Petrified Proust

Pierre Jardin is proud to say that the following post is this month’s featured Contemporary Corner on the website of the Viewing Stone Association for North America (VSANA).. Read the post there and discover other information about viewing stone appreciation!

As both a bibliophile and petrophile, I like to play “Rocks on Books,” a game I invented during the pandemic. I choose a book (usually related to rocks in some way) and then look for a rock from my collection that works well visually with the book’s cover. Once I’m satisfied with the display, I like to contemplate it and see what connections I can make between the stone’s geology and the book’s subject matter.

In this case, I selected Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past because the title resonates with rocks, and Proust’s monumental work is geologic in scale. Composed throughout the last fifteen years of his life, it consists of over a million words and was originally published in twelve volumes. This edition, published by Random House in 1934 in two volumes in a pictorial slipcase, was the first English translation of Proust. After many failed experiments placing rocks on or next to the cover, I removed the books and was delighted to discover that this piece of polished petrified wood slips perfectly into the slipcase. More surprisingly, serendipitous harmonies of form, color, and lines revealed themselves on both sides of the slipcase and stone.

A point of comparison between Proust’s magnum opus and this piece of petrified wood may be found in the concluding words of Joseph Wood Krutch’s Introduction to Remembrance: “Something has been rescued from Time. It is not often that that can be said.” Here, Krutch—an English professor who later wrote several books on southwestern American ecology and geology—highlights the success of Proust’s “search for lost time” (the literal translation of the French title). What does it mean to ‘rescue’ something from time? For Proust, it meant that, more than simply recalling past events, he transmuted life into art by interpreting the significance of especially resonant “images” or “signs” in his experiences (he includes stone as an example) and drawing out their “essence” or “spiritual meaning.” 

This piece of petrified wood is also “something that has been rescued from Time.” Geologists often observe that, while the Earth’s story is written in stone, most of that story gets erased by erosion, tectonics, and weathering. Only rarely do rocks or rock units manage to survive the ravages of the rock cycle intact. I purchased this piece at Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, an outcrop of the Chinle formation, which geologists Lon Abbot and Terri Cook call a “Triassic Time Capsule,” because it preserves hundreds of plant and animal fossils, making it possible “to reconstruct not just a landscape, but an entire ecosystem” (Geology Underfoot in Northern Arizona, p. 203). About 234 to 209 million years ago, large trees were swept in floods down a river and deposited in sub-tropical swamps, and buried beneath volcanic ash—a deposition environment that prevented decay. In a process called permineralization, percolating groundwater dissolved the ash into its constituent chemical elements and the compound silica; as the logs soaked up the water, organic reactions precipitated out the silica, and microscopic crystals of quartz called chert solidified in the pore spaces of the trees’ cells. The unusual shades of red, yellow, purple and black in the Petrified Forest samples result from trace elements of iron and manganese in the chert, and the amazing petrified logs are indeed things that have been rescued from Time.

The most famous episode in Proust’s search for lost time is simply known as ‘the madeleine.’ When the adult Proust dips a “petit-madeleine” in tea and tastes it, he experiences a “shudder,” an “exquisite pleasure,” that catapults him out of the “vicissitudes” of mortal time. After repeated tastings and with great concentration, he recalls the source of the memory: being given the cookie as a child by his aunt when she took her tea. At this moment, the “spiritual” meaning of the madeleine reveals itself to be an entire world of his childhood, which springs to life intact, rescued from time. Proust’s description of the process by which a single sensation encapsulated an entire portion of his life culminates with one of his intricately constructed, characteristically long and complex sentences:

“And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.”

Just as geology transposes the linear flow of time into stratified layers, Proust’s subordinate clauses and gnarled syntax transform the linear flow of his sentences into a set of layered phrases. Proust’s allusion to Japanese culture at this seminal moment in the text is not accidental. Like many of his fellow artists (including the Impressionists), Proust partook in the period’s japonisme, displaying a taste for Japanese aesthetics that included bonsai.

While I have found no allusion to suiseki in Proust or Proust scholarship, the madeleine episode nonetheless invites comparisons to viewing stone appreciation. Like the appreciation of a stone as a scale-model for a mountain or landscape, the sudden transformation of the Japanese paper works through image and imagination; a small, banal-seeming object becomes something larger and recognizable. The metamorphosis of mere paper into a complex aesthetic object mirrors the permineralization of a dull log into a colorful piece of petrified wood. Finally, in mulling over the display, I am reminded that, like Proust’s madeleine, all viewing stones exemplify the transformation of an everyday object into something with an elusive, even spiritual essence that seems to transcend time.