This is my first blog entry of a series considering my journey from research scientist to writer.

A year or so after closing my research laboratory and becoming an emeritus scientist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), I was browsing in the bookstore in Point Reyes, a cozy California nook about an hour’s drive from San Francisco, and saw Marcel Proust’s books spread on a separate table. Apparently it was Proust week, or something of the kind. I’d never read Proust’s famous six volumes of In Search of Lost Time, each at least (most more than) six hundred pages, but I was drawn to the title. It reminded me of a conversation I had with a scientific director at the NIH many years earlier when I, a junior scientist, arrogantly accused him of evaluating scientists by weighing publications instead of reading them. While I’d said that in jest (not entirely!), it seemed to apply to Proust with his heavy tomes. If weight was the issue, I understood why I didn’t know anyone who had actually read all these books. Tackling Proust’s mass of words was intimidating. Nonetheless, I picked up the first volume, Swann’s Way, and read snippets at random. The extended sentences comprised long strings of phrases separated by commas and folded into paragraphs. One sentence ran more than the page. But what sentences! I bought Swann’s Way.

I had read several hundred pages when Proust’s name came up in a fiction workshop I was taking at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda. I perked up. “I’m reading Swann’s Way now. It’s…,” Before I had time to say more, the instructor interjected, “The only way to stay awake reading Proust is in an ice bath.” Everyone laughed, including me. However, I disagreed silently.

When I finished Swann’s Way I started reading a different novel, but found it listless, drab, as if I had mental withdrawal symptoms and craved another fix of Proust. I bought the other five volumes of In Search of Lost Time. It took about a year for me to read all six volumes of Proust’s magnificent opus. I loved Proust’s colorful prose. The flow and cadence of elegant sentences begged to be read and reread. The streams of similes and metaphors transformed scenes into images, reminding me of colors and planes of abstract paintings triggering the imagination, or perhaps more aptly, of a picture emerging after piecing a puzzle together. I was enmeshed in the story as well and felt a deep loss when Albetine suddenly died. Also, Proust’s innovative contexts for specific events – the taste of a Madeline cake dipped in tea unleashing memories being the most famous – seemed at times like literary metaphors for scientific efforts to extrapolate general rules from experimental data.

Of course I skimmed some pages of Proust’s salon conversations and snide remarks that could be insufferably long, but then I often went back and read them more carefully. At times I felt a distant resonance with the scenes of elegant salons and the empty gossip among the sophisticated guests trying to impress in order to not be dropped from the inner circle. This personal connection stemmed from my Parisian visits years ago to my maternal grandparents, who were members of the Rothschild banking dynasty. Although Proust’s era during the early twentieth century was history during my mid-century visits to Paris, my mother’s relatives had been a part of the aristocratic world that he wrote about. In Search of Lost Time thus awakened a dormant nerve, an ephemeral sensation associated with my French family buried within me. I could even hear my mother’s insistence within this deep layer of myself that I act with unimpeachable decorum because I’m a Jew, a Dreyfusisn in Proust’s society, who must remain above reproach as a shield against anti-Semitism. Reading Proust, then, resonated with personal experience and feelings, unlike dispassionate and impersonal science, which is an intellectual experience.

At the time I read In Search of Lost Time I was starting to write personal essays, but was troubled by the belief that I hadn’t done anything interesting enough to attract attention. My father’s journey from the pogroms in pre-Bolshevik Russia to world-fame as a cellist, and my mother’s escape from the privileged but emotionally starved childhood in the Rothschild palaces of France to excelling in chess, tennis, and sculpting in the United States made fascinating stories, but why would anyone want to read about a U.S. government scientist like myself who had lived a conventional, sheltered life in the relatively calm United States, at least from my perspective.

Proust kindled my hope that my peaceful life could make interesting reading by showing that experiences alone had minimal interest until filtered through an inner world. His compelling novel was created from his relatively uneventful life, such as his boyhood crush on young Gilberte and summer vacations at the seaside. These became momentous occasions in his transparently autobiographical In Search of Lost Time; however, nothing of note actually happened. Marcel, Proust’s narrator, like Proust himself, roamed museums, vacationed, visited friends, socialized at salons, introspected and nurtured neurotic torments. And he wrote, and then wrote more. Neither Proust nor his narrator fought in battles like Hemmingway, or made great discoveries like Madame Curie, or led nations as a King or President. No. What Proust did was expose his conflicts and his precious society, including his signature issues of homosexuality and anti-Semitism.

Perhaps not a perfect analogy, but imagine someone refusing to relinquish a doll through exhilarating or horrid adventures. Wouldn’t the reasons for treasuring the doll be more compelling tha the specific experiences endured? Writing wasn’t confined to elaborate plots, or harrowing escapes, or world-changing triumphs. Writing became compelling by creating an outer world – a universe that could never be all truth or all fiction – by exposing oneself, turning inside out as it were, blending and blurring boundaries: reaching out while looking in and having the courage to be authentic.