356. Swann's Way - Combray 3

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The foods I miss the most while sheltering in place and mostly preparing my own meals:

Veggie burrito with avocado and green salsa from Cancun

Veggie deli sandwich from Roxie Food Center

Blueberry pancakes with butter and syrup from Olympic Flame Cafe

My usual Indian meal at Udupi Palace

Vegan Delight breakfast with a biscuit and iced tea at The Pork Store

Combray 3

I stopped last time just before one of my favorite passages/scenes in the entire work. Here it is now, the passage that I should like to show to Jane Austen,

P100 “...it was Legrandin himself who, without the least suspicion... walked into the trap uninvited one evening, when we met him strolling on the banks of the Vivonne.

“‘There are tints in the clouds this evening, violets and blues, which are very beautiful, are they not, my friend?’ He said to my father. ‘Especially a blue which is far more floral than atmospheric, a cineraria blue, which it is surprising to see in the sky... Nowhere, perhaps, except on the shores of the English Channel, where Normandy merges into Brittany, have I been able to find such copious examples of what you might call a vegetable kingdom in the clouds. Down there, close to Balbec, among all those places which are still so uncivilized, there is a little bay... In that bay... the golden sands appear more charming still from being fastened like fair Andromeda, to those terrible rocks of the surrounding coast... Balbec! The oldest bone in the geological skeleton that underlies our soil... the land’s end, the accursed region which Anatole France -- an enchanter whose works our young friend ought to read -- has so well depicted... how delightful it is, down there. To be able to step out at once into regions so primitive and so entrancing.’

“‘Indeed! And do you know anyone at Balbec?’ inquired my father. ‘This young man is just going to spend a couple of months there with his grandmother, and my wife too, perhaps.’

“Legrandin, taken unawares by the question at a moment when he was looking directly at my father, was unable to turn aside his gaze, and so concentrated it with steadily increasing intensity -- smiling mournfully the while -- upon the eyes of his questioner, with an air of friendliness and frankness and of not being afraid to look him in the face, until be seemed to have penetrated my father’s skull... and to be seeing, at the moment, a long way beyond and behind it, a brightly coloured cloud, which provided him with a mental alibi, and would enable him to establish the theory that, just when he was being asked whether he knew anyone at Balbec, he had been thinking of something else, and so had not heard the question. As a rule these tactics make the questioner proceed to ask, ‘Why, what are you thinking about?’ But my father, inquisitive, annoyed, and cruel, repeated: ‘Have you friends, then in that neighborhood, that you know Balbec so well?’

P101 “In a final and desperate effort the smiling gaze of Legrandin struggled to the extreme limits of its tenderness, vagueness, candour, and distraction; then feeling, no doubt, that there was nothing left for it now but to answer, he said to us: ‘’I have friends all the world over, wherever there are companies of trees, stricken but not defeated, which have come together to offer a common supplication, with pathetic obstinacy, to an inclement sky which has no mercy upon them.’

‘That is not quite what I meant,’ interrupted my father, obstinate as a tree and merciless as the sky. ‘I asked you, in case anything should happen to my mother-in-law and she wanted to feel that she was not all alone down there, at the ends of the earth, whether you knew any people.’

‘There as elsewhere, I know everyone and I know no one,’ replied Legrandin, who was by no means ready to surrender... That land which knows not truth,’ he continued with Machiavellian subtlety, ‘that land of infinite fiction makes bad reading for any boy, and is certainly not what I should choose or recommend for my young friend here, who is already so inclined to melancholy, for a heart already predisposed to receive its impressions... Believe me’ he went on with emphasis, ‘the waters of that bay -- more Breton than Norman -- may exert a sedative influence, though even that is of questionable value, upon a heart which, like mine, is no longer unbroken... But at your age, my boy, those waters are contra-indicated. . . . Good night to you, neighbours,’ he added, moving away from us with that evasive abruptness to which we were accustomed; and then, turning toward us, with a physicianly finger raised in warning, he resumed the consultation: ‘No Balbec before you are fifty!’ he called out to me, ‘and even then it must depend on the state of the heart.’

“My father spoke to him of it again, as often as we met him, and tortured him with questions, but it was a labour in vain... M. Legrandin, had we insisted further, would in the end have constructed a whole system of ethics, and a celestial geography of Lower Normandy, sooner that admit to us that, within a mile of Balbec, his own sister was living in her own house; sooner than find himself obliged to offer us a letter of introduction....”

Because I have a family history of skin cancer, and I tend to work out in the sun for eight hours a shift, often twice a week, I take a range of precautions. I use a good sunscreen on days when I work. I wear a special hat and sleeves that protect my skin from the sun. But my third layer of protection in recent years has been my hair. I’ve managed it so that it starts growing over my ears and the back of my neck when my greening season starts mid-April. And it was right where it should be. But now there is no greening work in my immediate future so yesterday I trimmed it back so as to be out of my way.

