Marcel Proust Discovers LiveJournal
By Summer Block

I spent the morning in bed, my sleep so heavy as to obliterate utterly my consciousness, like a man who falls asleep on a fast-moving train, letting a well-worn novel slip from his hands and onto his lap, and whose dreaming head remains throughout his long journey through quaint country towns wreathed with memory; countless hours pass and the sleeper stays motionless, his interior vision turned away from the markers of civilization outside his window and inclined instead towards his interior existence like another man who, tormented by the practice of a hidden vice which alienates him from his fellow man, seeks sympathy in the forgiving eyes of simple beasts, and the first man awakes with a jolt to find his head has slipped onto a stranger's shoulder and he is drooling.

I've been spending a lot of time in this room lately; I should do some redecorating. I've heard good things about cork.

Location: My room
Mood: Pensive
Music: The whistle of a country train muffled by a passenger's gentle weeping
Tags: memory, trains

——

I spent the morning sleeping again; in the space between dreaming and waking I found myself wandering in the distant country of memory and recalled again a succession of the comfortable bedrooms of my youth, where I would recline weeping on a counterpane embroidered with nodding daffodils and wait for my mother to come up with a plate of toaster pastries; then I shifted in my sleep in response to the remonstrance of an aching joint; the nature of my rest changed and instead of my lovely mother, I saw the patterned wallpapers of the different darkened rooms where I had played as a child, and I awoke two hours later disoriented, like a young man who falls asleep at a failing seaside resort and wakes to find the sun has set and the tide gone out, all the hotel's many windows have grown dark, and someone has stolen his beach umbrella.

Today's Amazon Recommendations suggests someone named Joyce. I should look into that.

Location: My room
Mood: Contemplative
Music: Dashboard Confessional
Tags: memory, weeping, Mother

——

I spent last night feverishly working, with the renewed energy of a young man who has spent the whole day asleep and wakes at last as the sun is setting and finds that he is too late, Home Depot is closed and he will have to try again tomorrow; at sunrise I fell asleep, and woke for short intervals thereafter to lie in bed with my eyes closed, perfectly still, and imagine there all the component pieces of my familiar room, or to picture with half-waking horror the fears of my long-ago youth, and to see lurking by my unfinished walls a glimpse of childhood's forgotten ghouls; I stayed in bed, in thrall to nameless immature terrors, and felt my heart palpitate with unspoken dread like a teenage boy who, upon seeing a bouquet of perishable violets in a delicate vase, bursts into tears and is promptly beaten by his schoolfellows, until finally I buried my throbbing head in my down comforter until Mother called up from downstairs to say the pizza had arrived.

I must remember to buy a present for Mother. Also I should really do something about these walls.

Location: My room
Mood: Thoughtful
Music: The heartbreaking sound of nightingales outside the shuttered window of my distant boyhood bedroom
Tags: memory, Mother, fevers, weeping

——

I passed the morning sleeping fitfully, troubled by asthma and a general weakness of constitution which left me pale and breathless, like a young man who, suffering in love, is made invalid by his own jealous imagination, and so casts himself down onto his counterpane with a moan and falls into an uneasy sleep, and in dreams, wanders through all the places where he followed his love jealously in waking, and shifting in his narrow bed, rehearses again the alleyways and drawing rooms of his painful passion, until he awakes at last days later in a bathtub full of ice in Las Vegas missing a kidney; I slept, weak and wheezing, until at last Mother pounded on the door and demanded that I explain some unsavory charges on our most recent telephone bill.

Might I be allergic to cork?

Location: My room
Mood: Sickly
Music: The wet, troubled sounds of my own labored breathing
Tags: weeping, memory, jealousy, Mother

——

I spent the night working feverishly and fell asleep at last near dawn, my face pressed to the keyboard, and awoke thirteen hours later to find that my neck was stiff and painful and I had lost all sense of time passing; I lay down on my bed again, sighing and weeping, like a young man who, however circumspect in his ordinary life, is led by temporary weakness of spirit to the lowest ebbs of suspicion and romantic torment, and so wishing to expunge forever from his memory the image of his beloved's face, loses himself in exhausted ruminations, falls asleep during his final exams and wakes at last to the find the classroom cold and desolate and has to re-take chemistry.

Tomorrow I'll be sure to call the phone company and look into getting a second line.

Location: My room
Mood: Petulant
Music: Sunny Day Real Estate
Tags: weeping, memory, jealousy

——

Summer Block considers literary parody the highest form of flattery.

This piece first appeared in McSweeneys.

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