360. Swann In Love - part 4

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The Last of Swann In Love

Well, I spoke a little too soon. We are still deep in Swann's affair with Odette. There’s an Odette passage here I can’t ignore. This is while Swann is giving Odette an ultimatum about not going to the theater with the Verdurins and staying with him instead.

P223 “Meanwhile, Odette had shewn signs of increasing emotion and uncertainty. Although the meaning of his tirade was beyond her, she grasped that it was to be included among the scenes of reproach or supplication, scenes which her familiarity with the ways of men enabled her, without paying any heed to the words that were uttered, to conclude that men would not make unless they were in love; that, from the moment when they were in love, it was superfluous to obey them, since they would only be more in love later on. And so, she would have heard Swann out with the utmost tranquility had she not noticed that it was growing late, and that if he went on speaking for any length of time she would ‘never’ as she had told him with a fond smile... ‘get there in time for the Overture.’”


Day 65 of Pandemic Shelter in Place. By my count. Every day there seem to be even more bees in the bush out my kitchen window. The bush overhangs our deck and I’ve wanted to trim it back for months, but I remembered how the bees love it, so I’m waiting until it stops flowering. The problem is that when the tiny flowers have done their job they fall apart and the debris falls on the deck where it doesn’t do anyone any good.

We’ve been having some May rain. Unusual but it does happen. It’s good in that it pushes our fire season back a few weeks, but otherwise doesn’t amount to much.

Now that we’re past mid-May and the COVID-19 curve is flattened and the numbers in some cases are coming down, people are starting to open up the economy again. I think this is inevitable. Already the damage done to San Francisco alone is almost unfathomable. I will have to be more careful as the city around me gets less careful, but taking a year off from business would just be too costly. San Francisco is stuck at 36 known COVID-19 related fatalities, which is about as good as we could have hoped for back in March. I’ve already decided that once things start to open up a bit, I will give in and join Amazon Prime so I can shop Whole Foods online and have it delivered. It’s been interesting eating what I can eat at my local markets, and I like supporting them, but I’m not eating as well, and I think shopping at places like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s will soon be more dangerous than it is now. Now I just need to find a supply of better face mask/respirators.


Day 68 - As I walked my steep hike today I was doing a little corporate archaeology. Most of the telephone utility covers in the sidewalks were branded Pacific Bell, but I also found a more recent AT&T and a single SBC. The remaining covers were the even older Bell System survivors.


P236 “...his love extended a long way beyond the province of physical desire. Odette’s person, indeed, no longer held any great place in it... And this malady, which was Swann’s love, had so far multiplied, was so closely interwoven with all his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what he hoped for after death, was so entirely one with him that it would have been impossible to wrest it away without almost entirely destroying him; as surgeons say, his case was past operation.”

Love is a malady to Swann and Marcel. You can’t really envy them the success they have in love as it seems to take them over like a cancer. And since we are graced with an omniscient narrator here and get Odette’s perspective as well as Swann’s, The object of Swann’s affection is not really all that impressed with his love. It is certainly good for business, but, this reading, I’m finding it hard to disagree with Swann’s middle class neighbors back in Cambray. It is indeed an unfortunate marriage, or will be.


P237 “...Once when, because it was the birthday of the Princesse de Parme... he had decided to send her a basket of fruit, and was not quite sure where or how to order it, he had entrusted the task to a cousin of his mother who, delighted to be doing a commission for him, had written to him laying stress on the fact that she had not chosen all the fruit at the same place, but the grapes from Crapote, whose specialty they were, the strawberries from Jauret, the pears from Chevet, who always had the best, and soon, ‘every fruit visited and examined, one by one, by myself.’ And in the sequel, by the cordiality with which the Princess thanked him, he was able to judge of the flavor of the strawberries and of the ripeness of the pears. But, most of all, that ‘every fruit visited and examined, one by one, by myself’ had brought balm to his sufferings by carrying his mind off to a region which he rarely visited, although it was his by right, as the heir of a rich and respectable middle-class family in which had been handed down from generation to generation the knowledge of the ‘right places’ and the art of ordering things from shops.”


Day 69 - I managed to get one of the things I most crave during Shelter In Place, a good San Francisco burrito. Weeks ago I rejected the idea of walking down into the Tenderloin to my usual favorite taqueria, but today there was a taqueria food truck parked a block away so I jumped at the opportunity. This has the potential to be a protracted Good luck, Bad luck, Who knows? Series, but it is at least starting off well.

The plumber, who I had reservations about calling for a very minor problem, was running late so I decided to take my walk at an unusual time, the Noon hour. While walking I noticed the food truck parked in front of a large apartment building a block away from me. I had to go home to get money, but I returned and ordered my burrito. It was good and big. Not as good as Cancun, but it answered my craving. 

Of course if I get sick in around a week, I will have to wonder if this is the reason why. But then again, catching COVID-19 could itself be either a good or bad thing. Worst case I die in a very San Francisco way. Recently I’ve been rating San Francisco deaths and 1. Is being hit by cable car; 2. Is dying as a result of climbing a hill -- as the Emperor Norton died; and 3. Could be as a result of eating a classic SF burrito. Dying in an earthquake may trump all of these, but that’s not something that can happen very often.

