My Year With Proust - Day 92

"'I do not share you son's point of view, Bergotte is what I call a flute-player: one must admit that he plays very agreeably, although with a great deal of mannerism, of affectation.  But when all is said, there's no more to it than that, and that is not much.  Nowhere does one find in his flaccid works what one might call structure.  No action - or very little - but above all no range.  His books fail at the foundation, or rather they have no foundation at all.  At a time like the present, when the ever-increasing complexity of life leaves one scarcely a moment for reading, when the map of Europe has undergone radical alterations and is on the eve, perhaps, of undergoing others more drastic still, when so many new and threatening problems are arising on every side, you will allow me to suggest that one is entitled to ask that a writer should be something more than a clever fellow who lulls us into forgetting, a mid otiose and byzantine discussions of the merits of pure form, that we may be overwhelmed at any moment by the double tide of barbarians, those form without and those from within our borders.  I am aware that this is to blaspheme against the sacrosanct school of what these gentlemen term "Art for Art's sake," but at this period of history there are tasks more urgent than the manipulation of words in a harmonious manner.'"

Marcel Proust, With a Budding Grove, p. 510

In this passage M. de Norpois is holding forth, as he often does, this time on the relative merits of Bergotte.  It really hits home with me on several fronts.  As a historian it is a reminder of thee age in which Proust wrote, the aptly named Age of Anxiety, when the Europeans stood on the edge of World War I but were also dealing with the repercussions of the intellectual world being transformed by the thought of Marx, Freud and Darwin.  Was the capitalist world doomed and was revolution inevitable?  Are we actually driven primarily by dark mysterious drives beyond our ability to understand as compared to the world of reason promised by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment?  Are we just bipeds with oppose-able thumbs, which allow us to hold weapons, as compared to divinely created beings with a higher moral purpose?  If the Europeans were already worrying about these issues the horror of World War I seemed to provide a dark answer to all of those questions.

More philosophically, M. de Norpois' rant raises the essential question: what is the point of art?  Does it have to be "important?"  On Facebook - and in way too many bars - I've plagued my friends with the question of whether or not R.E.M. was an important band as compared to just being an influential band or a great band?  Or, to ask the question another way, does a band have to have produced "important" songs, that is songs with a social relevance, to be considered a great band?  Most of the singers or bands that I truly admire produced beautiful or moving or heartbreaking songs, but also songs that were important, that is socially significant.  I will be utterly predictable by bringing up Neil Young.  I think songs like Ohio and Rockin' in the Free World captured key moments in time or forced the audience to ask tough questions about their world.  Obviously, you could say the same thing about Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen or Marvin Gaye. So, it came down to this point - R.E.M. is one of my favorite bands, but did they ever produce an "important" songs, and so were they then an "important" band, and thus a "great" band?  It's an interesting discussion over beers with great friends, but it hints at the bigger question of what is art supposed to accomplish?  I used to have this discussion with my ex-wife Brenda, who, as I've pointed out repeatedly, had much better and sophisticated taste in music than I have, and I would argue that songs had to be about something, as compared to just being beautiful.  As with most things, in the end I suspect that she was right, and I've come to believe that in the end maybe beauty is enough, and, what is more, maybe it's actually the most important thing.  As Rumi reminds us, "judge a moth by the beauty of its candle."  Anything that takes us away form the mundane world and toward something more profound and transcendent is justification enough, and doubtless representative of human nature at its finest.

Mercury House

And a picture that I snapped outside the Mercury House in Zanzibar.  This is, at least allegedly, where the young Farrokh Bulsara, later much more famously known as Freddie Mercury, lived as a young boy.  Of course, there is also something akin to a cottage industry in Zanzibar in promoting houses associated with Mercury's life.  As with so much of the trip, it featured a very teachable moment because his family were Zoroastrians, one of the world's oldest religions and one that has been dwindling away for years, with Zanzibar being one of the last centers.  I told the story (recorded elsewhere somewhere on this increasingly unwieldy blog) of the epic dart competition wherein Team Scudder defeated Team Zale and it was declared, officially and irrefutably, that Bohemian Rhapsody could never be played again.  Sadly, apparently I'm the only one who respects the law - and, as everyone knows, I'm all about respecting the rules and authority.

One of the students on the trip, the normally trustworthy and affable Emily, broke every cardinal rule of polite society by singing the lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody, quite loudly, as we walked through the winding passageways of the old market in Zanzibar, in response to the story of my heroism.  Clearly she's going to have to flunk the class.

Another One of the Dessert Loving Englishmen

I've talked a lot about how having my son so close over the last year has been such a blessing. No one will ever mean to me what he means to me, and although I tell him that all the time I do hope it resonates with him.  We tend to get together later in the evening when things have slowed down around Bleak House.  The problem is that we live in Vermont, and late evening options are limited - it is, as Andy Burkhardt can testify, a Yankee hellhole.  Inevitably we end up going to Denny's, which is our only late night (and sadly I mean past 9:00 p.m. option [see note above about Yankee hellhole]).  We normally get together to discuss movies or books or just to goof.  Last night he ordered a Maple Bacon Sundae, which is, despite the addition of bacon, sweet bacon, looked wrong on so many levels.

I'm kind of surprised that Homer Simpson didn't join us.

