The chances of my ever going to prison seem slight, since, even if I am caught yet again vandalising Liberal Party election posters with my flamethrower, it will mean a good behaviour bond at most.
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But now I learn that if I am ever sent to prison, my doing time there will have its bright side. That bright side will be time, at last, to read the whole of Marcel Proust's seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time, also known as A Remembrance of Things Past.
Yet again, this year, for the umpteenth time, I have made a new year's resolution to read Proust's masterpiece, but know it is a promise I will struggle to keep.
And now in a rippingly readable new online piece, Reading And Time, Ryan Ruby shows how the main reason so many of us fail to ever get through the great work is that, ironically for a book about lost time, few of us can ever find the time required to read it. To be able to read it all, Ruby says, one needs "opportunities in life".
And so, Ruby shows famous feats of reading the whole work have been accomplished by prisoners given the opportunities, locked-up inside, of swathes of spare time and freedom from the distractions of life on the outside.
So, for example, "Daniel Genis, surely one of the best-read persons of our time, finished it ... while serving out a 10-year sentence for armed robbery at the Green Haven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York."
While Ruby's essay, published in the journal Liberties, dwells on Proust's masterpiece, it's really all about how in these frazzled times we never have enough time to do anything worthwhile.
But reading Proust's novel presents special difficulties, Ruby divines.
"Scott Moncrieff's translation of [In Search Of Lost Time] is 4347 pages long. At an average speed of two hundred and fifty words, or one page, per minute, it takes approximately 72 hours, or three days, to read it. But ... thanks to a few features of Proust's distinctive style, reading In Search of Lost Time inevitably takes at least twice or even three times as long as this.
"There is, first of all, the famous Proustian sentence, whose syntactic cascades of independent and subordinate clauses were compared by Walter Benjamin, one of his first translators, to the flowing of the Nile. The longest of those riverine sentences is 958 words ..."
For those of us who have so often tried and failed to finish In Search Of Lost Time, Ruby's analysis of why it is so very difficult comes as a great comfort. One had feared one must be too blunt a tool to be able to meet the book's challenges. But no, it turns out that it so challenges everyone that even the sharpest tools in the shed need special opportunities like being in prison (being immobilised with broken limbs is another godsend in this context, Ruby says) to successfully rise to its Proustian challenges.
Meanwhile, alas suffering the misfortune of not being in prison, one of the many distractions away from reading In Search Of Lost Time is the time lost to watching the ever-hypnotising Australian Open tennis on TV.
But summer's gift of the Australian Open brings with it, in the official statistics of every match and on the lips of courtside commentators and in the clichéd reporting of press hacks, the philosophically fraught notion of the "unforced error".
So, for example, of Alex de Minaur's five-set, epic, Shakespearean round-of-16 loss to Andrey Rublev we learn that de Minaur's shamefully careless "eight unforced errors" in the fourth set helped put him on the slippery slope to defeat.
In the reportage of top tennis, the notion of an unforced error is as well as being a gallumphing cliché, a display of ignorance.
In all top tennis all errors are forced by something. If they're not forced by pressures unathletic sports journo-hacks can never understand (pressures of the sheer occasion, say, of an elite athlete's elite demons of temperament, of elite mental and/or physical fatigue) they're forced by the erring player's opponent driving him or her (the error-maker) into mistakes.
As I write (it is Wednesday morning) everywhere the tennis hacks are reporting Taylor Fritz's "39 unforced errors" in his quarter-final loss to Novak Djokovic. But as if, as if errors were not forced upon young, mortal, awed Taylor simply by being out on the same court in the public gaze pitted against the almighty God of Tennis, Djokovic, the greatest player of this greatest, this most Shakespearean of sports the world has ever known.
MORE IAN WARDEN:
In tennis, a metaphor for Life, and in Life per se, there is probably no such thing as an unforced error. We are an error-prone species.
Surely, too, whole nations make forced errors. The Australian people's rejection of the Voice, a moral error, can look as if it was freely made when of course "no" voters were forced into their nos by their innate forceful Australian ignorance, racism and cowardy custardy fearfulness of change.
Similarly, the error of our use of January 26 for Australia Day is forced upon us not only by the general evolved coldness of the human heart but also specifically by a uniquely Aussie oi oi oi insensitivity to the feelings of those for whom January 26 is Invasion Day, a day of mourning.
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
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