Cultural succulence

Sunday afternoons are the high point of the week. A few blocks from home is a place you'd never find if you didn't know where it was. Down the steep steps into a large cellar array of rooms is the Forum. And every Sunday is a reading of about 2-3 chapters from Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

Well down the steps you enter a large room, unfurnished except for a counter where you pay for tickets, wine, coffee and selected books. Plus a few chairs to sit on.

Suppose you might call it a soirée, though not in the evening. The performances have been going on for several years and we're well into the third book now and that gives us a few more years to look forward to.

At three o'clock we all wander into an even larger cellar room, whitewashed stone walls and fitted with video camera, lighting and sound equipment, a grand piano, a small stage, dozens of plastic chairs and in the front, a small table and chair. On the table are a glass of water and Proust's book.

It starts by a short performance, always by an excellent, sometimes unknown, musician. Today a pianist played 3 études for the piano by Debussy. The stage is already set and the reader of the day - oftentimes an actor or author - then reads three or four chapters from Proust's novel.

For those of you who haven't read Proust, the novel is about people, places, ambitions and emulations in upper-class France in the late nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. It is a novel that takes time. It is about the small intricacies and nothings of high-class society, with small intrigues, great ambitions and nebulous outcomes. Much of it is extremely funny in the sense of recognizing the successes and ill-successes of people who are transparently portrayed as flesh and blood. The result is both interesting, entertaining and subtly thought provoking.

You long for the next reading to come.