My Year With Proust - Day 91

"Now, fully as much as retirement, ill-health or religious conversion, a protracted love affair will substitute fresh visions for the old."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 506

I don't think I can speak for all of these eventualities, but I'm sure that Proust is correct once again.  A very good friend of mine, who is actually six years younger than me, tells me with complete sincerity that he begins and ends each day with thoughts of retirement.  I've certainly not reached that point, and, truthfully, the thought of retirement fills me with dread.  The thought of spending the last few years of my life puttering around the house just sounds like hell.  This, of course, means that I've probably lived my life poorly and have devoted too much of my time and effort and emotional capital in the pursuit of my career, which, considering what a middling success I've enjoyed, is about as good an investment as following the Vikings for forty-six years (we both came into existence in the same year, which I'm sure is a metaphor that even my students could decipher).  As we've discussed before, it seems to me that so much of Remembrance of Things Past, and I guess all literature, is an exploration of liminal spaces.  In all of these instances, retirement, ill-health, religious conversion and a protract love affair, they all relate to transitions.  Or, maybe more accurately, they relate to the destruction of some aspect of the self and its replacement with "fresh visions."  In one of my favorite Hadiths the prophet said, "the best jihad is the conquest of the self," and maybe the reason why all of these instances produce new visions is that, in some fashion or another, the older visions - just as the older self - are being destroyed and must be replaced.

Turn It Up

Travel is filled with odd little moments which defy logic or categorization, and which sadly/happily drive the insufferable Type A personalities insane, but which are actually the best part of travel.  When we left Pemba we took a four hour ferry ride to Zanzibar, which I highly recommend because it was beautiful and gave us an extraordinary view of the island.  It was air conditioned and the seats were comfortable and the good, while limited and in oddly short supply, was OK.  While we were killing time, and before we were welcomed up on deck to take pictures (more on that later), we enjoyed a Chinese gangster picture.  What made it most enjoyable was that it was in Chinese, but also included Chinese subtitles, which allowed us to not understand the story on many levels.  At a certain point one of the porters came over to the TV and turned up the volume, which added to the overall Fellini-esque feel of the experience.  That said, it was one of my favorite moments, and a teachable moment in its own way.  The Chinese are all over Africa at the moment, pouring in a ton of money, while we're busy blowing up big chunks of the Middle East.  I don't think it takes a Ph.D. in economics to figure out which is the better investment.

"You're right, that other guy is a bad person, thanks for sharing."

My Year With Proust - Day 90

"It would seem, none the less, that so far as Odette was concerned people could have taken into account the fact that if, indeed, she had never entirely understood Swann's mentality, at least she was acquainted with the titles and with all the details of his studies, so much so that the name of Vermeer was as familiar to her as that of her own dressmaker; while as for Swann himself, she knew intimately those traits of character of which the rest of the world is ignorant or which it scoffs at, and of which only a mistress or a sister possesses the true and cherished image; and so strongly are we attached to such idiosyncrasies, even to those of them which we are most anxious to correct, that it is because a woman comes in times to acquire an indulgent, an affectionately mocking familiarity with them such as we ourselves or our relatives have, that love affairs of long standing have something of the sweetness and strength of family affection. The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 505

Proust continues to reflect upon the mystery of the seeming aberration of the marriage of Swann and Odette.  As is always the case, the question eventually evolved from why are they together to why are they still together, as is so often the case.  There is an old chestnut that runs that you initially love your partner despite their idiosyncrasies but eventually - and this is how you know it is truly love - you begin to love them for their idiosyncrasies.  In my last two love affairs - and considering my age - they will probably officially be my last two love affairs (although, life is strange and tends to have its own plan, so who knows) both women at a certain point suddenly realized that we had absolutely nothing in common. To be fair, I think in both instances I prompted the realization when I commented, during an exegesis on some other couple's mismatched pairing, that it just not really matter because we had nothing in common.  In both instances there was this almost theatrical pause wherein the woman suddenly realized that we, in fact, had nothing in common; and how this wasn't painfully obvious from the beginning is beyond me.  I don't know if my long-suffering first wife Brenda ever grew to love my idiosyncrasies, but she did put up with them.  I remember one time leading up to my fantasy baseball draft she prepared, somehow, in an age before memes, a copy of the famous Polaroid picture from the film Memento of me, wherein she had scribbled "Don't believe his lies," which served as both a great homage to the movie as well as a necessary warning to my fellow owners. Now, that seems like the classic example of the "affectionately mocking familiarity with them" that Proust discusses.  She never grew to love baseball (one of her few egregious faults), and I don't think she ever reached the point of loving what I loved, but maybe she just loved that I loved something, and maybe that's more than most people ever have.

But what to make of the last line, "The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections."  I don't think Proust in this case is talking about sharing our own self-delusion about an imperfection, but rather in sharing the same honest view of that imperfection; accepting that imperfection as an essential part of the person. One of the fundamental mistakes that people make, and I know I've talked about this before, is our desire to change the other person, even though it was the very original nature of that person we fell in love with.  Men tend to want to tart up their girlfriends, and then turn around and jealously assume that the only reason why they're dressed that way is that they're sleeping or looking to sleep with someone else.  Women tend to try and turn their men into this paragon of bourgeois normality, fit only to go to cookouts and mow the yard, that they, in the end, wouldn't fuck on a bet.  It's amazing that we've survived as a species.

