How Soon Is Now? – On How to Regain Time Through Literature
When people have a newborn child, they often can't resist sharing their labor story. Don't worry, that's not going to happen this time. I'll focus on what happened before that final hectic moment. What they don't tell you is that it's not like running a sprint – it's like an endless marathon where you don't run: you sit and wait, for months. Each time you visit the hospital for a checkup, you wait. I observed parents consumed by a mix of anxiety and a profound sense of uselessness – because in those moments, your performance doesn't matter. It doesn’t make any difference. You just have to wait.
As for me, I chose to read extensively during those waiting periods. What I find intriguing is my book selection while awaiting our first child and the one I read for the second: In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust and 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, respectively. These aren't books you simply decide to read. They're books that call to you when the time is right. You can sense it.
Though unintended, the more I reflect on these works, the more similarities I find: they're considered their authors' masterpieces, yet achieved posthumous success; they're autobiographical at their core, while remaining elusive about the authors' lives; they are divided into connected sections, each substantial enough to stand as a novel in their own right; they tend to fail, or refuse, to conform to our expectations of what a novel should be. As one of the characters in 2666 remarks, these are “great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown”. They are not “the perfect exercises of the great masters”. They are places of “real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all”.
But above all, these books are worlds unto themselves – you lose yourself in them. Their characters certainly do. And so did I, as every reader does. It's like sailing on the open sea. Or more precisely, it's like life itself: you can never quite pinpoint your exact location on the map. It echoes that terrifying question that God asks to Adam, in the Bible's opening book: “Where are you?”. To be honest, I don’t know.
As with the Odyssey, reading these books is a journey of recognition that unfolds over time – a process in which you can’t know something until, in a way, you’re ready to know it. My first such journey was with Proust, whose masterpiece is a complete work. Everything is in Proust. He's an author who can accompany you throughout the entire length of a life. Following him in search of lost time felt like a precious gift, especially at a moment when my own time was about to change forever: my first child was on the way. This reading journey became a sort of coming-of-age experience, a way to prepare for a new era in my life.
The choice of Bolaño, as we prepared for our second child, was instinctive as well. I needed a great book – one that dared to take risks. And 2666 felt right from the start. As I sat in waiting rooms, my mind wandered through Europe and small Mexican towns, alongside four literary critics in search of a German novelist named Benno von Archimboldi – who closely resembled the elusive writer B. Traven. Reading back over that sentence for sanity’s sake, I realize how strange it sounds. It almost feels like I was losing my grip on reality.
But that's the true magic of literature, which brings me to the real point of this personal reflection. To a casual observer, I might have seemed self-absorbed or detached from the moment. Physically, I was in the hospital next to my wife, but mentally, I was adrift in a fictionalized Mexican border town. Oddly enough, being elsewhere helped me stay grounded in the moment, connecting me more deeply to the changes about to unfold in our family. Like the characters in those novels, suspended in time, so too were my wife and I, awaiting our next chapter.
Proust crystallizes this insight in the seventh and final volume of La Recherche, Time Regained, when he writes that, “In reality every reader is, when he reads, the reader of his own self. The work of the writer is just a kind of optical instrument that is offered to the reader to permit him to discern that which, without the book in question, he could not have seen within himself”.
And then Proust’s words flood in: “True art takes hold of life and also the life of others (…). Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance”.
My second child was kind enough to wait until I was exactly halfway through 2666 before beginning active labor and making their entrance into the world. So, my literary journey with Bolaño continues. I’ll keep you updated as it unfolds. Thanks for following along this far.
