Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.

Reading for Our Sixth Meeting on April 4, 2012

For our next meeting we will read halfway into the "Place-Names, the Place" chapter of Within a Budding Grove, which takes us all the way to the full line break on page 502 of the Modern Library (Moncrieff / Kilmartin / Enright) edition.

The sentence before the break reads:

"At length I would go to bed, a little resentful of her for depriving me, with an indifference so new and strange in her, of a joy on which I had counted so much, and I would lie there for a while, my heart throbbing as in my childhood, listening to the wall which remained silent, until I cried myself to sleep."

After the line break Proust continues:

"That day, as for some days, Saint-Loup had been obliged to go to Doncières, where, until he returned there for good, he would be on duty now until late every afternoon."

See you on April 4!

Proust, the Open Sea, and an Invitation

So I started thinking about my presentation for April 4's meeting, and I had a moment of inspiration -- all of which prompted this invitation to all of you.

Here's what happened:

I was reading along in the "Place-Names, the Place" chapter. Then I came to this:

"What a joy it was to me," Proust writes,

"...to see in the window... the open sea, naked, unshadowed, and yet with half of its expanse in shadow, bounded by a thin, fluctuating line, and to follow with my eyes the waves that leapt up one behind another like jumpers on a trampoline. Every other moment, holding in my hand the stiff starched towel with the name of the hotel printed upon it, with which I was making futile efforts to dry myself, I returned to the window to have another look at that vast, dazzling, mountainous amphitheatre, and at the snowy crests of its emerald waves, here and there polished and translucent, which with a placid violence and a leonine frown, to which the sun added a faceless smile, allowed their crumbling slopes to topple down at last" (WBG, 342).

I don't know about you, but I was stunned when I read this. And it got me to thinking about how much I would like to give a non-verbal response to this novel in my presentation on April 4.

A painting? I'm not a painter. But still... why not try...?

Then it occurred to me that I would very much like to see paintings, collages, crayon drawings, sculptures, ceramics, in short non-verbal creations of all kinds, provoked by this novel, from all of you as well!

Hence the invitation part.

I hereby formally invite you to join me in creating a tangible object of some kind, a painting or anything else you may imagine, as a response to Proust's descriptions of the sea at Balbec (or any other part of the "Place-Names, the Place" chapter). My presentation will be to lead a guided tour of our collection at the beginning of our April 4 meeting.

I counted them, and I found that Proust gives us at least seven different descriptions of the sea at Balbec. The first one is above. Here are the other six, in order of appearance:

2. "It was at this window that I was later to take up my position every morning... to see... those hills of the sea which, before they came dancing back towards us, are apt to withdraw so far that often it was only at the end of a long, sandy plain that I would distinguish, far off, their first undulations in a transparent, vaporous, bluish distance, like the glaciers that one sees in the backgrounds of the Tuscan Primitives" (WBG, 342).

3. "On other mornings it was quite close at hand that the sun laughed upon those waters of a green as tender as that preserved in Alpine pastures (among mountains on which the sun displays himself here and there like a giant who may at any moment come leaping gaily down their craggy sides) less by the moisture of the soil than by the liquid mobility of the light" (WBG, 342).

4. "When in the morning the sun came from behind the hotel, disclosing to me the sands bathed in light as far as the first bastions of the sea, it seemed to be showing me another side of the picture, and to be inviting me to pursue, along the winding path of its rays, a motionless but varied journey amid all the fairest scenes of the diversified landscape of the hours. And on this first morning, it pointed out to me far off, with a jovial finger, those blue peaks of the sea which bear no name on any map, until, dizzy with its sublime excursion over the thundering and chaotic surface of their crests and avalanches, it came to take shelter from the wind in my bedroom, lolling across the unmade bed and scattering its riches over the splashed surface of the basin-stand and into my open trunk, where, by its very splendour and misplaced luxury, it added still further to the general impression of disorder" (WBG, 343).

5. "... I wondered whether [Baudelaire's] 'sun's rays upon the sea' were not -- a very different thing than the evening ray, simple and superficial as a tremulous golden shaft -- just what at that moment was scorching the sea topaz-yellow, fermenting it, turning it pale and milky like beer, frothy like milk, while now and then there hovered over it great blue shadows which, for their own amusement, some god seemed to be shifting to and fro by moving a mirror in the sky" (WBG, 344).

6. "By what privilege, on  one morning rather than another, did the window on being uncurtained disclose to my wondering eyes the nymph Glauconome, whose lazy beauty, gently breathing, had the transparency of a vaporous emerald through which I could see teeming the ponderable elements that colored it? She made the sun join in her play, with a smile attenuated  by an invisible haze which was no more than a space kept vacant about her translucent surface, which, thus curtailed, was rendered more striking, like those goddesses whom the sculptor carves in relief upon a block of marble the rest of which he leaves unchiselled. So, in her matchless colour, she invited us out over those rough terrestrial roads, from which, sitting with Mme de Villeparisis in her barouche, we should glimpse, all day long and without ever reaching it, the coolness of her soft palpitation" (WBG, 387).

7. "One afternoon of scorching heat I was in the dining room of the hotel, plunged in semi-darkness to shield it from the sun, which gilded the drawn curtains through the gaps between twinkled the blue of the sea..." (WBG, 420).

Now let's get messy!

Photographs of Proust's "Balbec"

Rebecca Valette sent along this wonderful link to the seaside town of Cabourg, Proust's "Balbec":

http://www.cabourg.net/spip.php?rubrique45

Painting with Words

by Rebecca Valette

Proust's Narrator paints with words. For him, the "remembrance of things past" seems to be primarily visual. The taste of madeleine awakens memories of Combray, but subsequently the narrator recalls visual scenes: the blooming hawthorne bushes, the reflections in the pond, the perceived "dance" of the distant church steeples as observed from the slow-moving horse-drawn carriage.

The French title of the work, "A la recherche de temps perdu," recognizes that the past is lost — perdu — and will never return. (Proust would agree with the refrain of the American folksong: "Thou art gone and lost forever, Dreadful sorry, Clementine.")

In the last pages of "Swann's Way" which are probably set in 1913, the Narrator revisits the Bois de Boulogne and regrets what he sees: the fashions of the 1890s have vanished. Women's tunics lack the elegance of the beautiful dresses Madame Swann would wear on her daily promenade. The men are hatless. The automobiles lack the panache of the elegant carriages with their matched teams of horses. The present is so disappointing that the Narrator finds consolation in recreating in great detail the beauty of past scenes as he remembers them.