Pemba Airport

OK, just a brief post, but I loved the flight from Dar Es Salaam to Pemba.  Four years ago, in a very different universe, I took the short flight from the Dar Es Salaam domestic airport to Zanzibar, but this time we leapfrogged over Zanzibar and flew directly to Pemba.  The airport at Pemba was, as you might expect, pretty quiet, but still a nice place - and the arrival sign was brilliant.

The quiet, but tidy and pretty well-organized, airport in Pemba.

For some reason this sign is a metaphor for the entire trip.

My Year With Proust - Day 89

"Almost everyone was surprised at the marriage, and that in itself is surprising.  No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.  And so there are very few who can regard as natural the enormous proportions that a person comes to assume in our eyes who is not the same as the person that they see."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 505

Proust assures us that everyone was shocked that Swann ended up marrying Odette, and maybe most of all Swann himself.  I think I've talked before about my theory that, thanks to cognitive dissonance, people often end up marrying the person who broke up their marriage because it somehow alleviates the inherent psychic tension.  Yes, I broke up my marriage, but I did it because I found the great love of my life, and not simply because I was bored or met someone who likes sex as much as I do.  If you end up marrying that person then, at least psychically, and completely unconsciously, it's all a wash.  Swann's case is slightly different because he never broke up his marriage or hers, but by marrying her it does help explain away his increasingly irrational behavior; again, not in a rational conscious world, but down deep in the unconscious depths.

The "supplementary person" is more problematical, not in the ability to understand the concept but rather in our ability to live with that person.  I always warn my students against falling into the trap of following up their college graduation with a wedding, which too many of them do as they begin to imagine themselves as a functioning adult.  Too big a part of that imagined adult self is the perception of themselves as a married, adult creature, the supplementary person that Proust discussed.  In a classic Seinfeld episode George goes on a rant on the dangers of "relationship George" coming into contact with "relationship George", and, while it is funny, like a lot of Seinfeld, there is a grain of truth in there somewhere.  The supplementary person we imagine/construct does appear to be the real person, although in reality it is as transitory or fictitious as a doppelganger.

The Crew Outside the Temple

And here is a nice picture of the crew on the steps outside the Hindu temple (much more on this later) during our first day in Dar Es Salaam.  Look how bright-eyed and bushy-tailed they all look.  Within a week Africa had beaten the vast majority of them down and they trudged on to the plane a weary but enlightened lot. And look at how happy Wehmeyer is as he finally touched down in Africa.  Unlike the students, he could have stayed on.

In the end they were a great group who never complained (much) nor mutinied (at least openly).  I never once had to remonstrate them with "The dogs may bark: the caravan moves on!", although I did yell "yallah" a lot.

My Year With Proust - Day 88

"' . . . For a month and more Vaugoubert's enemies danced around him howling for his scalp' (M. de Norpois detached this word with sharp emphasis). 'But forewarned is forearmed; he treat their insults with the contempt they deserved,' he added even more forcibly, and with so fierce a glare in his eye that for a moment we forgot our food. 'In the words of a fine Arab proverb, "The dogs may bark; the caravan moves on!"' . . . 'Give me a good policy and I will give you good finances, to quote the favourite words of Baron Louis': for we had not yet imported from the Far East: 'Victory is on the side that can hold out a quarter of an hour longer than the other, as the Japanese say.'"

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 497-498

Here Proust is recounting M. de Norpois holding forth, and specifically his habit of emphasizing his points with famous or obscure quotes.  I tagged this passage for a couple reasons.  First off, the quotes "The dogs may bark; the caravan moves one!" and "Victory is on the side that can hold out a quarter of an hour longer than the other" are two of my favorites.  I was prepared to make the former the official quote/remonstrance of the Zanzibar trip, but never had to do so because the students were so well-behaved and enthusiastic.  The second reason why I pulled out that section is that it reflects my own conflicted reaction to people who pull out quotes like this to prove a point.  In some ways it annoys me, especially if the person making use of the quote quite clearly opened up Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and randomly pulled out something.  Commencement speakers - and college presidents - do this all the time.  In the end it just makes you look stupid, especially when you're trying to pull off this bait and switch in front of an educated audience.  I always tell my students that they should only use quotes that they legitimately came across in their actual readings.  Essentially, if you're going to quote Proust then it better have been from that time you read Remembrance of Things Past.  Over the years I've made more than a few students cry over this issue, but in the end I think it's good for them.  The other side of my conflicted view of the use of quotes is an obvious one - I do it all the time (albeit while keeping within the rule explained above).  Yes, it's one of my great weaknesses, and I know it says something bad about my character.  And, yes, the more obscure the quote the better.

My Year With Proust - Day 87

   "The contempt which my father had for my kind of intelligence was so far tempered by affection that, in practice, his attitude towards everything I did was one of blind indulgence.  And so he had no qualm about sending me to fetch a little prose poem which I had made up years before at Combray on coming home from a walk.  I had written it in a state of exaltation which must, I felt certain, communicate itself to everyone who read it."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 490-491

Proust is reflecting upon his complicated relationship with his father.  Does anyone have a relationship with their father which is not complicated?  Or maybe this is just a gender-specific situation.  Maybe women have more simple relationships with their fathers, which they balance out by having complicated relationships with their mothers, and it is only the men who routinely have complicated relationships with their fathers.  One of the things I've always appreciated about my father is his love of literature, which we clearly share.  Growing up I would routinely harvest books from his library, and my first experience with Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (which I've talked about at length) was from a bound set of his.  Years later when I did a meaningful books talk at Champlain my father went out of his way to track down all the books I discussed and read them all, some of which  became his favorites as well (especially Yukio Mishima), so I guess it came full circle.  And speaking of which, I need to send him my copy of the Iliad on CD.

