357. Swann's Way - Swann in Love

Link to Table of Contents

Day 44 of the COVID-19 Shelter-In-Place and I’m still well. So far as I can tell. I’d like to think I’m one of the people who have had it without symptoms, but that seems unlikely. According to the latest figures I’ve seen, there have been fewer than 10 cases in my zipcode (and no deaths) and I’ve been probably 90% as good as I could be at social distancing. It’s only when I feel odd for a moment that I dwell on that 10% where I could have been even stricter, since this doesn’t seem to be a fun disease to get. 

I’m going out even less than I was at first and I even have cut back just a little on my outdoor exercise routine. This was the first weekend I haven’t had take-away restaurant food because I had some other menu things going on and would have ended up with stale sourdough bread and other food waste. Still eagerly anticipating my postponed treat. And SF is still only up to 22 known dead. And are those 22 fatalities more tragic in being the few dead of what could have been a much worse butcher’s bill? The odds of dying here are almost lotto bad, but that has never stopped anyone from imagining the worst (or best).

Speaking of the lotto, the reason I used to occasionally play was that I thought it was instructive to consider what you would do differently if you won a big payout. I had various plans depending on the size of the payout. But now, there’s very little winning a bunch of money would help with and in many ways it would only add to your risks. If I still played, I would stop for the moment. 


It always amazes me to think how little the best educated person knew about the world at the end of the 19th century. You could have spent your life going from one university to another learning from the most brilliant minds of the time, but when it comes to physics (and consequently chemistry) and astrophysics in particular, your ignorance would have been profound. Most of what you thought you knew about atoms and outer space was simply wrong. The 20th century was when humans finally got a clue about where they were and what they were made of. From our perspective there’s very little difference between the understanding of the most sophisticated Parisian of the 19th century and the most primitive savage at that time. And from our perspective their differences in personal dress and manners would be equally strange. 


Today is day 46 of Sheltering In Place which I realized means that I’ve gone without a drop of tea (I don’t drink coffee) or alcohol for that whole time. My last iced tea was at my last breakfast out, the day before we went to SIP. Can’t say I feel that different. I may have more of a tendency to fall asleep during the day, but that could also be because there’s nothing very exciting happening and I’m sitting around the house so much. You’d think stopping something I did on such a regular basis, drinking iced tea, would have had some effect, but I wasn’t really even aware of it until I saw something about a couple who are avoiding caffeine during SIP. They were having more of a problem, but they were also used to a lot more caffeine than I am normally exposed to.

Today was an unusually social day. I had to let a couple contractors into the building and I stayed with them to answer questions as they looked at the work that needs to be done. We were all wearing n95 masks, but it was still the most I’ve been around anyone in 46 days. And then I had to buy a light bulb at the hardware store and was around still more people. And they weren’t wearing masks, though I was. I am tempted to ask people not wearing masks why? I doubt, however, that the young woman behind the counter at the hardware store would say it was because she’s quite pretty and the mask hides some of that, though I think that is at least part of it.

Swann's Way - Swann in Love

While introducing, at greater length, Swann and also Odette de Crecy and the beginning of their affair,

P149 “...Since we possess its hymn, engraved on our hearts in its entirety, there is no need of any woman to repeat the opening lines... for us to remember all that follows. And if she begins in the middle, where it sings of our existing, henceforward, for one another only, we are well enough attuned to that music to be able to take it up and follow our partner, without hesitation, at the first pause in her voice.”

I had forgotten that he uses music in this way as well. Though really it’s the same way. And I had forgotten that it was Odette who initiated the relationship. 

Reading these opening pages I can certainly see why Charles Haas would have taken exception to being linked to Swann.


Today I read in the newspaper that people of my vintage should plan on hiding indoors for the next year or two until the virus storm abates... or until I catch it. While I try to look at this sentence from Marcel’s perspective (rather than from that of Hans Castorp or Henry Ryecroft) it is still rather daunting. I’m doing a reasonably good job of staying fit and eating well. I’m keeping myself amused. But in your late sixties you have to wonder how many “good” years you have left. To spend so much time in virtual house arrest (with walks) seems like giving up a lot. On the other hand, the accounts I read of people with even a moderate case of COVID-19 does not make me want to gain my freedom that way... and even that freedom is still in question.


Today is day 47 of SIP by my count. The USA has over 60,000 deaths from the virus, but this is probably a massive undercount. According to something I saw in the NYT, NYC alone has experienced 60,000 more deaths this year than last. The ratio is probably not as bad in places that have not been hit as hard, but even we have some deaths that were not diagnosed but are probably COVID-19 related. And now people and governments are starting to cut back on the social distancing. 

This is necessary to some extent, but only some curves have flattened and there are still many known and many more unknown active cases walking around. It will be interesting to see what the curves look like a month from now. How many other places will look like the NYC area then?