This same focus on the visual is evident in "Place-Names, the Place" where, as Tom points out, the narrator seems transfixed by the changing view of the ocean as seen from his window in the hotel at Balbec. Lacking a still camera, Proust's narrator uses words to describe the nuances of the scenes that hold his attention. Lacking movie film, he uses words to describe the movements of the young group of girls on the beach. And with the magic of his verbal paintbrush, he makes these scenes come alive for us here in America a century later. 

Notes on the April 4, 2012 Meeting

These notes cover pp. 298 - 502 in Volume Two, Within a Budding Grove, in the Modern Library edition (Moncrieff / Kilmartin / Enright).

It was a smaller group that met last night, with a more intimate feel to it, and perhaps that's why it was such a no-holds-barred discussion!

Certain members... um... expressed themselves with considerable passion, particularly on the subject of the visual arts. As well they should.

On occasion, though, the various positions in ther room clashed, and the result was a night of oohs and aahs and fireworks, and then relief and laughter, and, finally, many good memories that will last a long time.

1. Tom's Presentation: General vs. Specific Beauty

As the designated presenter, I began the meeting by reading aloud a passage from "Place-Names, the Place," in which the adolescent Narrator describes feeling entranced by a "tall girl... carrying a jug of milk" who, moving from window to window, serves coffee and milk to passengers on the train to Balbec when it stops briefly at an unnamed station.

Unable to take his eyes off of this girl, the Narrator observes:

"Flushed with the glow of morning, her face was rosier than the sky. I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and happiness. We invariably forget that these are individual qualities, and, mentally substituting for them a conventional type at which we arrive by striking a sort of mean among the different faces that have taken our fancy, among the pleasures we have known, we are left with mere abstract images which are lifeless and insipid because they lack precisely that element of novelty, different from anything we have known, that element which is peculiar to beauty and to happiness. And we deliver on life a pessimistic judgment which we suppose to be accurate, for we believed that we were taking happiness and beauty into account, whereas in fact we left them out and replaced them by syntheses in which there in not a single atom of either. So it is that a well-read man will at once begin to yawn with boredom when one speaks to him of a 'good book,' because he imagines a sort of composite of all the good books that he has read, whereas a good book is something special, something unforeseeable, and is made up not of the sum of all previous maserpieces but of something which the most thorough assimilation of every one of them would not enable him to discover, since it exists not in their sum but beyond it. Once he has become acquainted with this new work, the well-read man, however jaded his palate, feels his interest awaken in the reality which it depicts. So, completely unrelated to the models of beauty which I was wont to conjure up in my mind when I was by myself, this handsome girl gave me at once the taste for a certain happiness (the sole form, always different, in which we may acquire a taste for happiness), for a happiness that would be realized by my staying an living there by her side" (WBG, 318-319).

Having introduced my theme -- that true beauty and happiness require, above all, specificity -- I went ahead and presented as promised the painting, inspired by Proust's descriptions of the sea, that I had made the previous week.

It turned out, much to my surprise, that I had sufficiently lowered expectations in my email a few days before, to the point that the group's response was better than my painting deserved (or perhaps they were being excessively polite?).

Everybody had been primed by my email to see something "Insipid. Bland. Cloying. Generalized." Although the painting is, I will continue to insist, all of these things, a few members also saw in it some redeeming virtues. 

Two or three in the group (I was too shocked at that point to put faces to voices, so I don't remember who spoke first) mentioned that my use of perpective in the painting made the sea loom larger than life, as if it were about to pour in through the window. Conversely, Dirk expressed his appreciation for the fact that the window frame, and the lavender curtains, kept the sea at a safe remove from the viewer (after all, Dirk exclaimed, the sea is "full of things that can sting and pinch and bite you, and kill you if they can!").

Someone else in the group mentioned that they liked the repetitive, loopy motif that I gave to the water. Heather characterized this motif as "blackberry bushes." Marie-José remarked that, while of course I had no skills or technique whatsoever (both true), I had managed to create something with... some limited appeal. Thank you Marie-José!

This positive response from the group led me to a realization. Yes, my impetus for the painting had been too general (my only thought, I'm afraid, had been of painting the sea, as seen by the Narrator through his window at the Grand Hotel, and somehow showing it permeating the room). And yes, as a result, I had failed to achieve the specificity required for beauty.

And yet, by trying, by going for it anyway, despite my lack of skills or technique, I had ended up producing something indisputably specific after all   -- if only as an object, and not a work of art. It has perspective. It has loops. It has lavender curtains. The lesson? Do something! Go for it anyway. Proust was right: there is beauty and happiness in specificity, even in the specificity of failure.

2. Miriam Gets a Bee in Her Bonnet, and then the Bee Gets Free and Flies Away

I started to express something along these lines to the group, but Miriam cut me off. She emphasized, no doubt correctly, that the less said the better about our own paintings, since, after working on it so closely, the artist has very little idea anymore of what he or she has done.

At this point, though, Miriam proceeded to share with the group her strong opinion about the right way to paint the sea inspired by Proust, and the wrong way.

She asserted that for Proust the visual arts, much like his writing, have, as their basis, the principle of close observation, i.e., to paint the sea you must look at the sea.

"Without a strictly phenomenological approach," Miriam insisted, "you simply could not hope to grasp the details of visual data that the Impressionists obsessed over. Our memory does not store visual information for very long; we must constantly refresh ourselves by way of direct observation."

As she spoke it was apparent that she held at bay, but barely, a great deal of emotion under her words. Was it pent-up anger at amateur artists or stored-up enthusiasm for plein air painting? I wasn't sure. Surely, I mused to myself as I listened to her speak, as an artist herself Miriam has spent countless hours wrestling with these very questions. She has, no doubt, practiced this principle of close observation. Day after day she has submitted herself to the discipline, the self-denial, the almost monk-like humility, required to do it right... She knows of which she speaks.

But some in the group did not agree with the substance of what she was saying. (I wasn't sure I did either, but at first I held my tongue.) Marie-José, in her decisive, English-tea-time-accent (where did you acquire that accent, M-J?), proclaimed from deep within the cushions of the couch: "But of course, that is not true!"