A Fellow Traveler

Over the years I've met so many amazing folks on my travels around the world, and I wish I would have made a more concerted effort to keep track of them and keep in touch with them - or at least record them.  So, with that in mind, here's a picture of a very nice German woman named Kristin who we bumped into on our first day in Zanzibar.  She had just set off on a solo vacation and had never visited an Islamic country before, so I think she was very happy to run with our crowd.  She shared many of our adventures before she headed off to different parts of Zanzibar for diving.

Here's a nice picture I snagged on the City Tour.  Here's hoping the rest of her adventure was extraordinary.

Abdul

While I don't try and record everyone I meet along the way, I do like to include folks who are very helpful or memorable or kind.  This is Abdul, who led the City Tour and the Spice Tour while we were in Zanzibar.  He was unfailingly helpful and patient - which was a challenge when you're leading nineteen American university students around.  The students loved him.

Abdul would begin every speech with the words, "hey guys," which quickly became a popular catchphrase on the tour.

Officially a Trip

I think it's never officially a trip until you make a trip to the hospital, and our visit to Zanzibar provided the opportunity.  Or, since we were visiting Tanzania, a former British colony, I suppose it would be appropriate to take the more traditional British approach and say that we went to hospital.  And, further, in this case hospital would really mean a doctor's office.  In this case the doctor's office was that of Dr. Mehta, although he was busy and we saw the excellent Kamlesh Purbia.  The patient was Emma Michalowski, who thought it might be a good idea to change her contacts on the beach, and thus managed to get some grit in her contact and a scratched cornea.  She was pretty miserable, and was beginning to look like an unsuccessful boxer, so she and I passed on the music lesson at the Dhow Countries Music Academy (fortunately we went back that night for a concert) and went in search of a doctor.  On our walk downtown we had gone by Dr. Mehta's Hospital every day, and decided to give it a shot.  The walk-in hours were listed as beginning at 8:00, although, classically, in Zanzibar that didn't really mean 8:00.  At 9:00 we began to knock and eventually a very nice nurse opened and let us in.  We spent the next hour and a half there and I'm happy to report that we received first rate treatment.  And it was also air-conditioned, which made Emma very happy (and she quickly dozed off waiting for her next round of eye drops).  They asked for our insurance information, which we could give them because Champlain was insistent that we carry the information at all times.  They said it looked good, and then charged us $125 ($137.40 once you factored in the 10% charge to use the credit card), so I'm not really certain what the insurance actually covered.  I would think that even in the US you could see a doctor and get some eye drops for $125, although maybe I'll delusional (or even more delusional than normal).  Still, I'm not complaining.  They were extremely nice and professional and Emma felt better very quickly, so it actually became one of my favorite moments from the trip.

Obviously Dr. Mehta is pretty famous, as shown by the fact that there is a sign for his house.  I think the current Dr. Mehta is the grandson of the original Dr. Mehta.  There were all sorts of pictures on the wall of various Dr. Mehtas meeting various famous people.

And here is the patient, who was soon fast asleep as she waited for her next round of eye drops and enjoyed the air conditioning.  And to think, she went on our Jordan trip last year and she was allegedly on this trip because of her experience as an international traveler.

Kamlesh Purbia, who looked after Emma.  He was a very nice guy who was completely on top of things.

And Emma's drops, one set antibiotic and the other steroid for pain and swelling.  I suspect you'd get something very similar in the US.

While killing time during Emma's nap I read all the signs on the wall.  This one was my favorite.  It walked you through what you were supposed to do to treat a bite from a Black Mamba.  With my brutish Arabic I figured out that Mamba must actually be an Arabic word, because it's quite common to form the plural by adding an extra A in the middle of the word.

Billby

OK, so I'm going to break every rule of social media (again) and post a picture without gaining written approval.  My friend Bill Farrington reached out to me yesterday and sent me this picture.  Bill was my best friend in college and I could tell many stories, some of them actually fit for polite company.  Besides being a truly great friend, he also helped me through some tough times and was supportive during that time when we're all evolving and trying to figure out who in the hell we are.  Ironically, I was just talking about him - and blogging about him - the other day and saying that I really needed to reach out to him, so this is pretty serendipitous.  He's going to be up in this neck of the woods in August on a motorcycle trip and I think we can arrange our schedules to spend some time together.  That would make me very happy.  Every year one of my New Year's resolutions is to be a better friend, and maybe I'll actually accomplish it this year.

That is definitely a cool bike, although I doubt if I will participate in the motorcycle riding part of the reunion.  I barely have enough balance to get into the kitchen unscathed. 