Under other circumstances, though under the other circumstances I wouldn’t need to trim it, I would have gone to my poor barber and had her do the trimming. As it is I see her once a year. And if I hadn’t been going to her for over thirty years, she probably wouldn’t even remember me from one year to the next. Fortunately, my hair hasn’t changed much, except to become rather straighter than it once was. But I’ve frequently cut my own hair in the past and giving myself a trim at a time when virtually no one sees me, is not all that hard.

I keep hearing in the news about others of our usual events that have been cancelled. The Berkeley Book Fair was the most recent. And while I still would like to hope that the situation might change by September and October, it’s hard to imagine. And even if some of our events did return, it’s hard to imagine my working them unless I either gain immunity through getting it or a vaccine appears out of nowhere.


It has finally gotten warm again so I have a window open onto the garden next door. Thus my apartment’s soundscape is now dominated by the sound of a mourning dove. Fortunately, I like their often repeated tune. And nearly every morning I have to chase out a bee that has somehow slipped in my closed sash style windows. The bush right outside my window is covered in small flowers... though that probably gives too attractive an image. These “flowers” are useful to the bush and to the bees, but that’s all that can be said for them.


Young Marcel sees Gilberte for the first time, but what I find more interesting is the introduction of the Baron.

P109 “‘Gilberte, come along; what are you doing?’ called out in a piercing tone of authority a lady in white [Odette], whom I had not seen until that moment, while, a little way beyond her, a gentleman in a suit of linen ‘ducks,’ whom I did not know either [Charlus], stared at me with eyes which seemed to be starting from his head... ”
...

“...I loved her; I was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to do her some injury, to force her to keep some memory of me. I knew her to be so beautiful that I should have liked to be able to retrace my steps so as to shake my fist at her and shout, ‘’I think you are hideous, grotesque; you are utterly disgusting!’...”

P115 “...For constantly, after meeting M. Vinteuil, he [Swann] would remember that he had been meaning for a long time to ask him about some one of the same name as himself, one of his relatives, Swann supposed. And on this occasion he determined that he would not forget what he had to say to him when M. Vinteuil should appear with his daughter at Tansonville.”

Which Vinteuil never does so I guess Swann does not learn that he is the composer of the “little phrase.” Though one can imagine Marcel informing him of this fact once Swann tells him his story. If I have that right.

P137 “...suddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight reflected from a stone, the smell of a road would make me stop still, to enjoy the special pleasure that each of them gave me, and also because they appeared to be concealing, beneath what my eyes could see, something which the invited me to approach and seize from them, but which, despite all my efforts, I never managed to discover. As I felt that the mysterious object was to be found in them, I would stand there ... motionless, gazing, breathing, endeavoring to penetrate with my mind beyond the thing seen or smelt... It was certainly not any impression of this kind that could or would restore the hope I had lost of succeeding one day in becoming an author and poet, for each of them was associated with some material object devoid of intellectual value, and suggested no abstract truth. But at least they gave me an unreasoning pleasure, the illusion of a sort of fecundity of mind; and in that way distracted me from the tedium, for the sense of my own impotence which I had felt whenever I had sought a philosophic theme for some great literary work...”

Shortly after this is the passage about the three church steeples roaming about, in perspective, on the horizon. I know how that works but I still don’t know what he’s getting at in talking about it. But, the passage above reminded me of something else as I was rereading it. One of my favorite passages in The Elegance of the Hedgehog is the one where Paloma has her Zen moment with the falling flower petal -- in the past I’ve called it satori but I see that kensho may be more appropriate, though that’s a term I don't recall hearing before. Young Marcel is trying too hard to grasp what his senses are suggesting to him. But if kensho is “flashes of the enlightened state” what is so enlightened about these rocks or roads or even the central madeleine experience? 

Proust is not the philosopher of transcendence or satori or “fully awakening to your Buddha nature.” He is the prophet of this world, of fully appreciating maya. Devi went to a lot of trouble to dream all this up, and Marcel fully appreciates it. Or at least he tries. Whether it’s the hawthorn blossoms or a hat worn twenty years before, he discovers the divinity in the phenomena around us.

And that wraps up Combray, I’m almost sad to say, and clears the way for Swann In Love. And who does tell him this story? I thought it was Swann himself, when Marcel had insinuated himself in Swann’s house in pursuit of Gilberte and was then distracted by Odette.

355. Swann's Way - Combray 2

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Today I defrosted my freezer. I’ve been defrosting this particular freezer for 27 years now and yet I came up with a new refinement in my technique just this time -- I sponge out the water from as soon as there is any in the drip tray, rather then waiting until the end. 

The refrigerator is actually a little larger than I need and I wouldn’t object to a frost-free machine, but this little machine just keeps on working so I find it hard to replace. And it would be a shame to let this defrosting skill set go to waste along with so many others. I’m only half kidding about that.