"The artist," she continued, "must always draw deeply from his or her own visions. She must meditate on the subject inwardly, as well as outwardly. When making a sculpture I can only look at the model so long; then I must stop looking!"

Don too objected to Miriam's premise. With his upturned collar, and his gray hair pressed down over his forehead, he looked like an urban warrior, or a member of the Resistance (which Resistance? Some Resistance.). "When I write short stories," he said, "I draw almost entirely from my memories. My memory is... unusually good. It's like playing a movie, and I simply write that movie down in its every detail: the sound of the gravel underfoot, the color of the ash in the ashtray, the innocuous words said in passing that changed everything."

"But I'm not talking about writing," said Miriam. "I'm talking about the visual--"

"I painted for many years," said Don sharply. "It's exactly the same."

"Actually, Miriam?" I heard myself saying. (I was taking the risk of ganging up on her, because I knew Miriam could handle it.) "Have you ever had a shamanic journey?"

Everybody laughed.

"No, no, I'm serious," I carried on. "I have. And if you know me at all then you know that I don't believe in some supernatural spirit world outside of us. I believe that it is all in here [I said, pointing to my head]. The details that you see when you go into a deep meditation, as in a shamanic journey, are not at all like usual memories. You can revisit the living room of your childhood home, as I did once, and see the individual brown and white threads of the shag carpet again, each little dab of wax holding them at their root, the specks of dust slowly turning in the sunlight. You can smell the smoke from Dad's pipe in the air. It is vivid beyond belief. And it's all stored somewhere in your head. There is no direct observation in it at all."

The debate went back and forth. At some point, in a stroke of genius that seemed obvious as soon as it was done, Miriam returned us to Proust. She read the following:

"... the better part of our memories exist outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected" (WBG, 300).

For a moment she seemed to have enlisted Proust on her side and silenced the rest of us, namely, by having him echo her point that observable details are a more reliable source of inspiration than our own fitful memories.

But luckily I recalled that passage and remembered that it had more to it than that. I asked Miriam to read just a few more sentences, starting from where she left off. She graciously picked the book back up and continued: "... what our mind, having no use for, had rejected..."

"... the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again. Outside us? Within us, rather, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged" (WBG, 300).

Aha! "Outside us? Within us, rather..."

So Proust now seemed to be taking both sides of the argument we were having. It is true that our memories, the sources of our inspiration, are within us, as Marie-José, Don and I were arguing. But often the only available path to these memories is through paying attention to those tiny, overlooked details that have escaped the "broad daylight of our habitual memory" and so stayed fresh. Our inspiration is more likely to be found in the actual blatter of rain, not in the abstract memory of a rainy day.

3. The Sea, the Lonely Sea

Having reached a point at which we stood together, as it were, one foot on the sand, one foot in the sea, it seemed a good time to move on.

The discussion had become, well, not heated exactly, but intense in all the right ways (imagine! a group of people sitting around a room, truly caring about the sources of art...).

So I took this opportunity to turn us back to the central role of the sea in the "Place-Names, the Place" chapter. What is it doing there? I asked. Why is the image of Proust's Narrator confronting the wide-open sea -- this "vast, dazzling, mountainous ampitheatre" (WBG, 341; Florence drew our attention to this description) as he calls it -- so arresting? Did anyone want to comment specifically on how the setting of Balbec spoke to him or her?

Jeff remarked that, as he reads, he is very aware of how private his responses are. He was inspired to create a work of art that expresses the way that he alone thinks of the sea. With this in mind he set to work. Inside a FedEx box Jeff laid down a series of horizontal stripes of colored fabric. When you lift the cover flap, therefore, you see a highly textured, brightly colored representation of deep water, shallow water, horizon line, lower sky, upper sky. We passed it around. I called it "Sea in a Box!" which cracked me up, the idea of containing something of such a scale in something so portable. It was quite colorful and pleasing to the eye, and the way that the sea was contained and stratified did suggest a unique way of looking at it.

Jeanne was next and showed us her creation: an elaborately folded "book" representing her own response to Proust's description of the sea at Balbec, mixed with her memories and associations of floating in the sea in Hawaii, where she lived for a number of years. One side of the book showed the sea and shore, greens and blues and browns, at daytime; the other, heavier, moodier, steeped in blacks and dark blues, showed the sea and shore at nighttime. We took turns opening it and closing it. Don lingered with it in his lap as he said, "Well, I wanted to create a work of art for this meeting..." For a moment I thought he was going to try to pass off Jeanne's book as his own. But he continued, closing up Jeanne's book: "But I didn't get a chance."

Heather too presented a work. She declared that she was the least creative person in the room, but then she brought out three simple pastel drawings of a coastline, one with a figure in it. They were full of volume and had a mysterious melancholy to them as well. We took turns leaning over the area where she had arranged them in the middle of the carpet, and enjoying their qualities.

4. The Little Deaths that Happen Everyday (No, Not That Kind; Get Your Mind Out of the Gutter, Dirk)

There was a slight pause in our conversation, and I took advantage of it to shift to another observation from this chapter that had intrigued me. When the Narrator first arrives at his room at the Grand Hotel in Balbec, he is unsettled by the unfamiliar furniture and its arrangement -- all of it so unlike his bedroom at home. In speaking of the discomfort he feels with these changes, he writes:

"It is they -- even the meanest of them, such as our obscure attachments to the dimensions, to the atmosphere of a bedroom -- that take fright and refuse, in acts of rebellion which we must recognize to be a secret, partial, tangible, and true aspect of our resistence to death, of the long, desperate, daily resistence to the fragmentary and continuous death that insinuates itself throughout the whole course of our life, detaching from us each moment a shred of ourself, dead matter on which new cells will multiply and grow (WBG, 340).

Don said that this passage, and this chapter as a whole, were particularly profound to him because he has experienced this sense of repeated little deaths throughout his life. There are many occasions, he explained, when he looks back and recognizes that some incident, which seemed minor at the time, forever changed him. He feels a constant sense of saying goodbye to old selves.

Again, the emotional stakes were rising; again, in a good way. Marie-José questioned Don's outlook, however.

"I can't stand this kind of talk," she exclaimed. "It is false. Significant events in our lives do not happen in a sudden moment, a single incient. That is a literary device, nothing more. Things actually happen due to a slow accumulation, and it is almost always unnoticable."

At this Don got his back up. "No, you are wrong. I might not have known as it happened, but looking back I can point ot exact moments in time when something changed for me and will never go back."