My Year With Proust - Day 86

"But the very terms that he employed showed me Literature as something entirely different from the image that I had formed of it at Combray, and I realized that I had been doubly right in renouncing it.  Until now, I had concluded only that I had no gift for writing; now M. de Norpois took away from me even the desire to write.  I wanted to express to him what had been my dreams; trembling with emotion, I was painfully anxious that all the words I uttered would be the sincerest possible equivalent of what I had felt and I had never yet attempted to formulate; which is to say that my words were very unclear.  Perhaps from a professional habit, perhaps by virtue of the calm that it acquired by every important personage whose advice is commonly sought, and who, knowing that he will keep the control of the conversation in his own hands, allows his interlocutor to fret, to struggle, to toil to his heart's content, perhaps also to show off the character of his face (Greek, according to himself, despite his sweeping whiskers), M. de Norpois, while anything was being expounded to him, would preserve a facial immobility as absolute as if you had been addressing some ancient - and deaf - bust in a museum."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 488

In this passage Proust is struggling with the words of M. de Norpois and his own desire to be a writer.  Years and years ago I wrote a novel, which was pretty bad, and a collection of short stories, which were a little more promising, but still pretty rough.  I sent the novel and the short stories off to publishers and agents and they were all roundly rejected (and I think quite rightly so).  Essentially, I was evolving as a writer and beginning that difficult process of trying to find my voice and learn the craft - or any of those words that people use to describe the grueling chore of learning to write.  I showed some of my writing to my ex-wife and she was utterly disdainful of it, which I found crippling, and I stopped writing.  This is not a condemnation of my ex-wife because, well, like I said, it really wasn't very good, and it was not her job to lie to me and tell me that it was.  Rather, this is a condemnation of myself for giving up.  It's not like me to just give up on anything.  My friends will joke that I am like a force of nature when I want something.  My normal response to criticism of one of my plans is an initial mini-collapse, and then I come back even stronger and in a much more determined and structured way.  My normal joke is that you're just better off to accept this version of the plan because next week's is going to be much grander.  But it was not that way with writing.  I just stopped.  Now, it could be that I was just playing at writing, and that I wasn't meant to be a writer, or it could have been that writing is such a deeply personal process that to I could not accept the criticism because it was too close.  Or maybe it was just a case that at that moment in my life I was not prepared to deal with the criticism or put in the hours to make myself  better. Either way, I've always regretted it.  I saw where Helen Mirren recently said that if the seventy year old version of herself could have told anything to the twenty year old version of herself it would have been to feel free to tell more people to fuck off.  That is truly sage advice.

My Year With Proust - Day 85

   "M. de Norpois had also brought about a change in my father's plans in a matter of far greater importance to myself.  My father had always wanted me to be a diplomat, and I could not endure the thought that, even if I were to remain for some years attached to the Ministry, I might run the risk of being sent later on as ambassador to capitals in which there would be no Gilberte.  I should have preferred to return to the literary career that I had planned for myself and then abandoned years before during my wanderings along the Guermantes way.  But my father had steadily opposed my devoting myself to literature, which he regarded as vastly inferior to diplomacy, refusing even to dignify it with the title of career, until the day when M. de Norpois, who had little love for the more recent generations of diplomatic officials, assured him that it was quite possible, as a writer, to attract as much attention, to receive as much consideration, to exercise as much influence as in the ambassadorial world, and at the same time to preserve more independence."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 474

A few things jump to mind as I reread this passage, although I'm running dreadfully far behind this morning so I'll just jot down a couple notes and, inshallah, return to this later.  First off, it's classic/amusing/touching/ridiculous that he initially is factoring in Gilberte in this thought process in choosing a career.  That said, don't we all do this? When my son was trying to decide between Drake and Saint Anselm's (both really good schools) I was trying to get a sense of his thought process, and he had to admit that one of the allures of Saint Anselm's was that it was close to home and thus his girlfriend at the time.  I told him that hometown girlfriends have a remarkably short half-life, but maybe I should have just shut up and remained out of it completely.  I'm sure my thought process was very similar at that age.  At the time I was dating a very sweet girl who my brother Eric remembers as being Miss Teen Indiana, although I don't think she was - although I think she competed for the title - or maybe she didn't.  That was a million years ago.  Without doubt, she was beautiful and smart and sweet.

The clash between Proust and his father over the younger man's career is also sadly typical.  One of the issues that festered, although never rising to the level of an actual argument, between my father and myself over the years was my decision not to go to medical school, which was his preference.  Now, the reality is that it was probably much more my perception of his displeasure than his actual displeasure, although I think there was at least some truth to it.  If you love your career - and you feel that you are making the world a better place through it - why wouldn't you want you children to follow in your path?  Certainly when I finally told him that I didn't want to be pre-med he was he very gracious and told me that I needed to do what made me happy.  We just have a wonderful chat on the phone the other day where we ended up telling each other how proud we were of the other, which we probably needed to have said more definitively over the years.  We have two very large egos, and sometimes it is difficult to contain both in one hemisphere, but, all things considered, we have a good relationship.

Why We Do This

I finally figured out how, with the assistance of the excellent David Mills, where the memory card slot is on my laptop so I gained access to the hundreds and hundreds of pictures I took on the Zanzibar trip.  Posts about Zanzibar will be competing with Proust for space for the next few weeks.  I'll start with a seemingly pedestrian one, but one which I think speaks volumes about why my friend and colleague Steve lost so much sleep putting this trip together.  Here is a shot of the normally laconic Amos on the ridiculously tiny plane we took (arranged by the esteemed and almost mythological Kombo Bakar) from Dar Es Salaam to Pemba.  He's listening to the sound track from Indiana Jones and his joy is infectious.

