359. Swann In Love - Part 3

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It is now day 53 of Shelter In Place. I have a satisfactory routine. I’m still having to do HOA things, with another intense round of documents needing to go out as soon as I can get a signed copy returned to me. I still have a couple things to do around the house, but I’m mostly caught up. Of the things I’ve yet to do, many are in that class of things I would previously have done at a cafe table with a glass of iced tea at my side. Sitting down and doing them at home is doubly tedious.

I’m adopting a Stoic approach to the pandemic. This is our new path so we may as well make the most of it. The environmental benefits are worth the personal inconveniences, so far. I now wish I had bought a few of the better respirators back in the fall of 2018, but really I’m fortunate to have any n95s at all. I think having a quality respirator will become increasingly important over the next several months as the disease expands to places, like San Francisco, where it has been mostly blocked so far. Worst case, I may have to switch to delivery rather than pickup for my food and other essential needs. But every month travel is curtailed will be worth the inconvenience.

It struck me just today how curious it is that this Administration, together with a sizable percentage of the populace, is satisfied to have around 2,000 random Americans dying each day. When you consider the comparatively modest pretext for our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it makes you think perhaps we could have saved ourselves a lot of money and trouble. Will this serve as a vaccine against future revenge wars? Maybe not since the other thing we’re seeing in abundance is stupidity. Fools can always be played. Something I don’t know if anyone really anticipated is how popular disaster is. The end of the world as we know it is getting great ratings. Everyone wants to watch. Not me, but everyone else seems to be tuning in. 

Swann In Love 3

What do I think of Charles Swann? We first saw him from the perspective of Marcel’s parents and grandparents who see him as a respectable middle-class man who has gone astray in his domestic arrangements. Now we are seeing him in the thick of his affair with Odette and also as a not-enthusiastic-enough member of the Verdurins’ “little clan.” We’ve heard hints of his life in society but haven’t seen any of that yet, we haven’t even met the duke. 

As memory serves, he will turn out to be as disloyal to his society friends as he is seen to be to his Verdurin friends, and he’s not satisfied to stick with the middle-class society he was born into. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that he ends up having to cobble together still another phase of society that is willing to come to his home after his marriage. One wants to like him for his taste and education and for his role as family friend, but with reservations.

Here’s a perfect example of what I find problematic about Swann’s behavior, and since this involves the Princesse des Laumes, it is worth remembering for what comes much later.

P207 “After dinner, if he had an early appointment in the Bois or at Saint-Cloud, he would rise from table and leave the house so abruptly -- especially if it threatened to rain, and so to scatter the ‘faithful’ before their normal time -- that on one occasion the Princesse des Laumes (at whose house dinner had been so late that Swann had left before the coffee came in, to join the Verdurins on the Island in the Bois) observed:

‘Really, if Swann were thirty years older, and had diabetes, there might be some excuse for his running away like that. He seems to look upon us all as a joke.’”


Day 58 of pandemic Shelter-in-Place. And I’ve now missed three of my usual greening events. All four days of Cherry Blossom Festival, Dutch King Day, and the International Book Fair in Berkeley. The Book Fair is a recent addition, taking the place of either the Maker Faire in San Mateo or the Himalayan Fair in Berkeley. Really I’ll do anything to avoid working the Bay 2 Breakers race.

But Dutch King Day is one of our oldest events. We’ve been doing it so long both the gender and the location have changed, but it is still just as orange. Back when it was Dutch Queen Day, it was on the northern side of Golden Gate Park by the other windmill. It moved to the site of the southern windmill after the Netherlands helped to restore it from it’s ruined state. I actually like the new site better, the garden isn’t as pretty, but the site is more compact and easier for us to work. We don’t even use dumpsters for this one, all the trash gets bagged and hauled away in our truck. This also gives us more control over where the compost and recycling goes -- occasionally our carefully sorted trash gets mistakenly treated as landfill. We don’t like to think about that.

I can’t mention Dutch Queen Day without repeating one of my favorite greening-in-Golden-Gate-Park stories. It may have been the first year we worked the event when it was still by the north windmill. We were packing up at the end, loading trash and containers and signs into big trash toters and rolling them back to our truck. To save trips I always over-load my toters so they are nearly impossible to move (I’ve gotten a little better about this in recent years). At one point I left the toter in the middle of the street while I went to collect something else, and the wind was so fierce that it actually started blowing the toter down the street.


Swann first realizes that he has fallen out of favor with the Verdurins,

P220 “ ‘God knows that I have honestly attempted to pull Odette out of that sewer, and to teach her to breathe a nobler and a purer air. But human patience has its limits, and mine is at an end,’ he concluded, as though this sacred mission to tear Odette away from an atmosphere of sarcasms dated from longer than a few minutes ago, as though he had not undertaken it only since it had occurred to him that those sarcasms might, perchance, be directed at himself, and might have the effect of detaching Odette from him.”
...

P221 “In a word, the life which they led at the Verdurins’, which he had so often described as ‘genuine,’ seemed to him now the worst possible form of life, and the ‘little nucleus’ the most degraded class of society... ”
...

“...no sooner had he closed the front-door behind him than he suddenly struck his forehead, and, making his servant open the door again, dashed out into the street shouting... ‘I believe I have found a way of getting invited to the diner at Chatou to-morrow!’ But it must have been a bad way, for M. Swann was not invited...”


And so we are at last past the Verdurins... at least for now. And now we move on to the part where, as it were, Swann’s Way and the Guermantes’ Way begin to blend.