"But this is the narrative you have cree-ated for yourself!" said Marie-José, sitting forward now, always glad to discover a difference of opinion.

"What about PTSD?" Don retorted. "A single moment in someone's life, perhaps a few seconds only, and nothing will ever be the same! What about that?"

5. Inside the Adolescent Mind, or, All the Wasted Time We Spend Looking at, Thinking About, Dreaming of, Girls (and Boys) We Will Never Know

Faced with another aaah moment, with everybody still looking up into the sky, I decided to set off a line of firecrackers nearer to home and pull the attention a new direction. So I brought up a new and important topic: all the time I wasted in high school and college and grad school... and after, thinking about whether that girl locking her bike up outside the library had caught my eyes or not, and if so, if I should say something (which invariably I declined to do).

"Isn't it fascinating," I said, "that Proust's Narrator spends so many of his waking hours creating little fantasies, little puzzles to solve, involving girls he happens to see serving coffee through the windows of a train, or sitting in the shade next to a bridge, or making deliveries to the hotel reception. What a waste! It brought me right back to all the time I wasted in my 20s and 30s, wondering about this girl or that girl, every five minutes someone new, when I could have been doing something else!"

Renée was the first to offer a different perspective. "This is what we were supposed to do!" she insisted. "That's how we learned what kind of boy we liked, what the rules of attraction are, how we want to carry ourselves in public, what we think of being admired, how we cope with being rejected." Everybody seemed to pile on at this point. "It's natural, Tom!" I heard someone say. "That's called courtship!" said someone else.

"So in other words," I responded, "when our children are teenagers and they are spending hours worrying about some possible look from some boy or girl that they barely met, we should remember, This is Important! Is that what you are saying?"

"Yes," said Dirk. "When I am taking photographs I always look for the quality in someone that is the most ephemeral and the most individual. That is really what we are talking about. I fall in love every week with someone I see. I ask to take his or her picture. So often, especially with children, once I have my camera in hand then the spontaneous indivdual expression is lost. They will go into a practiced pose. But when I catch this ephemeral moment on camera: that is beautiful."

Without meaning too we had circled back to the point about specificity. But here was another point too: that we escape the heavy hand of Habit sometimes best in passing moments, forgettable, inconsequential, in-between experiences, which suddenly open up a whole world of perception to us. Proust says that most of the older guests at the Grand Hotel are closed-off to this world, sticking to their daily routine instead:

"...by engulfing them thus in a system of habits which they knew by heart it sufficed to protect them from the mystery of life that was going on all around them" (WBG, 353).

But the Narrator could not join them.

"Alas for my peace of mind," he remarks, "I had none of the detachment that all these people showed" (WBG, 355).

Instead he would meet "... one of these creatures -- flowers of a fine day but unlike the flowers of the field, for each of them secretes something that is not to be found in another and that will prevent us from gratifying with any of her peers the desire she has aroused in us -- a farm girl driving her cow or reclining in the back of a waggon, a shopkeeper's daughter taking the air, a fashionable young lady erect on the back seat of a landau, facing her parents" (WBG, 396).

This strikes me as the very passage that gives the title to this second volume. It is easily skipped over, mere rhapsody over young girls in flower, but it contains a very profound observation about our perception of other people: the promise of time, the possibility of intimacy with him or her, is built into even our most fleeting observations.

If we could rid ourselves entirely of habit and live in the moment, if we could disenthrall ourselves from our conception of the future and its possible rewards, then Proust asserts we could all live in this specific, ecstatic space all the time. Of one girl he remarks:

"Was it because I had caught but a momentary glimpse of her that I had found her so attractive? It may have been. In the first place, the impossibility of stopping when we meet a woman, the risk of not meeting her again another day, give her at once the same charm as a place derives from the illness or poverty that prevents us from visiting it, or the lustreless days which remain to us to live from the battle in which we shall doubtless fall. So that, if there were no such thing as habit, life must appear delightful to those of us who are continually under the threat of death -- that is to say, to all mankind" (WBG, 398).

Can we just all agree that the old cliché about how life would be unbearable if it was eternal, and thank god for death because it gives meaning to our lives -- is completely ridiculous? If we had eternal life we could concentrate on every gorgeous moment without fear of losing it. Anyone who says anything else is just trying to make us all feel better about our mortality, which is actually not good, not good at all.

6. Last Reflections of the Evening

Next it was time for Renée's contribution to our sea-inspired art. She mentioned by way of introducing her pieces that she did not fully understand what had been requested of us ("even though the person lives in the same house and I could have asked him" -- "the person"? really honey?).  Nevertheless, she had two photographs of the sea to share with us, that she had pulled up on her iPad. We passed them around: one showed a child (our son, Cole) running madly, his shadow trailing him, on a windy beach, headed at full tilt towards the raging ocean. In the foreground stood his father, immobilized, deep in thought, looking out over the horizon. The second showed a tangle of trees, a rock streaked with orange minerals, and in the background the ocean that Renée grew up knowing on Stradbroke Island, near Brisbane, in Australia. Both were stunning, and like Proust's descriptions, they showed how wildly different the sea can look at different times and under different conditions.

The meeting ended with Lucie reading aloud two poems by Baudelaire. Even for those of us who do not understand French, they were memorable to hear. They were as follows:

Harmonie du soir

Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige
Chaque fleur s'évapore ainsi qu'un encensoir;
Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!

Chaque fleur s'évapore ainsi qu'un encensoir;
Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu'on afflige;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!
Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir.

Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu'on afflige,
Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir!
Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir;
Le soleil s'est noyé dans son sang qui se fige.

Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir,
Du passé lumineux recueille tout vestige!
Le soleil s'est noyé dans son sang qui se fige...
Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!

— Charles Baudelaire

Evening Harmony

Now is the time when trembling on its stem
Each flower fades away like incense;
Sounds and scents turn in the evening air;
A melancholy waltz, a soft and giddy dizziness!

Each flower fades away like incense; 
The violin thrills like a tortured heart; 
A melancholy waltz, a soft and giddy dizziness! 
The sky is sad and beautiful like some great resting-place.

The violin thrills like a tortured heart, 
A tender heart, hating the wide black void. 
The sky is sad and beautiful like some great resting-place; 
The sun drowns itself in its own clotting blood.

