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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
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.
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