Day 35 of Shelter In Place and I made my first trip to a supermarket (Trader Joe’s). The last time I was there, shortly before SIP started, the shelves had been almost empty. Today the shelves were stocked, with a few exceptions, but the store was nearly deserted with only a few customers allowed in at a time, and a long, well spaced line in front and extending for almost a block down the side of the building. Took well over thirty minutes to get in the front door, but then everything went quickly. I usually only buy a bag of groceries at a time, but this time I filled two bags and limited myself to just the items I couldn’t get at my corner markets. (Forgot to get better potatoes because I didn’t write it on my list. Baked potatoes have become one of my staples.)

You can’t give them your reusable bags now, but I had the checker leave the heavy items in my basket and only bag the lighter, bulkier items. Then I took the basket outside and emptied it into my usual cloth bag. Aside from the potatoes and the fact that I was exposed to more people than I’ve seen in 35 days -- I had my n95 mask on -- it went as well as it could have. I suspect there will be new rules in a month when I need to return. But now I have my favorite hummus, trail mix, granola, and brown rice, not to mention a few of the other unexpected items you always add in when you’re browsing TJ’s.


Less than 10 “known” cases in my zipcode (zipcode with most cases has 171) and my zipcode covers more blocks than I knew. I have to say this makes me feel a little better. By no means does this means I’m in a virus free zone, but it certainly isn’t rampant here. 

You can’t help wondering, every time you leave your house, if you’re making a big mistake. Sure, I’m taking “reasonable” precautions and I’m only going out for food and exercise; but I know other people my age are not going out at all. I’m doing a good job of keeping fit -- and I do live in a tiny apartment -- but if I were to come down with COVID-19 I would probably spend some time kicking myself for taking the risks I’m taking. I’m sure I would quickly fall back on “Good luck. Bad Luck. Who knows?” but in this particular case I would just as soon not learn anything from this path of illness. 


April 22, 2020 is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Seems like only yesterday. And we, and by “we” I mean the SARS-CoV-2 virus, have finally done something meaningful. The demand for oil is so reduced that if you had an empty oil tanker in the right location you could have oil companies pay you to take the oil off their hands. So of course thousands of Americans are protesting that they would rather die than live this way.

I covered the first Earth Day for my high school newspaper, which involved riding my 10 speed bike back and forth between Scottsdale and Arizona State University in Tempe collecting information and documentation. I would have to dig out my copy of that issue from storage, but I seem to recall I had the better part of a two page spread all to myself, The high point of my journalism career.

I think I had already sold my little Fiat, my first and last car, but I wouldn’t become a vegetarian for a couple more months. It still amazes me how few people have been motivated to change their habits by Earth Day and later Global Climate Change. The shared consensus seems to be that these are problems either the government or big business should address. Instead, it’s taken a virus to make a change. 

Combray continued

Vinteuil and Swann
P86 “M. Vinteuil... had retired to the neighborhood of Combray, we used often to invite him to our house, but with his intense prudishness he had given up coming, so as not to be obliged to meet Swann, who had made what he called ‘a most unsuitable marriage, as seems to be the fashion these days.’”

This is a perfect example of something you can only appreciate when rereading. The “little phrase” in The Vinteuil Sonata plays a key role in Swann’s romance with Odette. I can’t recall if Swann’s passion for that music survives his passion for Odette, and Vinteuil is such an ass I doubt that Swann would regret missing his company at dinner, but it is still a shame.

P88 “Although Saturday... passed more slowly than the other days for my aunt, yet, the moment it was past... she would look forward with impatience to its return, as something that embodied all the novelty and distraction which her frail and disordered body was still able to endure. This was not to say... that she did not long, at times, for some even greater variation, that she did not pass through those abnormal hours in which one thirsts for something different from what one has, when those people who, through lack of energy or imagination, are unable to generate any motive power in themselves, cry out, as... the postman knocks, in their eagerness for news (even if it be bad news), for some emotion (even that of grief); when the heart strings, which prosperity has silenced, like a harp laid by, yearns to be plucked and sounded again by some hand, even a brutal hand, even if it shall break them; when the will, which has with such difficulty brought itself to subdue its impulse, to renounce its right to abandon itself to its own uncontrolled desires, and consequent sufferings, would fain cast its guiding reins into the hands of circumstances, coercive and, it may be, cruel...”

It occurs to me, this reading, that much of this about his “aunt” must really be about the author. 


“...She was genuinely fond of us; she would have enjoyed the long luxury of weeping for our untimely decease; coming at a moment when she felt ‘well’ and was not in a perspiration, the news that the house was being destroyed by a fire, in which all the rest of us had already perished, a fire which, in a little while, would leave not one stone standing upon another, but from which she herself would still have plenty of time to escape without undue haste... must often have haunted her dreams, as a prospect which combined with the two minor advantages of letting her taste the full savour of her affection for us in long years of mourning, and of causing universal stupefaction in the village when she should sally forth to conduct our obsequies, crushed but courageous, moribund but erect, the paramount and priceless boon of forcing her at the right moment... to go off and spend the summer at her charming farm of Mirougrain, where there was a waterfall...”