A tender heart, boring the wide black void,
Gathers all trace from the pellucid past.
The sun drowns itself in clotting blood.
Like the Host shines O your memory in me!

— Geoffrey Wagner, Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (NY: Grove Press, 1974) 

L'invitation au voyage

Mon enfant, ma soeur,
Songe à la douceur
D'aller là-bas vivre ensemble!
Aimer à loisir,
Aimer et mourir
Au pays qui te ressemble!
Les soleils mouillés
De ces ciels brouillés
Pour mon esprit ont les charmes
Si mystérieux
De tes traîtres yeux,
Brillant à travers leurs larmes.

Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.

Des meubles luisants,
Polis par les ans,
Décoreraient notre chambre;
Les plus rares fleurs
Mêlant leurs odeurs
Aux vagues senteurs de l'ambre,
Les riches plafonds,
Les miroirs profonds,
La splendeur orientale,
Tout y parlerait
À l'âme en secret
Sa douce langue natale.

Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.

Vois sur ces canaux
Dormir ces vaisseaux
Dont l'humeur est vagabonde;
C'est pour assouvir
Ton moindre désir
Qu'ils viennent du bout du monde.
— Les soleils couchants
Revêtent les champs,
Les canaux, la ville entière,
D'hyacinthe et d'or;
Le monde s'endort
Dans une chaude lumière.

Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.

— Charles Baudelaire

Invitation to the Voyage

Think, would it not be
Sweet to live with me
All alone, my child, my love? — 
Sleep together, share
All things, in that fair
Country you remind me of? 
Charming in the dawn 
There, the half-withdrawn
Drenched, mysterious sun appears 
In the curdled skies, 
Treacherous as your eyes
Shining from behind their tears.

There, restraint and order bless
Luxury and voluptuousness.

We should have a room 
Never out of bloom:
Tables polished by the palm 
Of the vanished hours 
Should reflect rare flowers
In that amber-scented calm;
Ceilings richly wrought,
Mirrors deep as thought,
Walls with eastern splendor hung,
All should speak apart 
To the homesick heart
In its own dear native tongue.

There, restraint and order bless
Luxury and voluptuousness.

See, their voyage past,
To their moorings fast,
On the still canals asleep, 
These big ships; to bring 
You some trifling thing
They have braved the furious deep.
— Now the sun goes down,
Tinting dyke and town,
Field, canal, all things in sight,
Hyacinth and gold;
All that we behold
Slumbers in its ruddy light.

There, restraint and order bless
Luxury and voluptuousness.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay, Flowers of Evil (NY: Harper and Brothers, 1936)

---

See you all next time. Please leave comments and add what I have left out!

In Response to the April 4 Meeting

by Miriam Dym

I think our conversation about painting an ocean landscape was muddled
because two things got conflated: working method and desired results.

I don't know what Tom's desired results were. I should have asked
before letting loose my opinions. I guess I felt that in the context
of reading Proust and thinking about the narrator's very
observed-sounding responses (which were surely based, however much
they were constructed, on lived experience!) that it made sense to
look at the ocean while painting. (Yes, Tom, I have spent lots of time
looking at things while drawing and painting, and also lots of time
not looking at things while drawing and painting. The results are
different.)

Visual information is out there in the world, not in our heads. I
don't know about shamanic visions so I don't want to go there. I do
know that my own, very vivid, apparently very detailed dreams don't
hold up to my own scrutiny.

Without knowing how writers go about creating a simulation of
"reality," of describing an experience, a place, a thing, a person, a
situation, so that it feels utterly believable to the reader, I would
agree that Proust, in order to give _us_ the experience of a
moment-by-moment experience of something, would have had to have
distance, to be separate from the experience he was writing about, and
maintain a space of quiet and solitude.

This gets to the notion of working methods.

One gathers information. As a visual artist intent on making a
pictorial work, I'd do that by making drawings or paintings or taking
photographs. For some artists, this is the only step — they work
directly, always. For the rest of us, there follows a process that
might include collation, and de- and re-construction. This could lead
to secondary, more ambitious works built from parts of the collected
information (say, a detail drawing of a hand, combined with a figure
based on a photo, and that landscape sketch I copped from another
artist). This processing likely happens in the studio, away from
distractions, including the distractions of the original information.

The information gathered above may be from observation or invented. (I
am really only talking about pictorial two-dimensional visual art!)

To make something that feels real, as opposed to referring to the
real, I think the information needs to be gathered from reality. To
me, the difference is that between the general and the specific, or
between an idea of something and the something itself.

From experience, I know that if I paint something only looking from my
"mind's eye" the result might be clear but it won't be
specific—illustrations and cartoons are more likely to be less
specific in just this way. Moreover, even when trying to look and see,
it is difficult to overcome learned ideas about what color and shape
the ocean or an apple or anything that we "know" should be. When
novices draw a naked model, the straight men in the class draw her
boobs much bigger than they really are, when novices draw a face, the
shape of the skull gets no consideration and the features are
disproportionately large. (If you want a challenge, find a weird
looking rock and draw that.)

In taking what we see before us and putting it down on the page,
whether as drawing or writing, we engender a kind of translation. I
think of drawing as a series of languages that can be learned or
invented. Which drawing language, under what circumstances, and what
that language means, I think that's another topic.

Reading for Our Seventh Meeting, on May 2, 2012

For our next meeting we will read to page 613 in Volume II of the Modern Library (Moncrieff / Kilmartin / Enright) edition.

This takes us through the Narrator's first visit to Elstir's studio and Saint-Loup's departure from Balbec.

The last passage we will read is an extended "still life" with words, in which Proust describes what he sees on the table before him, having just finished his lunch at the Grand Hotel... "the broken gestures of the knives... the swollen convexity of a discarded napkin... the hollows of oyster-shells..." etc., etc..

It ends:

"I tried to find beauty there where I had never imagined before that it could exist, in the most ordinary things, in the profundities of "still life."

The sentence that follows (surprise! it's a long one) is:

"When, some days after Saint-Loup's departure, I had succeeded in persuading Elstir to give a small party at which I should meet Albertine, the freshness of appearance and elegance of attire, both quite momentary, which were to be observed in me at the moment of my starting out from the Grand Hotel (and which were due respectively to a longer rest than usual and to special pains over my toilet) were such that I regretted my inability to reserve them (and also the credit accruing from Elstir's friendship) for the captivation of some other, more interesting person, I regretted having to use them all up on the simple pleasure of making Albertine's acquaintance."

