us.” Prompted by Proust’s musical sensibility, this season will also continually rework The Cosmic Library’s own theme song, turning to music in a way that might—the hope is—advance the show to new intensities.

Experiences of art can, in Proust’s novel, make things happen. The Proust scholar Joshua Landy says that, in the novel, music “provides us a formal model for thinking about the shape of our own life.” And a novel where lives take musical shape can get intense. Hannah Freed-Thall, Proust scholar at NYU, says that “it feels like a text that is wild and not 100% in control of itself, and that’s appealing to me.” In Search of Lost Time can explore selfhood, then, and find that the self is a sprawling, mutable thing. As the novelist Rick Moody tells us, “Especially as you get towards volume seven, there’s not a stable Marcel.”

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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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