Young Man Reading
by Octavian Schmigelsi (1866-1912)
This painting represents the bliss of childhood reading. We see a young boy, head propped on a pillow, deeply immersed in his reading.
It brings to mind a passage I encountered recently, in which Marcel Proust reflects on the pleasure he experienced reading as a child. He writes:
“There are no days of my childhood which I lived so fully perhaps as those I thought I had left behind without even living them, those I spent with a favorite book. (…) So sweet is the memory it engraved in me (and so much more precious in my present estimation than what I then read so lovingly) that if still, today, I chance to leaf through these books from the past, it is simply as the only calendars I have preserved of those bygone days, and in the hope of finding reflected in their pages the houses and the ponds which no longer exist.”
It’s a typically Proustian conception of reading. That when we think back to the books we read as a child, we can also remember the places in which we read them. And so our memories of youth become intertwined with the stories that made us who we are today.
The young Proust read voraciously, with an omnivorous literary appetite that included Goethe, Shakespeare, but also Molière, Racine, and Balzac. In his diary he wrote that his favorite occupations were “Reading, daydreaming, poetry, history, theatre. And that he wanted “to live in the ideal.” And the best way to do so was to read as much as possible.
As I’ve grown older I’ve realized that we can read for different reasons. Sometimes we read for comfort, or to escape into another world. Sometimes we read to learn new things or to learn about ourselves. But above all, I think we read because it makes us feel less alone. This is what the young Proust, in a letter to his philosophy tutor, called a “constant redoubling”. We return to ourselves by returning to our books.
The painting above is by the Romanian artist Octavian Schmigelsi, and it reminds me of the young Proust, immersed in his reading.
Julian
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