SwannsWay

Week 2

thread: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1046872-through-sunday-13-jan-swann-s-way

Week 1

For a long time, I went to bed early.
thread: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1046827-through-sunday-6-jan-swann-s-way

• I read it slowly, then read it again. Somewhat perplexed all the while, I admit. Found it odd, a grown man talking of when he was a boy, using metaphors to describe the feeling of that boy, in that boy's voice, using metaphors only an adult could think of, describing his boyhood feelings from inside situations only a grown man could understand.
• long sentences are long. They start on one place circle around then flow back towards me in time. A hundred year wave, trying very hard to touch me in 2013 from their origin in 1913.
• viaticum - the Eucharist as given to a person near or in danger of death. A supply of provisions or an official allowance of money for a journey.
• otiose - serving no practical purpose or result. indolent, idle.
• Last night, at drawing, I heard this and could suddenly feel the sentiment of it. Whereas, for some reason in my own life I could not... I wonder why that is. I think I am wired to think this way anyway, and I find it sad, I don't like to think of it, cannot allow myself to see it this way.
  • • Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension. It is a long time, too, since my father has been able to tell Mamma to "Go with the child." Never again will such hours be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father's presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. Actually, their echo has never ceased: it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them afresh, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the streets that one would suppose them to have been stopped for ever, until they sound out again through the silent evening air.
• I will defer thinking about Swann yet. There was so much about the other characters. The class 'caste' system they live in as bourgeoisie. The oft times pettiness of it. But,
• The Grandmother intrigues me. Her strict belief in beauty, wanting to fully feel the forces of nature. Interesting that in that way she finds the 'layers of art' closer to nature than a photograph because the photograph, being mechanical, is therefore vulgar. An engraving (preferably antique, famous) of a painting of a landscape.
  • The truth was that she could never make up her mind to purchase anything from which no intellectual profit was to be derived,
  • *She would have liked me to have in my room photographs of ancient buildings or of beautiful places. But at the moment of buying them, and for all that the subject of the picture had an aesthetic value of its own, she would find that vulgarity and utility had too prominent a part in them, through the mechanical nature of their reproduction by photography. She attempted by a subterfuge, if not to eliminate altogether their commercial banality, at least to minimise it, to substitute for the bulk of it what was art still, to introduce, as it might be, several 'thicknesses' of art; instead of photographs of Chartres Cathedral, of the Fountains of Saint-Cloud, or of Vesuvius she would inquire of Swann whether some great painter had not made pictures of them, and preferred to give me photographs of 'Chartres Cathedral' after Corot, of the 'Fountains of Saint-Cloud' after Hubert Robert, and of 'Vesuvius' after Turner, which were a stage higher in the scale of art. But although the photographer had been prevented from reproducing directly the masterpieces or the beauties of nature, and had there been replaced by a great artist, he resumed his odious position when it came to reproducing the artist's interpretation. Accordingly, having to reckon again with vulgarity, my grandmother would endeavour to postpone the moment of contact still further. She would ask Swann if the picture had not been engraved, preferring, when possible, old engravings with some interest of association apart from themselves, such, for example, as shew us a masterpiece in a state in which we can no longer see it to-day, as Morghen's print of the 'Cenacolo' of Leonardo before it was spoiled by restoration.
    • Reminds me quite a bit of AgainstTheGrain
• The madeline and the tea. The first time I heard of this Proustian allegory was at the bar l'Archiduc in Brussels. We were discussing the making of the website with the owner and he offered me a drink. I chose Southern Comfort because I have never seen it on offer anywhere before or since. I smelled it and immediately began reminiscing about times past, drinking it before with my brother and various other happenings. I was really gone. The owner looked at me and called the drink my "Madelline de Proust." Unfortunately he had to then go on to explain to me what that meant. I am glad to read the book myself now, another hole in my culture, filled.
  • ...as though Combray had consisted only of two floors connected by a slender staircase and as though it had always been seven o'clock in the evening there.
  • *And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.''