The problem with living with so many books is that, at times like this when one has some time on one’s hands, it is so tempted to put off what you were going to do and pick up an old friend. My eye happened to fall on Wilt by Sharpe, which always makes me smile. There are some scenes in that novel that always make me laugh no matter how often I read them. Like the exhumation of the anatomically correct doll. And on my shelf it stands only a few volumes away from Anna Karenina, is there any humor in that book? I can’t recall any. If there is any it would involve Anna or her brother early in the book.


I have made it to the scene where Swann discovers, or rediscovers, the “little phrase” on his first visit to the Verdurin’s salon. I really dislike these characters, but there’s some important lines here about art. (It doesn’t help that I remember the cruel twist at the end of the work that requires the death of both M. Verdurin and the Princesse de Guermantes.)

P159 “A year before, at an evening party, he had heard a piece of music played on the piano and violin. At first he appreciated only the material quality of the sounds which those instruments secreted. And it had been a source of keep pleasure when, below the narrow ribbon of the violin-part, delicate, unyielding, substantial and governing the whole, he had suddenly perceived, where it was trying to surge upwards in a flowing tide of sound, the mass of the piano-part, multiform, coherent, level, and breaking everywhere in melody like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight. But at a given moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to collect, to treasure in his memory the phrase or harmony -- he knew not which -- that had just been played, and had opened and expanded his soul, just as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power of dilating our nostrils... And so, hardly had the delicious sensation, which Swann had experienced, died away, before his memory had furnished him with an immediate transcript... when the same impression suddenly returned, it was no longer uncapturable. He was able to picture to himself its extent, its symmetrical arrangement, its notation, the strength of its expression; he had before him the definite object which was no longer pure music, but rather design, architecture, thought, and which allowed the actual music to be recalled. This time he had distinguished, quite clearly, a phrase which emerged for a few moments from the waves of sound. It had at once held out to him an invitation to partake of intimate pleasures, of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed, into which he felt nothing but this phrase could initiate him; and he had been filled with love for it, as with a new and strange desire.

P160 “With a slow and rhythmical movement it led him here, there, everywhere, towards a state of happiness, noble, unintelligible, yet clearly indicated. And then, suddenly having reached a certain point from which he was prepared to follow it, after pausing a moment, abruptly it changed its direction, and in a fresh movement, more rapid, multiform, melancholy, incessant, sweet, it bore him off with it towards a vista of joys unknown. Then it vanished.  He hoped, with a passionate longing, that he might find it again, a third time. And reappear it did, though without speaking to him more clearly, bringing him, indeed, a pleasure less profound. But when he was once more at home he needed it, he was like a man into whose life a woman, whom he has seen for a moment passing by, has brought a new form of beauty, which strengthens and enlarges his own power of perception, without his knowing even whether he is ever to see her again whom he loves already, although he knows nothing of her, not even her name.” 

This incident precipitates a sort of mid-life crisis for Swann, but he is not able to track down the piece of music. Until now,

P162 “...scarcely had the little pianist begun to play when, suddenly, after a high note held on through two whole bars, Swann saw it approaching, stealing forth from underneath that resonance, which was prolonged and stretched out over it, like a curtain of sound, to veil the mystery of its birth -- and recognized, secret, whispering, articulate, the airy and fragrant phrase that he had loved... Finally the phrase withdrew and vanished... But now, at last, he could ask the name of his fair unknown (and was told that it was the andante movement of Vinteuil’s sonata for the piano and violin), he held it safe, could have it again to himself, at home, as often as he would, could study its language and acquire its secret.

“...Then he asked for some information about this Vinteuil; what else had he done, and at what period in his life he had composed the sonata; -- what meaning the little phrase could have had for him, that was what Swann most wanted to know.

“But none of these people who professed to admire this musician... seemed ever to have asked himself these questions, for none of them was able to reply...”

And now we stretch beyond music to art in general, and the appreciation of art,

“Inasmuch as the public cannot recognize the charm, the beauty, even the outline of nature save in the stereotyped impressions of an art which they have gradually assimilated, while an original artist starts by rejecting those impressions, so M. and Mme. Cottard, typical, in this respect, of the public, were incapable of finding, either in Vinteuil’s sonata or in Biche’s portraits, what constituted harmony, for them, in music or beauty in painting. [In a past blog this was described as consonance and contrasted with the dissonance of these artists.] It appeared to them, when the pianist played his sonata, as though he were striking haphazard from the piano a medley of notes which bore no relation to the musical forms to which they themselves were accustomed, and that the painter simply flung the colors haphazard upon his canvas...”

P163 “Swann discovered no more than that the recent publication of Vinteuil’s sonata had caused a stir among the most advanced school of musicians, but that it was still unknown to the general public.

“‘I know some one, quite well, called Vinteuil,’ said Swann, thinking of the old music-master at Combray who had taught my grandmother’s sisters.

“‘Perhaps that’s the man!’ cried Mme. Verdurin.

“‘Oh, no!’ Swann burst out laughing. ‘If you had ever seen him for a moment you wouldn’t put the question.’”
...

P164 “‘But it may well be some relative,’ Swann went on. ‘That would be bad enough; but, after all, there is no reason why a genius shouldn’t have a cousin who is a silly old fool...’”