This way, for the final meeting on June 6, before we break for summer, we will have finished Volume II (page 730 of the Modern Library edition).

Over the summer we will absorb what we have read so far, and prepare ourselves for the plunge into Volume III, The Guermantes Way, on September 5!

 

A Synopsis of Volumes I and II (Dave's Presentation on May 2, 2012)

by David Rees

The following is the presentation Dave made for the May 2, 2012, meeting:

Notes on the May 2, 2012 Meeting

These notes cover pp. 502 - 613 of Volume Two, Within a Budding Grove, in the Modern Library edition (Moncrieff / Kilmartin / Enright).

Just before the clock struck 8:30 pm I was called upstairs (to kiss my little girl Adeline goodnight one last time), so Dirk took up the tradition of clinking a glass and announcing that it was time to move to the living room and begin our meeting.

Rachel's caramel and apple tort had already vanished by that point (a total mystery how that happened! Why are you all looking at me and Dirk?) so everybody obliged.

As we settled into our seats, Jeanne passed around a postcard showing a photograph of Marcel's Proust's cork-lined room (or rather, she explained, a composite of three different rooms that he had occupied in Paris).

She had picked it up when she visited the Carnavalet Museum, a museum dedicated to the history of Paris (or, apparently, a composite of it!) over the Spring Break.

We were all surprised when she told us how small the dimensions of his bedroom and writing room were, as small as the carpet under our feet. And it was interesting to be able to make out the separate yellow rectangles of the cork panelling on the walls -- put there, as the story goes, for the purpose of shutting out all sounds from the outside world while he wrote.

This got us talking about Proust's physical and psychological disabilities, and the question (which so many of his contemporaries asked, and which so many have asked ever since) of whether they were real or imagined.

Jennifer noted that, having a son with asthma herself, she can well imagine how frightening to his family and Proust himself these attacks must have been. And, as to the psychological side of the question, we all agreed that, at least based on the evidence of his writing, he showed an extreme sensitivity to change, coupled with a constant horror of letting go of attachments. In fact, this latter aspect of his sensibility is so pronounced throughout In Search of Lost Time -- it is so fundamental to his mode of expression --that you might say it would be impossible to fake.

Still, we wondered, thinking of our own concerns as parents, whether (in some parallel universe?) Proust might have been raised in such a way so that he would have grown up more functional, more independent, less traumatized by the drumbeat of daily existence...

As anxious parents ourselves (by the way, when I finally got upstairs, Adeline had been sitting bolt upright, tears streaming down her cheeks... Why didn't you hear me, Daddy? I was scared!), we had to ask: Did Proust's Mom or Dad do something wrong along the way?

After a brief discussion we agreed: parents always mess it up. The justly famous Philip Larkin poem comes to mind here:

This Be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

 They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had    

And add some extra, just for you.

 

But they were fucked up in their turn    

By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern    

And half at one another’s throats.

 

Man hands on misery to man.    

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,    

And don’t have any kids yourself.

 

Our best efforts come up against loss and suffering, those countless turns not taken and mistakes made -- and lose.

So what should we do as parents, then? Sure, let's let M. Proust and Mme Proust off the hook, but is there nothing we can do to guide our children? 

Jennifer suggested that we simply must encourage them, and then step back and observe what happens. Hearing this, I remembered a pasage towards the end of this month's reading, in which Proust expresses a similar approach towards growing up. Thinking on the foolish things he did as a young man, the famous artist Elstir observes to the Narrator:

"We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by everything evil or commonplace that prevailed around them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I can see that the picture of what we were at an earlier stage may not be recognizable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not repudiate it, for it is a proof that we have really lived..." (WBG, 605-606).

While agreeing that the act of discovery -- by way of mistakes and foolishness -- is an important part of growing up, Renée noted that, nevertheless, the lessons that are imparted by our parents and others do have a place. They stay with us, she argued, and they do have value, if only as advice which we dimly recall, and upon which we can fall back when times get tough.

She mentioned that while growing up she often had the experience of discovering some painful life lesson for herself, and then remembering the words of her Step-father or Mother or Father or Great-Grandmother, who had spoken of exactly that kind of situation years before. Knowing that she had been told of something, or cautioned about something, or encouraged to do something, made it easier to comprehend it later.

Picking up on Renée's point, I argued that, after all, we need to give our kids something, don't we? If only so that they have something to define themselves against!  I would prefer to drive them into a ditch with my bad advice, rather than leave them in the lurch. (Got to love those consonant-rich Anglo-Saxon words, don't you, French readers? Lurch. Ditch. No sense of being impeded in our progress here -- a lurch, dammit.)

1. Dave's Presentation, or, Where We Are So Far

Anyway. 

Having started off with this little prelude about values and parenting, it was high time to hear Dave's presentation.

It took the form of a "synopsis of a synopsis" of everything that we have read so far. (The document he produced can be read in its entirety in the previous post.)

In preparing this "synopsis of a synopsis," Dave took the time to review everything he had read to this point, with the aim of finding the plot. In so doing, he discovered that, to his surprise, there really is one!

It turns out, Dave assured us, that the Méséglise Way, characterized in the Combray chapter as the "easy way" to the Narrator's Tante Léonie's house, provides a kind of legend for the first two volumes of the novel... 

Perhaps, he suggested, Swann's obsession with Odette, the Narrator's similar obsession with Gilberte, and maybe even the fantasy element in his love for Albertine (we shall see), all represent variations on this theme of an "easy" way...?  

And when, in Volume III, we arrive at the Guermantes Way, perhaps we will experience an alternative route, a more difficult but also a more enlightened way...?

We all appreciated the added clarity that his work gave to the winding way we have taken so far. For a brief moment I felt as if I could see all 1400+ pages stretching out behind us, perfectly lucid, like the ocean at Balbec on a clear day.

2. The Grandmother

Somehow (was it a continuation of the parenting discussion? I can't remember), we next found ourselves discussing the character of the Narrator's grandmother, who of course travels with him to Balbec and stays in an adjoining room to his at the Grand Hotel.

She struck more than a few of us as a model parental figure for the young Narrator, since she straddles the line (terrible metaphor for a grandmother, sorry) between what we now call "attachment parenting" on the one hand, and fostering the young man's independence, on the other.

