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Within A Budding Grove by Marcel Proust
I almost left this next bit out, but then realized I couldn’t, for a reason that has nothing to do with Proust.
P380 As my choking had persisted long after any congestion remained that could account for them, my parents asked for a consultation with Professor Cottard. It is not enough that a physician who is called in to treat cases of this sort should be learned. Brought face to face with symptoms which may or may not be those of three or four different complaints, it is in the long run his instinct, his eye that must decide with which... he has to deal. This mysterious gift does not imply any superiority in the other departments of the intellect, and a creature of the utmost vulgarity... in whose mind there is nothing out of the common, may perfectly well possess it... [At first his family decides to ignore Cottard’s instructions.] Then, as my health became worse, they decided to make me follow Cottard’s prescriptions to the letter; in three days my ‘rattle’ and cough had ceased, I could breath freely. Whereupon we realized that Cottard, while finding, as he told us later on, that I was distinctly asthmatic, and still more inclined to ‘imagine things,’ had seen that what was really the matter with me at the moment was intoxication, and that by loosening my liver and washing out my kidneys he would get rid of the congestion of my bronchial tubes and thus give me back my breath, my sleep and my strength. And we realized that this imbecile was a clinical genius....
Why, obviously, I can’t let this go by without comment is that it is a concise restatement of what Clausewitz writes about the instinct for command in war. And we need to remember that Proust’s father, in fact, was a doctor, so Proust is doubly interested in this subject, first as a patient but also as the son of a doctor.
Even the “fog of war” works for medicine. Unless there’s a knife sticking into someone, we rarely know all we need to know to make an accurate diagnosis. And a too analytical doctor can get lost in test results when a decision needs to be made now. Clausewitz, too, concludes that what you want in a commander is an imbecile like Cottard with good instincts. The difference is that for war you also need a good, analytical chief of staff to implement the commander’s instincts. To trot out my hobby horse again (and rarely has that phrase from Tristram Shandy been used so aptly) it isn’t enough to have Napoleon... you need Berthier as well.
And it may be that I’m not riding my hobby-horse that far off Proust’s road after all. I just noticed this,
P332 ...With Cottard... honors, offices and titles come with the passing of years; moreover, a man may be illiterate, and make stupid puns, and yet have a special gift, which no amount of general culture can replace -- such as the gift of a great strategist or physician....
P348 My Aunt Leonie had bequeathed to me, together with all sorts of other things and much of her furniture, with which it was difficult to know what to do, almost all her unsettled estate...
So this dilemma of the middle class is not so new. We shall see that young Marcel comes up with a novel solution to the furniture problem, but in my family today there is an over abundance of old furniture which none of the younger generations have any interest in. Perhaps some clever woodworker will devise a scheme to turn old furniture into caskets so that we can at least be buried in some of it. Or maybe we could go just a little further and load a boat with furniture and belongings that no one else wants, with the corpse on top, and send it, blazing, downstream.
There is a sort of reverie about the marriage of Swann and Odette inserted into the section about entertaining M. de Norpois -- the great success of which is Francois’ cooking.
P 360 ...it might be said that if Swann married Odette it was in order to present her and Gilberte, without anyone’s else being present, without, if need be, anyone’s else ever coming to know about it, to the Duchesse de Guermantes. We shall see how this sole social ambition that he had entertained for his wife and daughter was precisely that one the realization of which proved to be forbidden him by a veto so absolute that Swann died in the belief that the Duchess would never possibly come to know them. We shall see also that, on the contrary, the Duchesse de Guermantes did associate with Odette and Gilberte after the death of Swann... The laborious process of causation which sooner or later will bring about every possible effect, including (consequently) those which one had believed to be most nearly impossible, naturally slow at times, is rendered slower still by out impatience (which in seeking to accelerate only obstructs it) and by our very existence, and comes to fruition only when we have ceased to desire it -- have ceased, possibly, to live...
This “laborious process of causation” sounds almost like he’s describing quantum waveforms, for example in the weak force.
And we get something more of use from M. de Norpois. Marcel asks if he saw Gilberte while dining with the Swanns,
P365 M. de Norpois appeared to be trying for a moment to remember; then: “Yes, you mean a young person of fourteen or fifteen?...”