354. Swann's Way - Combray

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Swann’s Way

Combray

I just realized I’m even starting this at the right time of the year. This was when Marcel’s family would arrive from Paris. 

While walking today it occurred to me that if a taste or smell were likely to restore to me the house and situation of my Alabama aunt, it would almost certainly be the smell that came from the air conditioner in my uncle’s Lincoln Continental. This was a fancy car, electric window controls and the like, but it had seen better days and the smell produced by the air conditioner was powerful. The kind of smell that makes you wonder how safe it really was to breath the air. This would have been around 1960, give or take a few years.


I’ve had another “madeleine” moment. Well, a hint of one. Since I started sheltering-in-place I’ve been making myself peanut butter and honey sandwiches on a regular basis. Something I rarely do. And this has reminded me of something I had almost forgotten about. My freshman year at university my main activity, outside class, was working for the local war resistance group. Mostly I counseled guys my age who didn’t want to go to Vietnam. We also organized protests in town and on campus. But our most frequent activity was running a lunch program in a church a block off campus. Every day I would walk or bike over there and join the crew preparing lunch for people. All I remember making was peanut butter and honey sandwiches. 


It’s likely that by the time I stopped doing that I had had more than enough PB&H sandwiches for most of my life. Only now, fifty years later, am I returning to that easy lunch option for vegetarians. But now I think about it, I think there were also some quite delicious bean and rice dishes I recall having for Thanksgiving, probably that same year.

P37 “My grandfather’s cousin -- by courtesy my great-aunt -- with whom we used to stay, was the mother of that aunt Leonie who, since her husband’s (my uncle Octave’s) death, had gradually declined to leave, first Combray, then her house in Combray, then her bedroom, and finally her bed; and who now never ‘came down,’ but lay perpetually in an indefinite condition of grief, physical exhaustion, illness, obsessions, and religious observances... The air of those rooms was saturated with the fine bouquet of a silence so nourishing, so succulent that I could not enter them without a sort of greedy enjoyment, particularly on those first mornings, chilly still, of the Easter holidays, when I could taste it more fully... I would turn to and fro between the prayer-desk and the stamped velvet armchairs... while the fire, baking like a pie the appetizing smells with which the air of the room was thickly clotted, which the dewy and sunny freshness of the morning had already ‘raised’ and started to ‘set,’ puffed them and glazed them and fluted them and swelled them into an invisible though not impalpable country cake, an immense puff-pastry, in which, barely waiting to savour the crustier, more delicate, more respectable, but also drier smells of the cupboard, the chest-of-drawers, and the patterned wall-paper I always returned with an unconfessed gluttony to bury myself in the nondescript, resinous, dull, indigestible, and fruity smell of the flowered quilt.”

And that, in case you didn’t know, is the sort of book this is. And still talking about aunt Leonie (though maybe not only aunt Leonie),

P38 “...in the life of complete inertia which she lead she attached to the least of her sensations an extraordinary importance, endowing them with a Protean ubiquity which made it difficult for her to keep them secret, and, failing a confident to whom she might communicate them, she used to promulgate them to herself in an unceasing monologue which was her sole form of activity...”


The first mention of the character Bergotte. I find he is linked to both John Ruskin and Anatole France. Ruskin would seem to be of more interest to Ford Madox Ford, but Anatole France certainly makes sense. And Swann all but dooms Marcel to fall in love with his daughter by describing her friendship with Bergotte, who is a friend of the family. As we shall see in time. And this is said about Bergotte and philosophy,

P73 “...I cherished his philosophy, and had pledged myself to it in lifelong devotion. It made me impatient to reach the age when I should be eligible to attend the class at school called ‘Philosophy.’ I did not wish to learn or do anything else there, but simply exist and be guided entirely by the mind of Bergotte, and, if I had been told that the metaphysicians whom I was actually to follow there resembled him in nothing, I would have been struck down by the despair a young lover feels... when a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to come.”

P78 I tend to forget that the village church at Combray is also where the Guermantes are buried and where young Marcel first sees the Duc de Guermantes and his Duchesse. And Marcel laughs at his grandmother (Mme. Amédée) along with the rest of the family when she asserts that her school friend, Mme. de Villeparisis is related to the Guermantes.

We are now in day 34 of Social Distancing and San Francisco is finally up to twenty known deaths from COVID-19. We have certainly succeeded in “flattening” the curve, which unfortunately also means we are almost as vulnerable as before to fresh exposure when people return to town. And our tourist economy makes this even worse. As long as the virus is a problem anywhere there will be people there wanting to bring it here. 

I for one, am eating very well this weekend. I ordered a bunch of dishes from a local Burmese restaurant -- my favorite place is on the other side of town -- and am slowly heating them up and adding my own bread or brown rice. Curiously, this place lists cheesecake as one of their specialties, so I gave it a try... they weren’t kidding. One of the best I’ve ever had, not counting the kind with chocolate swirled in with the cheese. But for a simple cheesecake it is perfect.