She does respond to his knocking on the wall, but as the Narrator notes, her three quick knocks, "stamped with a calm authority, repeated twice over so there should be no mistake," seem to say, "Don't get agitated; I've heard you; I shall be with you in a minute!" (They don't say, "Anything you want my little one! ")

Or there's this exchange, a little later:

"I couldn't live without you," says the Narrator one afternoon in the hotel.

To which his grandmother responds:

"But you mustn't speak like that... We must be a bit pluckier than that. Otherwise, what would become of you if I went away on a journey? But I hope that you would be quite sensible and quite happy" (WBG, 418-419).

Jennifer commented that Proust's detailed observations of the grandmother's preferences for "naturalness," for rain, for open windows, for artistic and intellectual pursuits over practical things, present a clear contrast with the dizzy, superficial social world of, say, Mme Swann. And, further, she enjoys how Proust refrains from interpreting this contrast for us but, rather, leaves it deliberately understated.

I mentioned, though, that there are a few occasions where the Narrator does, subtly but unmistakably, criticize his grandmother. For example, he observes that Saint-Loup, an aristocratic man who has dedicated himself wholly to intellectual pursuits, "made a conquest" of his grandmother right away. But about this Saint-Loup the Narrator remarks:

"...in my own case, if I found Saint-Loup a trifle earnest, he could not understand why I was not more earnest still. Never judging anything except by its intellectual weightiness, never perceiving the magic appeal to the imagination that I found in things which he condemned as frivolous, he was astonished that I -- to whom he imagined himself to be so utterly inferior -- could take any interest in them" (WBG, 428).

The Narrator thus makes it plain that whereas he personally makes no distinction between high brow and low brow art or ideas (seeing them as one and the same: material for enchantment), Saint-Loup is more prejudiced. Saint-Loup -- and his grandmother, it is implied -- are bound up in a more limited view of the world but don't even recognize its limitations.

In the case of Saint-Loup, here is a man who has self-consciously translated his aristocratic heritage, i.e the identity of the warrior, the hunter, the ruthless ruler of men, into a focus on art and ideas. "His head," writes Proust, "reminded one of those old castle keeps on which the disused battlements are still to be seen, although inside they have been converted into libraries" (WBG, 544). 

But when talking about Saint-Loup's uncle, the Baron de Charlus, Proust explains that such aristocratic inclination towards art and intellectual pursuits can be "dangerous to people like my grandmother, to whom the less refined but more innocent prejudice of nobleman who cared only about quarterings and took no thought for anything besides would have appeared too silly for words, whereas she was defenseless as soon as a thing presented itself under the externals of an intellectual superiority" (WBG, 461-462).

According to the Narrator, then, his grandmother is too willing to be seduced by aristocratic tastes for art, as well as the air of 'naturalness' that Saint-Loup carries with him (WBG, 428), failing to recognize that these, too, are expressions of conquest and acculturation -- no more authentic than Odette's fans and perfumes and perfunctories.

3. The Narrator Discovering Himself

Somewhere around this point, perhaps prompted by this mention of the Narrator's criticisms of his own grandmother, our conversation turned to how the character of the Narrator is changing as we watch him grow older. I mentioned that, despite my continued absorption in the themes and characters and scenes of the novel, and my astonishment at how rich it is, I find myself, well, not liking the Narrator as much during this Balbec sojourn. He seems to be edging towards a realization of his own unique talent as an artist, which is fine, but sometimes he seems to add to this a tone of snobbery or superiority towards others, which I hadn't noticed in him as a boy. I offered some examples to support my view:

When he is accompanies Saint-Loup to Rivebelle, a trendy restaurant, the Narrator observes the people around him and comments:

"... I rather pited all the diners because I felt that for them the round tables were not planets and that they had not cut through the scheme of things in such a way to be delivered from the bondage of habitual appearances and enabled to perceive analogies. They thought that they were dining with this or that person, that the dinner would cost roughly so much, and that tomorrow they would begin all over again" (WBG, 533).

So now he pities the regular, unimaginative people around him? Before he marveled at them! (Renée rightly pointed out that he is drunk in this scene, and that his comments are best understood with that in mind.)

And there's another one. Speaking of whether or not he would throw himself over a bomb to protect strangers around him, the Narrator remarks:

"I have come to realize that the lives of many of the people in front of whom I plant myself when a bomb bursts are more valueless even than my own" (ML, 591).

This shocked me when I read it. Again, though, Renée challenged my initial reading of it. She and Jennifer both read this line more as a reflection of the Narrator's growing recognition that he is to be valued, he is somebody of equal worth to anybody else. Naturally, part of this recognition is that you don't want to throw yourself onto a bomb to protect the lives of strangers who, after all, would not do the same for you.

4. What Happens When Adolescent Boys Take "Naps"

To provide some comic relief, I read aloud a passage describing what happens when the Narrator returns to the Grand Hotel after a day out at the beach looking at girls. There's still an hour before dinner, so he has a little time before he has get changed. What to do?

"I threw myself down on the bed," the Narrator says. "...I was surrounded on all sides by pictures of the sea." The scene now set, I continued to read:

"But... they were, indeed, only pictures: I forgot that below their coloured expanse lay the sad desolation of the beach, swept by the restless evening breeze whose breath I had so anxiously felt on my arrival in Balbec; besides, even in my room, being wholly taken up with thoughts of the girls I had seen go by, I was no longer in a sufficiently calm or disinterested state of mind to receive any really profound impression of beauty. The anticipation of dinner at Rivebelle made my mood more frivolous still, and my mind, dwelling at such moments upon the surface of the body which I was about to dress up in order to try to appear as pleasing as possible to the feminine eyes which would scrutinise me in the well-lit restaurant, was incapable of putting any depth behind the colour of things" (WBG, 524).

At this point a few phrases lingered in our minds: "I threw myself down on the bed... no longer in a sufficiently calm or disinterested state of mind... dwelling at such moments upon the surface of my body..." A few people were starting to exchange looks and smile.

Hold on, I told the group, It gets even better. Here we go:

"And if, beneath my window, the soft, unwearying flight of swifts and swallows had not arisen like a playing fountain, like living fireworks, joining the intervals between their soaring rockets with the motionless white streaming lines of long horizontal wakes -- without the charming miracle of this natural and local phenomenon which brought into touch with reality the scenes that I had before my eyes -- I might easily have believed that they were no more than a selection, made fresh every day, of paintings..." (WBG, 524-525).