This is very helpful as I have a hard time judging Marcel’s age. In so many ways he seems like a child... a younger child by maybe five years. This makes a bit more sense.
P384 ...And so it fell out that, whereas M. de Norpois, on learning that I did not know but would very much like to know Mme. Swann, had taken great care to avoid speaking to her about me, Cottard, who was her doctor also, having gathered from what he had heard Bloch say that she knew me quite well... concluded that to remark, when next he saw her, that I was a charming young fellow and a great friend of his could not be of the smallest use to me and would be of advantage to himself, two reasons which made him decide to speak of me to Odette whenever an opportunity arose,
And now we are at the point where Marcel finally gains access to the Swann home. Having finally made it into their home, he is now keen to have, if not an actual “fragment” of one of Gilberte’s plaits, perhaps a photograph of them.
P385 ...To acquire one of these, I stooped -- with friends of the Swanns, and even with photographers -- to servilities which did not procure for me what I wanted, but tied me for life to a number of extremely tiresome people.
P387 [Young Marcel enjoys a tea-party with Gilberte.] ...Gilberte did not consider only her own hunger: she inquired also after mine, while she extracted for me from the crumbling monument [an architectural chocolate cake] a whole glazed slab jeweled with scarlet fruits, in the oriental style. She asked me even at what o-clock my parents were dining, as if I still knew, as if the disturbance that governed me had allowed to persist the sensation of satiety or of hunger, the notion of dinner or the picture of my family in my empty memory and paralyzed stomach. Alas, its paralysis was but momentary. The cakes that I took without noticing them, a time would come when I should have to digest them. But that time was still remote. Meanwhile Gilberte was making ‘my’ tea. I went on drinking it indefinitely, whereas a single cup would keep me awake for twenty-four hours. Which explains why my mother used always to say: “What a nuisance it is; he can never go to the Swanns’ without coming home ill.” But was I aware even, when I was at the Swanns’, that it was tea that I was drinking? Had I known I would have taken it just the same... My imagination was incapable of reaching to the distant time in which I might have the idea of going to bed, and the need to sleep.
[Odette makes an appearance at the tea-party.] p388 ...I had not at first understood of whom Mme. Swann was speaking when I heard her sing the praises of our old ‘nurse.’ I did not know any English; I gathered, however, as she went on that the word was intended to denote Francoise. I who, in the Champs-Elysees, had been so terrified of the bad impression that she must make, I now learned from Mme. Swann that it was of the things that Gilberte had told them about my ‘nurse’ that had attracted her husband and her to me. “One feels that she is so devoted to you; she must be nice!” (At once my opinion of Francoise was diametrically changed. By the same token, to have a governess equipped with a waterproof and a feather in her hat no longer appeared quite so essential.)...
If I had now begun to explore... the fairy domain... this was still only in my capacity as a friend of Gilberte. The kingdom into which I was received was itself contained within another, more mysterious still, in which Swann and his wife led their supernatural existence... But soon I was to penetrate also to the heart of the Sanctuary. For instance, Gilberte might be out when I called, but M. or Mme. Swann was at home. They would ask who had rung, and on being told it was myself would send out to ask me to come in for a moment and talk to them, desiring me to use in one way or another, and with this or that object in view, my influence over their daughter... My new position as the friend of Gilberte, endowed with an excellent influence over her, entitling me now to enjoy the same favors... the right of informal entry into the palace... Swann, with an infinite benevolence... would make me go into his library and there let me for an hour on end respond in stammered monosyllables, timid silences broken by brief and incoherent bursts of courage, to utterances of which my emotion prevented me from understanding a single word; would shew me works of art and books which he thought likely to interest me...
P391 [Swann and Gilberte are talking about Mme. Bontemps who is married to the Chief Secretary to the Minister of Posts.] “He’s the uncle of a little girl who used to come to my lessons, in a class a long way below mine, the famous ‘Albertine.’ She’s certain to be dreadfully ‘fast’ when she’s older, but just now she’s the quaintest spectacle.”