I have now received four weeks of unemployment, even less per week now that I asked them to withhold taxes from the payments, but I also received the $1,200 “stimulus” payment from the government that is intended to get the economy restarted again. How? I’m incredibly fortunate in that my income, excluding my seasonal work, just about matches my expenses. My Unemployment Payments are ridiculously small they average my usual income over twelve months rather than six. I will be short at the end of the year, but that’s mostly because of some unexpected things I’ve had to pay for related to my building.

My point is, I don’t need the $1,200 to survive so I could rush out and spend it, but then what’s open? I admit I’m tempted to replace my infuriatingly slow Windows laptop with a better machine. One with a generation of microprocessor that doesn’t have a flawed security design. Under other circumstances I would take the bus down to Best Buy and shop for such a machine, but today they won’t let you in the building. And all the ads are amazingly blind to the whole security problem. You’d think the machines with new chips would be announcing that fact but it seems like everyone had decided to downplay the chip issue since they are all still trying to sell machines with the bad chips. I’m going to have to do all my own research and then track down a likely machine. Am I then going to go to the trouble of dealing with a local business? Maybe, but maybe not. And how much good does my buying a new laptop do the national economy?

I would love to go on a restaurant binge. Eat really well and over-tip right and left -- and I probably will do this to the extent that I can -- but most of the places I would usually go are closed or too remote at the moment. And I’m tempted to just use the $1,200 to make up for some of the money I hadn’t planned on spending on the building. So some or all of it will probably just go to savings. Though this is s stupid time to save when the government seems determined to inflate the currency.

The other option, and this is the other thing I probably will do, is give a portion of the “stimulus” funds to charities that I otherwise wouldn’t be able to support this year with my reduced income. And I can do that now rather than at the end of the year, when I usually give. 


I’m glad we had this chat.

353. Swann's Way - Overture

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Swann’s Way

by Marcel Proust (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff)
Random House - 1924-25

Overture

Since I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read this, I’m not entirely sure now if my deep interest in dreams and dreaming is something I have in common with Proust or if I caught this from him. My dreams are so much more interesting than my waking life that it really doesn’t bear thinking about. Hardly a night goes by when I don’t awaken, in the night or in the morning or even better after having fallen back asleep in the morning, and am astounded by the beauty and complexity, and sometimes just the strangeness, of my dreams. And here is something in particular that I know very well.

P5 “...for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse and surmount centuries of civilization, and out of a half-visualized succession of oil-lamps, followed by shirts with turned-down collars, would put together by degrees the component parts of my ego.”

I sleep in a very dark room and so often I will awaken with no idea where I am. That I was just the instant before “someplace” quite different doesn’t reduce the confusion. Usually there is some light from the streetlight outside that penetrates my closed shutters. And if it is morning, there is a hint of light from several directions. But it takes a moment for me to orient myself, not just in my room but in time and place. 

I do wonder how this works for a blind person. If it is early or late there might be sounds to tell me something, but between 1 and 3 am it is nearly silent here. Without the visual clue of light I would not know where to even look for a light or a door. Or for my glasses.

But memory does reassemble your identity over time. 

San Francisco April 8, 2020
We are now in the fifth week of Sheltering in Place or practicing Social Distancing. Today I went out and walked up and down a relatively level stretch of Pine street for thirty blocks. I didn’t interact with anyone so I didn’t wear my face mask. Probably tomorrow I will need to go to the post office so I will wear my mask for that excursion. The streets are mostly deserted and many of the stores are boarded up. It’s rather more dull than the post-apocalyptic fantasies we’ve seen in films. I have been busy this whole time with homeowners association business so I have been anything but bored. I am hoping to have more time on my hands later this week, but that’s what I thought last week as well.

What I miss are things that would not have meant much to Proust, social distancing in his cork lined room. I miss settling in at a cafe with my iced tea to work or read. I have not had a drop of iced tea, or alcohol, since this started. I miss seeing the usual faces at the cafes I frequent. I worry about the workers and the businesses.

On the other hand, I’m amazed at what the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been able to achieve in a matter of months. The Paris Agreement was a half measure that I never believed everyone would live up to, but this virus is taking care of business. I never thought we would willingly do what was necessary, but I did think it would be a global recession or depression that could make a difference, this is even more effective in that it is immobilizing even the wealthy. The cruise and tourism industry is not going to recover quickly from this. Which means the carbon reduction should last for some time. Will it be enough to make a difference? Is it already too late? I don’t know. 

Even when I can return to the cafes, my seasonal work at public events is going to be slow to return. And San Francisco will be hit hard economically. We are known for tech but its tourism that pays the bills.

But as far as the pandemic goes, we are doing remarkably well. Today we counted only our tenth death. So far (knock on wood) we’re getting only a death every few days. Though that could change quickly as there are already cases in the huge, city run nursing home and several cases in the homeless shelters. I don’t see how those two communities can avoid being consumed by the pandemic.

