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.