Prescient Artists

When my oldest son was a boy, at the end of each school year, I would get a notice from the administration that either he couldn't advance or his grades would be held because he had never returned several books to the library. He just could not turn back in those ones he cherished the most. Only occasionally do I have the same feelings and being a better financed adult, I usually can get my own copy at the store. One such book I read a couple of years ago was Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer. Maybe I lent the library copy to a friend or it vanished under the car seat, but then it was the library notifying me of a past due and ultimately lost book. I paid the cover cost grudgingly.

And time went by, thought of the book often, but only bought it last week as part of the order for Pat Conroy works for my younger son. I probably used up all the ink in a ball point pen underlining ideas that were insightful, beautifully written. This book will now join those august few I designate coffee table books, an eclectic collection including de Tocqueville, A Year of Magical Thinking, and French Women Don't Get Fat.

Lehrer was a post-graduate technician in a neuroscience lab reading Proust waiting for an experiment to finish. Those two juxtaposed talents bode well for the rest theses that in striving to understand sensory perceptions and the mind, many geniuses articulated biological facts years before science caught up to their ideas and proved them true. Not only does Lehrer explain how Proust's madeline triggered childhood memories, but also how Cezanne drew the observer into his paintings by having them fill in his blank spaces or delineate objects crisply. He explores Escoffier's gestalt for fine dining and the importance of aroma (quick on the heels of Remembering Smell). For Stravinsky, he concludes that all art must be jarring and break with the unexpected; for Whitman, he agrees that the soul is created by the body.

Equally well analyzed but more difficult geniuses are Gertrude Stein and Virginia Wolfe, the former for her attempt to emphasize the structure of languages over the content of words. Extending her ideas to Pinker is fine, but somehow, Lehrer does not compel his reader to move on to Tender Buttons. I was motivated to pick up the copy of The Waves that was in the pile of books to read next to my bed and I finished about ten pages when I gave up. Lehrer is correct when he says the mind imposes logic and order and predictability ... it was too late at night to struggle with Wolfe's rhythmic and inundating prose.

Read this book.