354. Swann's Way - Combray

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Swann’s Way

Combray

I just realized I’m even starting this at the right time of the year. This was when Marcel’s family would arrive from Paris. 

While walking today it occurred to me that if a taste or smell were likely to restore to me the house and situation of my Alabama aunt, it would almost certainly be the smell that came from the air conditioner in my uncle’s Lincoln Continental. This was a fancy car, electric window controls and the like, but it had seen better days and the smell produced by the air conditioner was powerful. The kind of smell that makes you wonder how safe it really was to breath the air. This would have been around 1960, give or take a few years.


I’ve had another “madeleine” moment. Well, a hint of one. Since I started sheltering-in-place I’ve been making myself peanut butter and honey sandwiches on a regular basis. Something I rarely do. And this has reminded me of something I had almost forgotten about. My freshman year at university my main activity, outside class, was working for the local war resistance group. Mostly I counseled guys my age who didn’t want to go to Vietnam. We also organized protests in town and on campus. But our most frequent activity was running a lunch program in a church a block off campus. Every day I would walk or bike over there and join the crew preparing lunch for people. All I remember making was peanut butter and honey sandwiches. 


It’s likely that by the time I stopped doing that I had had more than enough PB&H sandwiches for most of my life. Only now, fifty years later, am I returning to that easy lunch option for vegetarians. But now I think about it, I think there were also some quite delicious bean and rice dishes I recall having for Thanksgiving, probably that same year.

P37 “My grandfather’s cousin -- by courtesy my great-aunt -- with whom we used to stay, was the mother of that aunt Leonie who, since her husband’s (my uncle Octave’s) death, had gradually declined to leave, first Combray, then her house in Combray, then her bedroom, and finally her bed; and who now never ‘came down,’ but lay perpetually in an indefinite condition of grief, physical exhaustion, illness, obsessions, and religious observances... The air of those rooms was saturated with the fine bouquet of a silence so nourishing, so succulent that I could not enter them without a sort of greedy enjoyment, particularly on those first mornings, chilly still, of the Easter holidays, when I could taste it more fully... I would turn to and fro between the prayer-desk and the stamped velvet armchairs... while the fire, baking like a pie the appetizing smells with which the air of the room was thickly clotted, which the dewy and sunny freshness of the morning had already ‘raised’ and started to ‘set,’ puffed them and glazed them and fluted them and swelled them into an invisible though not impalpable country cake, an immense puff-pastry, in which, barely waiting to savour the crustier, more delicate, more respectable, but also drier smells of the cupboard, the chest-of-drawers, and the patterned wall-paper I always returned with an unconfessed gluttony to bury myself in the nondescript, resinous, dull, indigestible, and fruity smell of the flowered quilt.”

And that, in case you didn’t know, is the sort of book this is. And still talking about aunt Leonie (though maybe not only aunt Leonie),

P38 “...in the life of complete inertia which she lead she attached to the least of her sensations an extraordinary importance, endowing them with a Protean ubiquity which made it difficult for her to keep them secret, and, failing a confident to whom she might communicate them, she used to promulgate them to herself in an unceasing monologue which was her sole form of activity...”


The first mention of the character Bergotte. I find he is linked to both John Ruskin and Anatole France. Ruskin would seem to be of more interest to Ford Madox Ford, but Anatole France certainly makes sense. And Swann all but dooms Marcel to fall in love with his daughter by describing her friendship with Bergotte, who is a friend of the family. As we shall see in time. And this is said about Bergotte and philosophy,

P73 “...I cherished his philosophy, and had pledged myself to it in lifelong devotion. It made me impatient to reach the age when I should be eligible to attend the class at school called ‘Philosophy.’ I did not wish to learn or do anything else there, but simply exist and be guided entirely by the mind of Bergotte, and, if I had been told that the metaphysicians whom I was actually to follow there resembled him in nothing, I would have been struck down by the despair a young lover feels... when a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to come.”