But the city as a whole went to sheltering in place early and it seems to be working. Also, I think a lot of people left town. I know four people in my building and another two or three across the alley went home to their families. Students and even some workers can work remotely from anywhere. I would love to know by how much the population of the city has dropped. 

I’m assembling lists of places I want to go (mostly foods I want to eat) as soon as things return to normal. But how many of my favorite places will survive? In many ways, this, especially if it goes on longer than two months, is going to be as bad as the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. It could take the better part of a decade for business to return to normal. All the more so if this is the start of the Trump Depression, which is quite possible.


Another day has passed with very little change. Yesterday 799 people died of COVID-19 just in NYC and there are now more cases in New York state than in any country besides the USA. No one seems to have handled the pandemic worse than New York. Our death count is still at 10. I realize that counting the weeks is confusing so I’m going to switch to a day count, starting with the day I and the City independently decided to embrace Social Distancing. This is then Day 23. So 23 days since I’ve been able to walk into a cafe, order some tea, and sit down to work. And I’m still refining my Social Distancing routine. I wear my N95 mask when I’m going to interact with someone at a market or bank or post office. And as of today, I’m wearing a cloth mask even when I go out for exercise. The latest word is that the six foot safety zone idea may not be good enough. So with a cloth mask I am preventing any viruses I may have -- there’s no way to know for sure if you have it -- from contaminating someone else as I huff and puff up my hill while giving me a similar degree of protection from anything in the air around me. Not perfect protection, but something.

When you think about it, and look at what’s happened around NYC and even in Singapore of late, it would seem to be a lost cause, yet the case count for San Francisco has gone from increasing around 70% every three days to the most recent count of 25%. That is a greatly flattened curve.


I’ve finished reading about young Marcel’s sad victory over his mother leading to a reading of parts of, but not all of, a novel by George Sand. In some ways I wish Proust had spent more time writing about his -- Marcel’s -- family than about the Guermantes. Though he does capture them and maybe more would not be better. And it’s really his grandmother that we see clearest. I’ve known women like her, and they can be exasperating, but she is also a lovely and good person.

Yesterday I paused at page 34, just before we come to the “petite madeleines.” It had been a long day of HOA related nonsense, check writing and taking the checks and other items to the post office for special service. I’m not going to read much now, but I want to keep moving forward. While I may regret saying this, I think I’m caught up for the moment so tomorrow I should have more time.

The last day has not been a good day for San Francisco during the pandemic. It was our first day with more than one death, in fact three deaths, and the number of cases went up 10%. That last isn’t a surprise as they are now doing more testing in the places where the destitute dwell and the results are about what you’d expect. People living in SROs or tents or in shelters are not going to be able to Social Distance even if they wanted to, and many have no real idea of what’s happening. And unless Meals on Wheels start delivering opiates and meth, they are not going to keep to themselves in any case.

Finally saw some death statistics comparing now with previous year. THIS is for NYC and it extends back to include 9/11. I hope someone at our local paper will see this so we can get similar statistics for San Francisco.

So here is the famous passage, as leaving it out really isn’t an option.

P34 “...mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory -- this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?”
...

P35 “...feeling that my mind is growing fatigued without having any success to report, I compel it for a change to enjoy that distraction which I have just denied it, to think of other things, to rest and refresh itself... I place in position before my mind’s eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth...”

P36 “And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray... my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or lime-flower tea... But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

“And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine... immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind if for my parents... and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square... the country roads we took when it was fine... all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village... and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being. Town and garden alike, from my cup of tea.”


I wonder if Temple Grandin has read this and if so what she thought of it. If she can remember everything she’s ever seen, does she respond to smell and taste in the same way when it comes to memory? Presumably she would remember the details of a house where she had spent time as a child, but would smell take her back in a more immediate way?

352. Reading Proust during a Pandemic

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Reading Proust during a Pandemic

Pvii “As early as 1890 (when he [Marcel Proust] was nineteen years old) he had also begun to take notes for an elaborate work which he was already projecting but none of his friends appears to have taken his literary pretension as anything more than the self-deception of a dilettante. He was universally liked because of a charm to which everyone who knew him has testified and because of a determination, carried to fantastic lengths, to do the considerate as well as the socially correct thing. He had not, however, written anything which displayed conspicuous talent and it was not thought likely that he would. Then, in 1905, his mother died and he began cutting himself more and more completely from the world which was to bring him at last to a strange self-imprisonment in the bedroom from which, after the most elaborate preparations, he only occasionally sallied forth in order to seek some bit of information from the head waiter at the Ritz or, as one lady remembers, to ask to see a hat worn some twenty years before.

