The Eye, the Steeple, and the Phone

A few months ago, I remarked on Wordsworth’s despotic eye, and it has left a dent in my lens. I see it everywhere now, which I suppose is what happens when your lens has a dent in it. Most recently, I have found it in my reading group, where we are close reading Swann’s Way. The group’s rule is to stay inside the text, with little to no outside reference, a rule I have respected by posting my half-baked thoughts here instead.

A quick recap: Wordsworth confesses in The Prelude to a stretch of life when “the eye was master of the heart,” when sight held his mind “in absolute dominion.” He means the picturesque habit. The trained eye that ranks landscapes, compares scene with scene, and simplifies them into content. The eye is a tourist. It goes everywhere, sees everything, and comes home with nothing, like a person who has photographed every painting in the show and experienced none of them, the natural enemy of the timed museum ticket!

Now Proust, page 67 of the Davis. The narrator has just spent a paragraph being a connoisseur of steeples. A pink spire near Balbec is appraised like a seashell. The dome of Saint-Augustin is compared to Piranesi. The whole apparatus of taste is in motion.

I will never forget, in a curious town in Normandy near Balbec, two charming eighteenth-century houses that are in many respects dear to me and venerable and between which, when you look at it from the lovely garden that descends from the front steps to the river, the Gothic spire of a church hidden behind them soars up, appearing to complete, to surmount their facades, but in a material so different, so precious, so annulated, so pink, so polished, that you see clearly it no more belongs to them than does the crimson crenellated spire of some seashell, tapering to a turret and glazed with enamel, to the two handsome, smooth pebbles between which it is caught on the beach.

Then he pulls the rug out!

But since into none of these little engravings, with whatever taste my memory may have executed them, was it able to put what I had lost a long time ago, the feeling that makes us not consider a thing a spectacle, but believe in it as in a creature without equivalent, none of them holds in subjection an entire profound part of my life, as does the memory of those views of the Combray steeple from the streets behind the church.

The feeling that makes a thing not a spectacle but a creature. Wordsworth wrote thirteen books of blank verse trying to find his way back to such a vision, where the world is not merely seen but received. Proust seems to know this feeling too, though I have six volumes ahead of me before I can pretend to understand his version of it.

But for now, the pink spire is exquisite and dead. The Combray steeple is ordinary and alive, because the child never looked at it merely as an object. He lived under it, around it, through it. The steeple gave “all the occupations, all the hours, all the viewpoints of the town their shape, their crown, their consecration.” It was there when he went to the post office for letters, when he asked after Mme. Sazerat, when he came home in the evening thinking of the moment, he would have to say goodnight to his mother and not see her anymore. The steeple got into him anyway, folded into errands, streets, hours, and the dread of evening.

The cures, though, point in opposing directions. Wordsworth’s is regime change. Two pages after the despotism passage, he describes the spots of time, deep memories that invert the whole arrangement. Memory storms the palace, the mind ends up “lord and master,” and the eye is sent back to the fields to do honest work as a servant. Proust looks at the same tyranny and decides the problem was never being ruled. The steeple holds an entire profound part of his life in subjection, and he is plainly delighted about it. He does not want liberation. He wants the right tyrant.

My phone attempts this on me regularly. Every so often it exhumes old photos, sets them to music, and presents me with a spectacle of my own life. It has never once produced a creature.

I promised to go easy on the phone comparison but bear with me. Every so often it exhumes old photos, sets them to music, and presents me with a spectacle of my own life.¹ It has never once produced a creature.

Footnotes

1. Apple calls the resurfaced ones “Memories,” which might be the most Proustian thing a trillion-dollar company has ever done. ↩