Proust’s sentences are like extended, protracted, interminable, long-drawn-out silkworms ; precious creatures producing the finest of fabric: text.

Even people who have never read any of Proust’s writing know that his sentences are gentle behemoths–so long as to make you forget they even had a beginning once you reach their elusive end. They might not know, however, that his chapter-less sections are just as long: as she gets ready for her goûter, the naive and overconfident reader picks up a cup of tea, a madeleine and the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, and soon finds herself hours later, plodding hopelessly through hundreds of pages, parched, looking for the oasis of a paragraph break in the middle of Combray.

I have been coddled by writers who commit only a few dozen pages to a single chapter ; who know I must go to the bathroom, to work, to bed ; who insert convenient breaks in their narrative so that my mind can rest ; who carefully spoon-feed me the smallest bites of their work ; who provide a rhythm of reading that makes space for my life. These writers are, apparently, cowards. Proust shows that they could trap me for three hundred pages, or leave me to make a painful choice: where do I interrupt the narrative?

Recently, I heard someone say that Dostoevsky likely penned monumental frescoes because his initial readers, nineteenth-century Russians, were often stuck at home, ensnared by vicious and protracted winters. If his Narrator is any indication, Proust might have had an equally captive audience in sickly bourgeois boys. However, as an employed promeneuse suffering, like many others, from an attention deficit, I need to wield the axe of time: when the hand of the clock drops, I chop. This means that I always interrupt a discussion, a crisis, a memory… loose threads, to be tied only hours or days later, when I pick up the book again.

As a result, these run-on books feel all the more like an interior monologue. Instead of starting a clean, new episode, perfectly framed and separated from the rest of life, I feel as if I was resuming some meditation I had loosely begun some time earlier, simply cut short by a shrieking child or a passing car. When I put the book down, the Narrator keeps nursing his neurotic obsessions in a corner of my brain, through a thick and unconscious fog. Then, when I return, his little life and my own have been woven, superimposed by equally foggy and neurotic processes. My day bears his trace, as yet another manifestation of involuntary memory.

Dialogues, bizarrely, feel vague and distant. I come back to the Verdurins’ salon, to Odette’s senseless chatter or to Swann’s odious moaning as if I was entering a crowded parlor in which people had been prattling without me. I eavesdrop, unsure if I am allowed to listen.

Through the magic of excess, Proust’s silkworms messily weave in and out of my day, and become the architects of its unacknowledged underbelly.