My Year With Proust - Day 84

" . . . we must bear in mind that the character which a man exhibits in the latter half of his life is not always, although it often is, his original character developed or withered, attenuated or enlarged; it is sometimes the exact reverse, like a garment that has been turned."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 468

This is, naturally enough, a continuation of Proust's previous discussion of a person's nature, in this case their character. Does our character actually change - either to develop or wither - or even become the exact reverse?  One of our biggest discussions in Concepts of the Self is exactly what constitutes the self in the first place?  If the body completely recreates itself every seven years or so - and the self is merely a negotiated phenomenon - then what is the self?  And, as a subset of the self, what is our character?  If it is not the soul then is it merely a construct?  Essentially, is my character different than it used to be?  When Brenda and I dated in college her friends always referred to me as Scary Gary, and I think she actually crossed over to the other sidewalk when she saw me coming?  Was I really that scary (I'm quite sure I was an insufferable ass, but that's not quite the same thing)?  I suspect I was playing a role.  As the Drive-By Truckers in Marry Me remind us, "It's a cartoon town, I play my part."  Despite my allegedly fearsome temper most of my colleagues would describe me as a good guy who would do anything for his friends and his students. Is this particular Scudder a development or a withering away of my earlier character - or the actual exact reverse?  I don't feel one iota different, although to be fair I guess none of us really do.  I think I try much harder to be patient and tolerant and supportive, but, again, I don't know if that's any different - maybe I'm just doing a better job sharing that side of my nature.  That said, there are certainly enough people who hate me, and maybe they're the ones who actually have a better read on my character.

My Year With Proust - Day 83

"But the chief reason - and one which is applicable to humanity as a whole - was that our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we have made it our duty to exercise them that if we come to engage in an activity of a different kind, it catches us off guard and without the slightest awareness that it might involve the application of those same virtues."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 466

First off, briefly, since I have returned to commenting on Within a Budding Grove it obviously means that I have returned safe and fairly sound from Zanzibar; clearly, much more on this later.  After writing on Proust every day for months it seems strange to have taken off nearly two weeks, and I'm sure it will take me a little while to get back in the routine. And maybe the best proof of being rusty - never mind the fact that I have limited intelligence and perception - is that I've been struggling a little bit with this particular passage.  In the end what I think Proust is talking about here - and it's perfectly possible that I might end up changing my mind entirely and returning for a rewrite - is that our virtues operate as a foundation, almost independent of conscious thought.  My father used to say that in his life as a doctor nineteen out of every twenty cases were pretty routine, but it was the twentieth that made you glad that you had gone to medical school.  One of his points was that life is pretty routine, if not completely mundane and boring, and it's easy to glide through life on auto-pilot.  We face the same problems, and, for that matter, most of them are actually non-problems, every day and deal with them in the same way, which means that our answers are the same and that our thought process is the same.  Ah, but then there's the twentieth issue which may be entirely unique and challenging, but it could well be that we're still tackling while making use of our own same virtues, even if we don't realize that we're doing so.

My Year With Proust - Day 82

"Now, this attitude on my father's part may be felt to require a few words of explanation, inasmuch as some of us, no doubt, remember a Cottard of distinct mediocrity and a Swan by whom modesty and discretion, in all his social relations, were carried to the utmost refinement of delicacy.  But in his case what had happened was that, to the original 'young Swann' and also to the Swann of the Jockey Club, our old friend had added a new personality (which was not to be his last), that of Odette's husband.  Adapting to the humble ambitions of that lady the instinct, the desire, the industry which had had always had, he had laboriously constructed for himself, a long way beneath the old, a new position more appropriate to the companion who was to share it with him.  In this new position he revealed himself a different man.  Since (while continuing to meet his own personal friends as himself, not wishing to impose Odette on them unless they expressly asked to be introduced to her) it was a second life that he had begun to lead, in common with his wife, among a new set of people . . ."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 465

We have now moved on to Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of Remembrance of Things Past.  First, a little housekeeping.  Since I was moving into the second volume I've gone ahead and switched over the Vintage boxed set of Remembrance of Things Past, which features the same classic C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation (with modifications from Terence Kilmartin).  I had been reading the Barnes & Noble trade copy of Swann's Way.  The point being that the page numbers will be slightly different, and I'm just enough of a nerd (and historian) to go back soon, as I've previously mentioned, and change the page numbers on my posts (as well as reproduce my comments on the Vintage edition).  That said, I can't wait too long because I've promised my B&N copy of Swann's Way to my student Taylor Post, who is one of the few people to read this blog and who actually likes to meet to discuss Proust.  Anyway, volume I in the Vintage set contains Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove, and is thus thick enough to stop most small arms fire.

As Proust tells us, Swann has added a new personality, that of Odette's husband, which he describes in section one, "Madame Swann at Home."  I had read the first two volumes years ago so this was not a surprise, although it's still funny/sad/tragicomic when you reflect back on all of his suffering at the end of Swann's Way and especially his decisions to have not more to do with her (as we all do, repeatedly).  In this instance Swann "revealed himself a different man," although one has to wonder if the key word in that sentence is "revealed," which is very different than being a different man.  It seems to me that all of us add new personalities along the way, but is this one of those instances where the tired old metaphor of a snake shedding its skin is actually appropriate; in the end, even with the new skin, it's still the same snake.  He talks more about this in the next few paragraphs so I won't go into this question too far yet.

