ABSTRACT
‘Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure.’ ‘For a long time I have gone to bed early ‘ - eight words only in the first sentence of a book several thousand pages long, Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, Remembrance of Things Past. How we know, reading that sentence, that we are beginning to read a very long book, and how Proust chose it as the opening of his great work, are among those many mysteries of literature that, thank God, no one is able to elucidate. It is part of the same mysteriousness that each text of fiction that we write should come with a first sentence, or a sentence or rhythm somewhere, that dictates the length the thing is going to be. We know at once whether it will be 5, 20 or 150 pages, and if someone asks, ‘Can you write a text of such and such a length’, something in us knows what kind of a prose to look for. Often the initial or initiating sentence is a spontaneous birth, something that comes and demands to be, alas, not just born but painfully gestated, fed, laboured at. Perhaps this is also true of verse. Valéry used to say that one line may be given: never two.
