My Year of Turning 40: In Search of Lost Time (Introduction)

     To my surprise, I turned 40 one month ago. Where did the time go? In this youth-obsessed culture, 40 feels like a turning point. The grim reaper appears, licking the tip of his pencil. Married? No. Children? No. Successful career as a bestselling author? No comment. Live boldly or else.
     Two years ago, I moved back home to help take care of my parents. My mother has Alzheimer's. Just dressing in the morning is an exercise in frustration: putting her arms through the right holes in her shirt, pullling up underwear facing the correct way, lacing up shoes that match on the proper feet. At night, she is confused about why her daughter and husband are telling her to take her clothes off and put on a nightgown. It just doesn't make sense.
     As my mother loses her memory, I am reading Proust. Finally. The last time I was in Paris, I bought a knapsack to smuggle all of Proust's masterpiece (in a dozen paperbacks) out of the country. They remained untouched until a year ago. I read the first section--"Combray"--twice in French before I read it in English. To my dismay, I realized that because I had missed so many nuances, I needed a translation. Now I'm just past the "At Madame Swann's" section of the second volume (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower).
     My task: to read 50 pages in English (and then in French) each week and write two pages that will provide a taste of Proust as seen through my own warped lens.
     Proust turned 40 in 1911. In January of that year, he wrote in a letter that he existed "suspended between caffeine, aspirin, asthma, angina pectoris, and in six...days out of seven (between) life and death." He had just started a book. "God knows if I shall ever finish it."
     And what do I have to show for myself? Two short plays, some poems, an unfinished (yet not abandoned) novel, and a memoir I'm in the middle of completing. Mere lines in the sand. (Disclaimer: not to compare myself in any way with the budding master novelist.)
     How will my blog differ from two recent popular books on Proust? Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life is clever and makes for a fun read, but it doesn't focus on the language. And Phyllis Rose's The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time left me stranded by chapter two, in which she devotes many pages to a blow-by-blow account of channel surfing that has little or nothing to do with Proust.
     I pledge to keep on topic, to share what it is I love about Proust without being doctrinaire. I pledge to illuminate the crosshatching where my life and Proust's words intersect without too many sentences like, "Of course, what Proust is trying to say here has everything to do with what happened to my cousin three years ago on the A train." I pledge to make this blog accessible to everyone, whether they've never read a word of Proust or if they read him every year. I pledge to find my way lit by the headlights two feet in front of me as I drive through the night, seeing where this experiment takes me.
     The year I turn 40 will be the most bold yet. I won't sit safely by the hearth, remembering things past, but I will go in hungry pursuit of lost time. So as I type this, I am dipping a madeline in my tea and mumbling a prayer I used to hear at Unitarian services: Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.