P78 I tend to forget that the village church at Combray is also where the Guermantes are buried and where young Marcel first sees the Duc de Guermantes and his Duchesse. And Marcel laughs at his grandmother (Mme. Amédée) along with the rest of the family when she asserts that her school friend, Mme. de Villeparisis is related to the Guermantes.

We are now in day 34 of Social Distancing and San Francisco is finally up to twenty known deaths from COVID-19. We have certainly succeeded in “flattening” the curve, which unfortunately also means we are almost as vulnerable as before to fresh exposure when people return to town. And our tourist economy makes this even worse. As long as the virus is a problem anywhere there will be people there wanting to bring it here. 

I for one, am eating very well this weekend. I ordered a bunch of dishes from a local Burmese restaurant -- my favorite place is on the other side of town -- and am slowly heating them up and adding my own bread or brown rice. Curiously, this place lists cheesecake as one of their specialties, so I gave it a try... they weren’t kidding. One of the best I’ve ever had, not counting the kind with chocolate swirled in with the cheese. But for a simple cheesecake it is perfect.

I have now received four weeks of unemployment, even less per week now that I asked them to withhold taxes from the payments, but I also received the $1,200 “stimulus” payment from the government that is intended to get the economy restarted again. How? I’m incredibly fortunate in that my income, excluding my seasonal work, just about matches my expenses. My Unemployment Payments are ridiculously small they average my usual income over twelve months rather than six. I will be short at the end of the year, but that’s mostly because of some unexpected things I’ve had to pay for related to my building.

My point is, I don’t need the $1,200 to survive so I could rush out and spend it, but then what’s open? I admit I’m tempted to replace my infuriatingly slow Windows laptop with a better machine. One with a generation of microprocessor that doesn’t have a flawed security design. Under other circumstances I would take the bus down to Best Buy and shop for such a machine, but today they won’t let you in the building. And all the ads are amazingly blind to the whole security problem. You’d think the machines with new chips would be announcing that fact but it seems like everyone had decided to downplay the chip issue since they are all still trying to sell machines with the bad chips. I’m going to have to do all my own research and then track down a likely machine. Am I then going to go to the trouble of dealing with a local business? Maybe, but maybe not. And how much good does my buying a new laptop do the national economy?

I would love to go on a restaurant binge. Eat really well and over-tip right and left -- and I probably will do this to the extent that I can -- but most of the places I would usually go are closed or too remote at the moment. And I’m tempted to just use the $1,200 to make up for some of the money I hadn’t planned on spending on the building. So some or all of it will probably just go to savings. Though this is s stupid time to save when the government seems determined to inflate the currency.

The other option, and this is the other thing I probably will do, is give a portion of the “stimulus” funds to charities that I otherwise wouldn’t be able to support this year with my reduced income. And I can do that now rather than at the end of the year, when I usually give. 


I’m glad we had this chat.

104. Goethe in Derbyshire

Previous - 103. Best laid plans

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Little Dribbling

Why aren't there photographs in this book? Even a few photos would make the reading experience so much better. I've been driven to Google Image and Map to see the places and some of the things Bryson talks about. The problem with this is that, seeing the areas for myself, I have to go on to be critical of things he fails to mention or emphasize. 

He gave the impression that the bizarre English holiday traditions at Skegness were mostly a thing of the past, but viewing the area from above, there seems to be an amazing expanse of camps still around. And some of them really do look like concentration camps.

He gave the impression that the port of Grimsby was pretty derelict, but that's just the fishing port. Next door is a very active port that appears to mostly deal with transporting cars. The other interesting thing about this port -- also Hull and Liverpool -- is that, because the rivers are not always navigable due to the tides, the actual port facilities are separated from the rivers by locks. 


When I bought myself this book for Christmas I never expected to write anything about it. I read Bryson for laughs -- that's not entirely true, since he's written a number of books like At Home and A Short History of Nearly Everything that are content rich -- but after making the notes above I hit a patch about the Peak District -- which makes me think of Pride and Prejudice, of course -- which I have to both quote and comment on. It never ends!

p272 About the Headstone Viaduct on the Monsal Trail which crosses, or rather tunnels and trenches it's way across, the Monsal Dale. ...When the viaduct was built in 1863, the art critic John Ruskin [especially here] famously raged against it, saying that a setting of tranquility and beauty had been cruelly sacrificed just so that "every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour and every fool at Bakewell in Buxton." Headstone Viaduct is often used as an example of how things that are hated when new later become treasured. Well, sure, that sometimes happens. But there is a difference here in that the Headstone Viaduct was from the start a thing of actual beauty, carefully built, which is rarely the case with intrusions on the landscape today.