We’ve finally made it to the “evening” at the Marquise de Saint-Euverte’s, when we are first introduced to Paris society. If I started quoting here it would be hard to stop, so I’m going to skip even our introduction to Oriane, at this point still the Princesse des Laumes -- not counting that mention of her earlier in the section -- and go to where the evening returns to Swann’s story.

P264 “...Swann saw that he could now not go before the end of the new number. He suffered greatly from being shut up among all these people whose stupidity and absurdities wounded him all the more cruelly since, being ignorant of his love... they made it appear to him in the aspect of a subjective state which existed for himself alone...

“But suddenly it was as though she had entered, and this apparition tore him with such an anguish that his hand rose impulsively to his heart. What had happened was that the violin had risen to a series of high notes, on which it rested as though expecting something, an expectancy which it prolonged without ceasing to hold on to the notes, in the exaltation with which it already saw the expected object approaching, and with a desperate effort it continued until its arrival, to welcome it before itself expired, to keep the way open for a moment longer, with all its remaining strength, that the stranger might enter in, as one holds a door open that would otherwise automatically close. And before Swann had time to understand what was happening, to think: ‘It is the little phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata. I mustn’t listen!’, all his memories of the days when Odette had been in love with him, which he had succeeded, up till that evening, in keeping invisible in the depths of his being, deceived by this sudden reflection of a season of love, whose sun, they supposed, had dawned again, but awakened from their slumber, had taken wing and risen to sing maddeningly in his ears, without pity for his present isolation, the forgotten strains of happiness.

P265 “In place of the abstract expressions ‘the time when I was happy,’ ‘the time when I was loved,’ which he had often used until then, and without much suffering, for his intelligence had not embodied in them anything of the past save fictitious extracts which preserved none of the reality, he now recovered everything that had fixed unalterably the peculiar, volatile essence of that lost happiness; he could see it all... At that time he had been satisfying a sensual curiosity to know what were the pleasures of those people who live for love alone. He had supposed that he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows also...

P267 “He felt that he was no longer in exile and alone since she [the little phrase], who addressed herself to him, spoke to him in a whisper of Odette... in that distant time, he had divined an element of suffering in its smile, in its limpid and disillusioned intonation, to-night he found there rather the charm of a resignation that was almost gay. Of those sorrows, of which the little phrase had spoken to him then... it seemed to say to him... ‘What does all that matter; it is all nothing.’ And Swann’s thoughts were borne for the first time on a wave of pity and tenderness towards that Vinteuil, toward that unknown, exalted brother who also must have suffered so greatly; what could his life have been? From the depths of what well of sorrow could he have drawn that god-like strength, that unlimited power of creation?

“...But ever since, more than a year before, discovering to him many of the riches of his own soul, the love of music had been born, and for a time at least had dwelt in him, Swann had regarded musical motifs as actual ideas, of another world, of another order, ideas veiled in shadows, unknown, impenetrable by the human mind, which none the less were perfectly distinct one form another... Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dreams of life is without existence; but, if so, we feel that it must be that phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, are nothing either. We shall perish, but we have for our hostages these divine captives who shall follow and share our fate. And death in their company is something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain.”
...

P270 “From that evening, Swann understood that the feeling which Odette had once had for him would never revive, that his hopes of happiness would not be realized now...”

P272 “Sometimes he hoped that she would die, painlessly, in some accident... And Swann felt a very cordial sympathy with that Mahomet II whose portrait by Bellini he admired, who, on finding that he had fallen madly in love with one of his wives, stabbed her, in order, as his Venetian biographer artlessly relates, to recover his spiritual freedom. Then he would be ashamed of thinking thus only of himself, and his own sufferings would seem to deserve no pity now that he himself was disposing so cheaply of Odette’s very life.”

I had forgotten about this. We shall learn in time that even her death wouldn’t really have helped much. And now we are at the end. Marked by Swann pursuing Mme. de Cambremer to Combray. But before we move on we get one last memorable line,

P292 “‘To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!’”


I rather suspect that this is not at all unusual. My parting thought about Swann is, "What did he understand courtesans to do?" His naiveté about Odette is rather puzzling.


Day 71 - On my off-day hike today I was thinking about what has surprised me about this period in quarantine. I knew I would miss my favorite cafes, in the last week or so before we went into lockdown I tried to hit as many of them as I could. But what I wouldn’t have predicted is that I haven’t had a drop of either alcohol or iced tea for over 70 days. Also fewer cookies and sweets, though that is mostly because there isn’t much available to me where I’m shopping.

That makes it sounds like I’m eating better, but I don’t think that is true. Normally I eat a lot of salad and I’ve been reluctant to order salad these days. I think I’ve had a total of six salads where I would normally have three or so a week. I’ve been eating more frozen dinners -- but veggie and often organic ones. Not terrible but not the best thing to eat. And a lot more bread than I usually consume. And cheese.


This is also the Memorial Day weekend. There are never any greening events on Memorial Day, I think because so many people are usually out of town. Not this year. And the weather couldn’t be better. As luck would have it, we are just about to go over 100,000 COVID-19 related known deaths. It would be too perfect if we hit that milestone on Memorial Day. Though the numbers are almost certainly too low, so the reality is that we are already way over 100,000 deaths compared with the same period of 2019. If we continue at this rate, which seems reasonable to assume, then we could have another 150,000 deaths by the end of October. Sadly, what people seem to be more concerned with just now is a shortage of hamburger and bacon since slaughterhouses turn out to be good places for a virus to spread. Not one of my concerns.