“From childhood Proust had regarded himself as primarily a spectator. There were many things which he could know only by watching, and this fact doubtless encouraged him to make watching an end in itself. Nevertheless, contemplation became something much more than merely a substitute for the activities he could not indulge. His theory was that the quality of a direct experience always eluded one and that only in recollection could we grasp its real flavor. Now that the death of his mother had severed the only tie which bound him to the life of the world, he retired in order that he might discover and record what his experience had been...”

This is from the Introduction, written by Joseph Wood Krutch to the C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation of Remembrance of Things Past, or In Search of Lost Time, as it is more commonly called today. 

I don’t know that I’ve ever read this introduction. Usually I don’t read things like this until after I’ve read the book, and in this case by that time I’m a year on and putting down a different volume. So it’s quite possible I never have returned to it. But I think Mr Krutch did a commendable job here. This initial point is one of my favorite things about Proust. And maybe this time through I will remember to note the point in the work, around the time he first meets Saint-Loop I think, when Marcel reflects on how, while we long to share important moments with others, this would actually only detract -- distract us -- from appreciating the moment ourselves. It’s one of my favorite passages and I can never find it when I look.

I’m rereading this at an interesting time, and the paragraphs above remind me that it is in some ways a very appropriate time. Today is the first day of the fourth week we are Sheltering-in-Place due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike Proust, I have not chosen to isolate myself in my little studio, but the result is similar though far from the same. I go out walking every day. I occasionally put on my face mask and walk to one of the nearby markets for supplies or to restaurants for take-away food. I can’t wait to spend time in cafes and restaurants again. But for the moment I am forced into social distancing and this could be a perfect time to read Proust.

Pviii “...The first rule for reading him is... complete submission to an author who will certainly take you where you ought to go and who will give you, not only vivid descriptions, subtle analyses, precise portraits and full participation in a strange new sensibility, but also compose all these things into a vast symphonic structure which is probably the most amazing thing of its kind in literature...”

Yes, the connection with music is something that must be mentioned. There follows a sort of preview of what the work is about, precisely the thing I don’t want to read before, and don’t much care to read after, but this next part is interesting,

Px “...No one could possibly be more detached than he and no one could have less faith in anything. Indeed the story of the novel might with some justice be said to be the story of his disillusion with the only thing in which he made even an effort to believe -- namely, that tradition of noblesse oblige which the members of the aristocracy ought to follow but which, so obviously, they do not...” 

So this does go well with Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End. Last reading I went back and forth between these two authors and I think I probably will again.

“...Proust’s greatest invention was the invention of a form, of a method by means of which events could be arranged in a pattern having a formal beauty and a formal meaning capable of replacing the beauty and the meaning lost to those who, like himself, had no moral or religious faith capable of giving them any other kind.”

That reminds me of Adrian in Doctor Faustus.

“Externally the method is one in which the normal chronological order of narrative is often subordinated to a quasi-musical arrangement of material by means of which similar or antithetical persons, situations and moods are rhythmically balanced against one another so as to create a pattern which does not depend upon the order of time but the sense of recurrence. At the same time every presentation of material is dominated by the author’s obsession with Time and the need of the artist to escape it’s tyranny. The past must be recovered; but that is not all. It must be made permanent, and it can become that only when grasped by the imagination in such a way that every moment implies the past and the future because its true significance lies in its being part of a pattern extending from the past into the future. Living experience cannot be fully significant because it is isolated and transitory; it becomes significant only when it is contemplated in connection with those parts of the pattern which Time separates but which really belong together...”

“Proust himself spoke of the various themes whose full significance would not be clear until, in the later volumes, they had begun to combine. This remark of his suggests the analogy with music...”

Thanks to having read Doctor Faustus since I last read Proust, I see a bit of a problem with this, as Adrian points out, the secret of most music is to begin by imperfectly suggesting the theme, but holding off until near the end, the full development of that theme. Marcel’s desperate need for his mother may be the first hint of that theme here, but it is quickly followed by ‘Swann In Love’ which is the full development, later echoed -- but less interestingly in my opinion -- by Marcel’s passions for Gilbert and the others. But this is a quibble. Our Mr Krutch really hits the nail on the head on the next page,

Pxi“...the escape from Time is alluded to on page four where it is immediately followed by the incident of the magic lantern, which, as the first work of art introduced, serves to suggest the technique by which Time is to be transcended. One result of this arrangement is to make the novel in another respect like a piece of music, for of it may be said, more truly even than of most great novels, that the second reading is more rewarding than the first. To know what is coming does not detract from the pleasure -- is indeed necessary to the full enjoyment of it -- since each incident is, like a musical theme, only enriched by a knowledge of the variations to follow.”

And this is why it is so hard to get people to read Proust. I always tell people if you plan on reading it, plan on reading it twice because it is at its best when revisited. And how appropriate to Proust’s purpose is that.

