It is always funny to realize how one can look stupid when riding a bus. It is obvious that today I made a great buy, I bought Proust for 52 reais, which means something close to US$ 25! Coming back home I started reading the Introduction to the book, in which the writer of that particular intro wrote about Proust himself, his stifled life, his excesses when late at night he used to stroll around Paris and hang out with local writers, his love life and this woman he was madly in love with and wrote a book about. There I was thinking about Remembrance of things past as a Buildingroman, a novel in which the main character evolves somehow into a better person (roughly that), in which there needs to be a development of the character to make the book work, and naturally our hero (not in the Greek sense, please!) goes through many events which help shape his new life. Needless to say that in the second part of the introduction the writer starts developing her theory on this novel as a buildingroman, and adding that it is a mixture of buildingroman and a roman fleuve…. this was when I started grinning …. by myself, on the bus with this very weird looking fella by my side who, at that time, was already starting at me, and probably thinking, who on earth lets such a weirdo onto a bus??! At that moment I remembered when I was reading the first act of Hydriotaphia when Dr. Browne’s souls started to rattle his handcuffs in order to get rid of them praying for Dr. Browne to finally die, and let him free… and I started laughing out loud on the bus… yet again.
This is something I think I need to stop doing, and it’s laughing by myself on the bus.