In French it's just as wonderful (Lucie found it and sent it by email):

"L’attente du dîner à Rivebelle rendait mon humeur plus frivole encore
et ma pensée, habitant à ces moments-là la surface de mon corps que
j’allais habiller pour tâcher de paraître le plus plaisant possible
aux regards féminins qui me dévisageraient dans le restaurant
illuminé, était incapable de mettre de la profondeur derrière la
couleur des choses. Et si, sous ma fenêtre, le vol inlassable et doux
des martinets et des hirondelles n’avait pas monté comme un jet d’eau,
comme un feu d’artifice de vie, unissant l’intervalle de ses hautes
fusées par la filée immobile et blanche de longs sillages horizontaux,
sans le miracle charmant de ce phénomène naturel et local qui
rattachait à la réalité les paysages que j’avais devant les yeux,
j’aurais pu croire qu’ils n’étaient qu’un choix, chaque jour
renouvelé, de peintures qu’on montrait arbitrairement dans l’endroit
où je me trouvais et sans qu’elles eussent de rapport nécessaire avec
lui. "

By this time we were all cracking up. I mentioned how it is truly amazing that Proust can take something as seemingly straightforward as masturbation and find something exquisite to say about it: a "charming miracle" (le miracle charmant), he calls it, one that brings the scenes that we have before our eyes "into touch with reality" (rattachait à la réalité)! Kind of a catchy slogan for an adult website, don't you think? www.thecharmingmiracle.com

Got you.

5. The Birdsong in All of Us

Trying desperately to segue away from all that, I mentioned another mention of a bird that stood out to me. Just after the Narrator describes the "pure pleasure" that seeing three trees by the side of the road brought him, he remarks on the sound of birdsong that fills his ears as he rides in Mme de Villeparisis' open carriage:

"The invisibility of the numberless birds that took up one another's song close beside us in the trees gave me the same sense of being at rest that one has when one shuts one's eyes... And whenever I caught a glimpse of one of those birds as it flitted from one leaf to another, there was so little apparent connexion between it and the songs I heard that I could not believe I was beholding their cause in that little body, fluttering, startled and blank" (WBG, 408).

When I read it this struck me as such an apt description of humanity: "fluttering, startled and blank," but capable of beautiful song.

6. The Six Girls

Somehow we began talking of the scene in which the six girls are introduced, including Albertine. We all commented on how vivid this picture is: the crowd, the girls, the octogenarian they climb over, the Narrator's inability to look away. Renée read the description of his first encounter with them:

"Although each was of a type absolutely different from the others, they all had beauty; but to tell the truth I had seen them for so short a time, and without venturing to look hard at them, that I had not yet individualized any of them... [T]hey were known to me by a pair of hard, obstinate and mocking eyes, for instance, or by cheeks whose pinkness had a coppery tint reminiscent of geraniums; and even these features I had not yet indissolubly attached to any one of these girls rather than to another; and when (according to the order in which the group met the eye, marvellous because the most different aspects were juxtaposed, because all the colour scales were combined in it, but confused as a piece of music in which I was unable to isolate and identify at the moment of their passage the successive phrases, no sooner distinguished than forgotten) I saw a pallid oval, black eyes, green eyes, emerge... And this want, in my vision, of the demarcations which I should presently establish between them permeated the group with a sort of shimmering harmony, the continuous trasmutation of a fluid, collective and mobile beauty" (WBG, 505).

Renée remarked that this was almost like a Cubist painting but done with words. It is so strange, and yet matches so well with how we actually perceive a group of faces for the first time. Heather commented how the Narrator's perceptions, and the whole scene at the beach, all could be present-day. We sometimes think because they wore frilly dresses and top hats and tails they were different, but the psychology of humankind shares so many commonalities through the centuries.

7. Love as Fantasy, Love as Regret

The last topic of discussion that I recall (I felt muddle-headed all night, and just as I feared, I'm having trouble reconstructing what happened), concerned the differences (and similarities) between love based on fantasy and love based on real incidents, time spent together, the minutia of existing day to day.

I mentioned how Proust describes the close relationship between love and impossibility. As he puts it:

"Variation of a belief, annulment also of love, which, pre-existent and mobile, comes to rest on the image of a woman simply because that woman will be almost impossible of attainment. Thenceforward we think not so much of the woman, whom we have difficulty in picturing to ourselves, as of the means of getting to know her. A whole series of agonies develops and is sufficient to fix our love definitely upon her who is its almost unknown object. Our love becomes immense, and we never dream how small a place in it the real woman occupies" (WBG, 597).

Renée read a quite different passage, which describes a passing moment in the ongoing relationship between the Narrator and his grandmother. He intentionally hurts her, and then regrets it:

"I assured her that I saw no harm in it [a photographic session he did not want to attend], and let her adorn herself, but, thinking to show how shrewd and forceful I was, added a few sarcastic and wounding words calculated to neutralize the pleasure which she seemed to find in being photographed, with the result that, if I was obliged to see my grandmother's magnificent hat, I succeeded at least in driving from her face that joyful expression which ought to have made me happy. Alas, it too often happens, while the people we love best are still alive, that such expressions appear to us as the exasperating manifestation of some petty whim rather than as the precious form of happiness which we should dearly like to procure for them" (WBG, 501).

This, Renée, argued, is the true nature of love. Not based on impossibility or wishing, but on procuring happiness (or failing to, but always trying to) for others, and occasionally seeing a joyful expression on the faces of those whom we love. This is the ongoing experience of love.

Surely, though, I argued, Proust is embracing both as forms of love. After all, there's that great story of the man who had a love affair with a woman who, as a result, gave birth to their child out of wedlock, whom he then raised as his own child after the woman died. When asked, years later, if the girl, now grown, had gotten her pretty hair from her mother, Proust tells us... "I don't know, was the old man's quaint answer, "I never saw her except with a hat on." 

Yet he had built his life around her! (Jennifer shared a remarkably similar story, but hers came from the movie City Slickers, starring Billy Crystal, for which, very rightfully, we gave her a hard time.)

Well, that's about all I can recall. If anyone wants to add anything in the comments (or as a separate post), please do. From one fluttering, startled and blank bird to all of you: tweet.

 

Reading for Our Eighth Meeting, on June 6, 2012

For our last meeting before the summer, please read to the end of Volume II, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower... Within a Budding Grove).