Before I go, and I'm afraid it's going to be for most of the next two weeks (I'm heading out to Zanzibar tomorrow with 19 students, and in the process of getting them all ready to go I somehow managed to forget that I'm going on the trip as well, and I'm magnificently unprepared), I wanted to make a quick comment about writing in books.  I always tell my students that if they don't write in their books then they don't love them, although very few of them, at that tender age, love books, yet.  I was wondering why I didn't remember more of Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove when I read them years ago (and, well, the years ago part definitely plays a role here), and I think it's because they were library copies and thus I didn't write all over them.  I've talked before of the Indian concept of rasa, where you become one with the art, and, at least for me, so much of that relates to writing notes for myself, and for the author, oddly, all over the book.  In this instance the process of reading Proust, writing notes (which probably explains, partially, why I want to go back and replicate my notes in the new version of Swann's Way - and because I'm a nut) and then writing about it on the blog, will not only help me understand Proust on a whole deeper level, but also make it an essential part of my own memory.

Oh, and one truly last thing.  If there are not any more posts on this blog then you can assume that I haven't made it back from Zanzibar. That said, I would prefer that I made it back from Zanzibar, and not just to ruminate more fully, although still clumsily, on Proust.  Obviously, my main goal is to, in addition to giving my students an amazing educational experience, get all of them back safe and sound.  The other day one of my students told me that her father, who is not a fan of this trip, wanted her to pass along the message that if something happened to her he was coming for me.  I told her, essentially, fair enough and understandable, but also keep in mind that if something happened to her it already would have happened to me, because it would have had to go through me to get to her; I'm the disposable one here.  So, my comment is made with the obvious disclaimer that my main job is to look after my students and get them back to Champlain College healthy (if they can actually listen to my constant reminders to take their malaria medicine), wealthy (well, that's going to take a short term hit, either from souvenir purchases or luggage charges, or both) and especially wise (although I'll settle for merely marginally wiser).  Now, having said that, if for some reason the blood clot shakes loose on the plane or a particularly vicious and radioactively empowered flying fox carries me away or swimming with dolphins turns into fleeing from sharks or a popobawa turns his insidious attention my way - and let's not even bring up the long-delayed witch gun incident from west Africa (how did I get so many enemies?) - and I don't make it back, then a couple quick thoughts.  First off, I'm a huge believer in saying what needs to be said, which means I'm usually the embarrassing person  who pours out their emotions on leaving - there are few things worse than what is not said.  Every time I talk to my best friend David I tell him I love him, which we, as men, tend to do a poor job of doing.  And when we had finally safely delivered the students last year on the Jordan trip, and were heading home, I turned to my friend Cyndi and said, "you do know how much I love you, right?"  Yeah, I'm that guy.  So, to anyone who has actually read this blog over the years - who has, at least indirectly, played a role in my life - thank you.  Sincerely, thank you.  It's very kind of you to take time out to read my words and to share my thoughts, even if you didn't agree with them.  Secondly, if I don't come back it's OK, it's really OK - again, I want to come back, but don't fret about me and what might have been.  I mean, hell, Zanzibar would be a sweet place to haunt; even those sad, dispassionate angels from Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire would smile as they hung around the bar at the Livingstone House.  More importantly, I'm solid, personally and professionally and spiritually. As Lester says at the end of American Beauty, "I'm great."

My Year With Proust - Day 81

"And I should have required also that they be the same women, those whose costume interested me because, at a time when I still had faith, my imagination had individualized them and had provided each of them with a legend.  Alas! in the acacia-avenue - the myrtle-alley - I did see some of them again, grown old, no more now than grim spectres of what once they had been, wandering to and fro, in desperate search of heaven knew what, through the Virgilian groves.  They had long fled, and still I stood vainly questioning the deserted paths.  The sun's face was hidden.  Nature began again to reign over the Bois, from which had vanished all trace of the idea that it was the Elysian Garden of Women; above the grimcrack windmill the real sky was grey, the wind wrinkled the surface of the Grand Lac in little wavelets, like a real lake; large birds passed swiftly over the Bois, as over a real wood, and with shrill cries their Druidical crown, and with Dodonaic majesty, seemed to proclaim the unpeopled vacancy of this estranged forest, and helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to see in reality the pictures that are stored in them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses.  The reality that I had known no longer existed.  It sufficed that Mme Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered.  The places that we have known belong not only to the little world of space on which we map them for our convenience.  None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas! as the years."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 447

