Daybook: Proust, Morandi, & taking a lot of time

A comic about reading Proust's Swann's Way while also looking at Giorgio Morandi's paintings.

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I first drafted this comic in the fall and I’m happy to say that as of two weeks ago I finished Swann’s Way. PLEASE CLAP. I’m so happy I still have six books left in In Search of Lost Time :’) Who knows when I’ll finish them and who I’ll be by then! Exciting.

Something that I didn’t really have the “space” to “say” in this comic above is that what I really love about Swann’s Way and about Morandi’s paintings is how they imply that life, even what I might think of as “my own small life,” is worthy of being looked at closely. For me this isn’t the same as “life-affirming” exactly; I find so much of contemporary life to be demoralizing but when I spend time with the way Proust and Morandi encounter the world, I find it dignifying: they dignify me.

A note that the Morandi exhibit I went to was Giorgio Morandi – Time Suspended, part II (Proustian ass title…) at the Mattia De Luca in the Upper East Side this past October. But if you’re in New York, there’s another Morandi show up at David Zwirner through February 22nd! Morandi fever when…

Anyway here is some BONUS PROUST CONTENT. (A comic I scrawled laying down in bed one night in November.)

(The back of the book is stamped with “www.digireads.com” in bold right below the synopsis, a URL which now occasionally gets stuck in my head like song.)

A photo of the book in question:

I can’t believe I read the whole thing with this awful AI-looking cover!! Maybe THAT’S why it took me so long. Although I will say that, by now, the guy on the front kind of feels like my pal. (The painting is of Count Robert de Montesquiou, who according to my research (Wikipedia) served as the inspiration for Proust’s character Baron de Charlus, who doesn’t even appear until the second book!! How the heck did he make his way to the cover of Swann’s Way!) Anyway, I digress. I look forward to acquiring a book with a more beautiful and appealing cover (not to mention hand-feel) for volume two, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.