As fond as I am of 19th century infrastructure, I'm sure I would love the walk along this old railroad right of way as much as Bryson did. But, again, I'm looking at the scene from Google Map and I have to sympathize with my old pal Ruskin here. The non-map view (satellite? aerial photo? whatever) is particularly fine of the Monsal Dale and it looks to be a lovely place to walk across, as one can imagine Elizabeth Bennett doing with her aunt and uncle in Austen's novel. That is until you come to the trench dug for the railroad. The viaduct itself, and the tunnel at one end of the viaduct, are almost beside the point. The problem is that trench running across the landscape as though a huge boar had been running loose. 

This is a prime example of a landscape where, for thousands of years you could wander at random until the 19th century when you were suddenly forced to find the few places where you could cross either over or under the tracks. Even now that it is just a walking trail and there is no danger of being run down by a steam engine, the barrier exists in the same way. And even Ruskin (probably) didn't consider the environmental side effects of dividing communities of wild animals by this arbitrary line. 

(It's worth noting that some of Ruskin's design ideas even apply to software interface design. I've considered his views, and sometimes gone against them -- with reservations -- more than once when designing software.)

But it doesn't stop there, Not far from Monsal Dale is a view nearly as good as, and even more historic than, the one that so exercised Ruskin, where the trail emerges from a long tunnel into a green valley. Holding a commanding position at the valley head is a white Georgian building that looks at first sight like a stately home. In fact, it is Cressbrook Mill, built by Richard Arkwright in 1779... to spin cotton. It is quite the most handsome factory you will ever see and possibly the most important, for it changed the world. Along with Cromford Mill, built a few miles away near Matlock, this was where the factory system started. Everything that is manufactured on Earth today traces its beginnings back to this tranquil corner of Derbyshire. Arkwright built his mills in the narrow valleys of Derbyshire because they had plenty of water to power his machines and because the remote location made it less likely that they would be besieged by angry spinners put out of work by his new methods. It also made it easier for him to exploit his workers. Cressbrook Mill was operated mostly by orphans who were treated worse than abysmally.

p273 Within half a century, the cotton industry employed over four hundred thousand people. Nearly everything that followed and made Britain great -- shipbuilding, finance, the building of canals and railroads, the growth of empire -- had its foundations here... Derbyshire's spell at the center of all this didn't last terribly long. As the cotton industry grew, larger factories and bigger rivers were required, and the work moved to more urban places like Manchester and Bradford. Derbyshire sank back into a picturesque oblivion. Today Cressbrook Mill is upmarket apartments."

Never-mind Ruskin, now I'm imagining Goethe here. (The Goethe of the last sections of Faust, the Developer sections.) Not reclaiming land and engaging in piracy, unless you interpret piracy to include the vicious exploitation of labor -- either "free" as here or slave as in Absalom, both are contemporary with Cressbrook Mill. The slaves producing the cotton to be spun by the orphans. 


When I first mentioned P&P it was because that's the first thing I think of when I hear the words "Peak District," but that association turns out to be prescient. On a hunch, I just did a quick Google search and learned two things: 1. There's a Wiki entry for "Pemberley," and 2. The fictional Pemberley was set in the vicinity of Bakewell -- also, like Cromford, near Matlock. I would love to know if Austen picked this neighborhood because it's romantically scenic or because it was coming to be associated with the new wealth of the Industrial Revolution. (Not easy to determine the source of the wealth of the Dukes of Devonshire. Seems to be something one doesn't speak of. Rents, I suppose?)

So Ruskin, Goethe, Austen, and Bryson -- I should have had them walking into a pub. 

Next - 105. Tower of Power