“In the pages of the novel the commonplace fact that faces grow old and characters change becomes... something to be analysed with a fascinated terror. But this change in faces is only trivially important in comparison with that change which takes place in character. Hence it came at last to seem to him that it was folly to speak of Albertine, or Charlus, of himself even, as though any one of them were an entity maintaining its identity while time flowed past; and he realized that if his novel was to attain the full significance which he wished, it must manage somehow, not only to attain timelessness itself, but also to suggest the triumph of Time over the persons and the experiences which the novel alone could rescue.”

Now this I’m not sure I agree with. Do any characters really change over the course of the books? Their status in society changes. I think of them as staying largely the same as their positions change. Marcel’s artistic tastes do change in the course of his education, but he seems to be the same in his relationship with Albertine as he was with Odette or Gilberte or his mother.

Pxiii “Events become, even as he recounts them, already a part of legend and thus life is magically transmuted into art. He himself, as well as M. Swann and M. de Charlus, are no longer mere human beings but analogous to the figures painted upon the slides of the little magic lantern which had fascinated him so long ago... The suffering and the wickedness of his own characters have now ceased to have any significance except as parts of a formal design...”

Mr. Krutch contrasts Proust with Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser -- reminding us that the copyright for this edition is 1934.

“...it must be admitted that... the spiritual world of Proust has elements of charm lacking in most contemporary novels because of the fact that the sensibility everywhere exhibited is of an extraordinary sort. He was disillusioned enough with many things -- with morals, for example -- and he had neither any code nor any standards besides those which his taste supplied. [Is this a reference to homosexuality?] Yet in the midst of what might seem to be anarchy there were still capabilities and faiths which he retained... On the other hand, he never, like so many moderns, found himself in a universe limited and debased by the impossibility of escape from psychology, anthropology and Freudianism. The world was still absorbingly, still amazingly, interesting. Women -- most women -- were to him magical and mysterious...”

Pxiv “Most of the novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries felt constrained to take life seriously in a sense that Proust does not, since, and with a clear conscience, he permits himself to live the charmed life of a dilettante, not troubling himself much about the fate of civilization, acting as though there were nothing more important than the careful discrimination between shades of feeling, and devoting himself with the selfishness of the contemplative saint to the achievement of his own private salvation...”

And yet this reminds me of Montaigne and also, dare I say it, of Hans Castorp. This is precisely what Settembrini was always finding fault with. Also, isn’t 1934 rather early to be characterizing the novelists of the century?

“...Charlus, Saint-Loop, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Francoise and Madame Verdurin have definitely taken their places in the not very long list of characters who are more real than reality. Something -- both in the particular sense defined by Proust and in the more general sense in which the phrase is applicable to all great literature -- has been rescued from Time. It is not often that that can be said”

Curious that he leaves Swann off that list. I would add several other family members plus the wonderful M. Legrandin. I don’t imagine Proust and Jane Austen are often compared, but Legrandin ranks right up there with her finest minor characters. Forever captured in a single scene. 


I do believe I am ready to start reading.

351. The Stone Angel

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The Stone Angel

by Margaret Laurence

The University of Chicago Press 1964

P5 “Now I am rampant with memory... To carp like this -- it’s my only enjoyment, that and the cigarettes, a habit I acquired only ten years ago, out of boredom. Marvin thinks it disgraceful of me to smoke, at my age, ninety. To him there is something distressing in the sight of Hagar Shipley, who by some mischance happens to be his mother, with a little white burning tube held saucily between arthritic fingers...” Kind of see Marvin’s side here. Though of course this was written in the ‘60s, today it would be even worse or at least mean something else.

P104 Hagar: “Do you--” I hesitate. “Do you ever get used to such a place?” [while visiting the old folk’s home.]

Mrs. Steiner: She laughs then, a short bitter laugh I recognize and comprehend at once.
“Do you get used to life?” she says. “Can you answer me that? It all comes as a surprise. You get your first period, and you’re amazed -- I can have babies now -- such a thing! When the children come, you think -- Is it mine? Did it come out of me? Who could believe it? When you can’t have them any more, what a shock -- It’s finished -- so soon?”

I peer at her, thinking how peculiar that she knows so much.

“You’re right. I never got used to a blessed thing.”

P111 line 2 “when let I’m out” I’m let out. There were also a number of instances of missing close quotation marks.

What an amazing narrator, and we never leave her point of view. The most revealing passages are when she’s drinking with the insurance man in the fish place and when the preacher sings for her. Otherwise she seems entirely shut off even to herself. And she so reminds me of Gladys Trede even down to her use of “black as the ace of spades.” Again, we don’t see any kind of a perennial philosophy shift as she nears death. It does seem that she finally realizes, at least to some extent, how she has always misjudged Marvin. Though if she suddenly recovered, I doubt she would change a lick.

As awful as she is, she does usually adjust to the curves thrown at her to some extent. From her marriage to the women she shares space with in the hospital. Everyone except Doris. And it’s really hard to tell how unfair she’s being to Doris since we only have her perception of her.

I like what Robertson Davies writes, “...The effect of such skilled use of language is to lead the reader toward the self-recognition that Hagar misses.”