Marginalia and the Strange Magic of Allée Marcel Proust

Last Days in Paris, Episode 2 (June 20, 2020)

I had begun carrying these five books around as a crutch. They sat on a table by the front door of the apartment on Rue de C., and when I stepped out the door in the morning to wander around the city, or in the early evening to go wait for K on the bench on Allée Marcel Proust¹, I would grab one.

This photo of Allee Marcel Proust is from Wikicommons. The bench in the right foreground is where I often sat and waited in the early evenings.

The idea was that if I opened any one of these books at any given moment to a random page and began reading, an idea would make itself known, or if not an idea a slip of an idea, or if not a slip of an idea a sentence, or if not a sentence a phrase. With this idea, slip, phrase, whatever, I could begin to write. It might not amount to anything. What I wrote might be totally unrelated in any conceivable way to “the novel,” that beast of burden, but at least I would be writing something, which was a form of progress, I told myself.