...
“I don’t know her. I only used to see her going about, and hear them calling ‘Albertine’ here, and ‘Albertine’ there. But I do know Mme. Bontemps, and I don’t like her much either.”
[I couldn’t leave this out, but it is a very strange thing to say.]
P394 Mme. Swann had... met with no [social] success outside what was called the ‘official world.’ Smart women did not go to her house... In the days of my early childhood, conservative society was to the last degree worldly, and no ‘good’ house would ever have opened its doors to a Republican. The people who lived in such an atmosphere imagine that the impossibility of ever inviting an ‘opportunist’ -- still more, a ‘horrid radical’ -- to their parties was something that would endure for ever, like oil-lamps and horse-drawn omnibuses. But, like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed to be immovable, and composes a fresh pattern...
P397 ...I conceived a suspicion that we had, at Combray, replaced one error, that of regarding Swann as a mere stockbroker, who did not go into society, by another, when we supposed him to be one of the smartest men in Paris. To be a friend of the Comte de Paris meant nothing at all... Princes know themselves to be princes, and are not snobs; besides, they believe themselves to be so far above everything that is not of their blood royal that great nobles and ‘business men’ appear, in the depths beneath them, to be practically on a level.
100 days of Pandemic
I’m surviving pretty well. If I could only spend a couple hours a week in a cafe working at a table that wasn’t in my little apartment, I would be completely content. But that seems as far away as ever. My local restaurants have thrown tables and chairs out on the sidewalk, so I could eat out if I wanted to, but that would involve an additional risk while having to endure cold winds or hot sun or the usual roving lunatics. I prefer to continue picking up four to six meals at a time and eating at home.
There’s a plan for opening things up even more, but so far people seem to be acting like idiots and the infection rate is going back up, so I think things are about to get worse rather than better. Internationally we continue to be Number One in cases and deaths -- over 120,000 deaths now -- but Brazil and Mexico are now hard on our heels. Brazil happens to have a leader who is even dumber than ours, so I think they have real potential to displace us as the world's basket case. I have always had a low opinion of people but even I am amazed at the general level of stupidity. This is becoming less a medical problem and more a case of the Darwin Awards Gone Wild.
Some examples of what I’m talking about: Some professional men’s tennis stars got together in the Balkans and promptly all got infected due to socializing off the court. And before you could blame it all on testosterone a women’s soccer team, getting ready to start competing in Florida, went out to a bar and the same thing happened to them. That Trump organized an indoor election rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma doesn’t really count, because Trump. And Trump supporters.
But back to ME. I continue to do virtually all my marketing at two corner markets: The small one on my alley and a much larger one four blocks away. Though I’m about ready to hit the closest supermarket again for some staples and items I can’t find anywhere else. My pharmacy has reopened after the looting spell, so that’s nice. And my bank’s closest branch has also reopened, so I don’t have to walk as far when I do need to do banking.
Realistically, I’m probably a third of the way through this ordeal. And that’s if we are lucky. The next 100 days should be easier. I have my routine down now and everything is going relatively well. I will get increasingly bored and will need to come up with new goals, but time is tending to fly by. We are approaching a Magic Mountain sense of time. I’ve visited my closest taqueria once so far and will probably do that again if the taco truck doesn’t appear here soon. I could really use a bakery but that’s something the neighborhood lacks.
As for what’s not happening: The usual time for the Sikh Rally has come and gone. We didn’t work Juneteenth even though it was more celebrated this year than normal. Looking at my records, I see that the time for the Sumerthing concert has also past. This hasn’t been held by the sponsoring radio station for several years now, but it was one of my favorite little concerts in Golden Gate Park. The next big event, one I’ve worked every year for at least ten years, is the 4th of July Festival and Firework Display in Berkeley.
While I like working that event, getting home at the end is not fun. First I have to walk several miles from the Marina to the street where I can catch a bus. Then there’s a long bus ride through a firework war zone to the train that will take me to another bus that will take me four blocks down the hill from where I live. It all takes forever, and at the end of eight hours of hard work. I would work it if I could, but I won’t really mind skipping this event once.