I've we've finally arrived, eighty-one posts in, to the final sentences of Swann's Way.  The other night I was reading on into Within a Budding Grove, and found myself moved to let several of my friends know that I have arrived at page eight-hundred of the entire Remembrance of Things Past, which, by my brief math at that moment, constituted around eighteen percent of the way in. A younger, more impatient man - or one who was not so maniacally task-oriented - might have found those statistics daunting if not overpowering, but I had the opposite response.  Rather, I was oddly relieved and reassured that I still have eight-two percent of the novel to read.  When I was on Facebook I used to run a monthly music discussion for my friends, and the friends of their friends.  Similarly, at school I used to organize a monthly discussion which I entitled The Correct Answer, where you pose a question every month - a question that definitively did not have a correct answer or even a Correct Answer, but if you were chosen to pose the question that month and moderate the discussion, the reward was that the end you were allowed to identify the Correct Answer (these things always tend to work best when there's a hook, and this was a moderately successful one).  One month I asked folks to give their opinion of the greatest last line or lines of a novel or chapter within a novel or of a short story.  It's difficult to do much better than: "The reality that I had known no longer existed.  It sufficed that Mme Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered.  The places that we have known belong not only to the little world of space on which we map them for our convenience.  None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas! as the years." This is especially true of the line, "remembrance of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment."  This has been one of my favorites for years, and has been one of my Facebook quotes for years and has also popped repeatedly here on this blog as a featured quote - and doubtless had been sent around via Twitter more than a few times.  One way to consider that line would be that life is regret, because every memory is based on regret - either because that moment will never come again or because of something bad you did or something that you wish you done (and, this one, of course, is always the most poignant and thus powerful and memorable).  As we know from David Linden's Accidental Mind (aka The Pumpkin Book) emotion is used to stamp a memory, and what is more powerful than regret.  Anyway, even if I were not dedicated to finishing all of Proust this year (or, more realistically, over the next year or so), those last couple lines would inspire me to push on.

My Year With Proust - Day 80

   "This day, which I had begun with so many misgivings, waas, as it happened, one of the few on which I was not unduly wretched.

   For, although I no longer thought, now, of anything save not to let a single day pass without seeing Gilberte (so much so that once, when my grandmother had not come home by dinner-time, I could not resist the instinctive reflection that, if she had been run over in the street and killed, I should not for some time be allowed to play in the Champs-Elysees; when one is in love one has no love left for anyone), yet those moments which I spent in her company, for which I had waited with so much impatience all night and morning, for which I had quivered with excitement, to which I would have sacrificed everything else in the world, were by no means happy moments; well did I know it, for they were the only moments in my life on which I concentrated a scrupulous, undistracted attention, and yet I could not discover in them one atom of pleasure.  All the time that I was away from Gilberte, I wanted to see her, because, having incessantly sought to form a mental picture of her, I was unable, in the end, to do so, and did not know exactly to what my love corresponded.  Besides, she had never yet told me that she loved me."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 419-420

Proust's love for Swann's daughter Gilberte now forms a lovely parallel to Swann's own love for Odette, and it's shaping up to be just as desperate and unhappy.  As Proust tells us, "when one is in love one has no love left for anyone."  His story about his early realization that if his grandmother were run down in the street he would not be able to get away to see Gilberte reminds me of George Willard's initial anger with his mother for dying on the same day that he had a date, as laid out in the short story "Death" from Winesburg, Ohio, which I just had my students read a couple weeks ago.  No wonder we're so insufferable when we're in love.  I do find it interesting that one of the reasons why he was so desperate to get away to see Gilberte because he was already beginning to forget what she looked like, which once again reminds me of a story from Winesburg, Ohio, this time the story of long-suffering Alice in "Adventure."  In the end we always end up falling in love with a mytholgized version of the other person anyway, so maybe the reason why we forget their faces so quickly is that we never actually saw them at all.  

My Year With Proust - Day 79

   "The first of these days - to which the snow, a symbol of the powers that were able to deprive me of the sight of Gilberte, imparted the sadness of a day of separation, almost the aspect of a day of departure, because it changed the outward form and almost forbade the use of the customary sense of our only encounters, now altered, covered, as it were, in dust-sheets - that day, none the less, marked a stage in the progress of my love, for it was, in a sense, the first sorrow that she was to share with me."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 418-419

In this brief passage Proust reflects on a day when snow kept him from meeting his friend, and love, Gilberte on the Champs-Elysees.  There is a beautifully elegiac feel to this section, as there is, clearly, to so much of Remembrance of Things Past.  It begs the question - is this one of the reasons why I love Proust so much?  My students will always complain, well, theatrically complain, that whatever I'm having them read at the moment has to be the saddest piece of literature of all time - at least until the next choice, which they will then assure me has somehow topped its predecessor.  To be fair, they may be on to something. I've always been drawn more to sad or wistful or tragic or elegiac stories (and moves and music) than their sunnier counterparts (which helps explain why it is always Schubert over Schumann, and how Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony is my favorite).  And it helps explain why the first novel I ever fell in love with is Winesburg, Ohio.  But why?  I guess I've always found the sad to be more honest and dependable, and, I suppose, believable, than the happy.  Or maybe there is something more intrinsically beautiful about sorrow than about delight, or at least something than can be more tangibly reproduced aesthetically.  If that is true, is it because the human condition is, at its heart, about sadness, so it can be better reproduced artistically because it is, in fact, more true?

My Year With Proust - Day 78

   "Brief, fading ivy, climbing, fugitive flora, the most colourless, the most depressing, to many minds, of all that creep on walls or decorate windows; to me the dearest of them all, from the day when it appeared upon our balcony, like the very shadow of the presence of Gilberte, who was perhaps already in the Champs-Elysees, and as soon as I arrived there would greet me with: 'Let's begin at once.  You are on my side.' Frail, swept away by a breath, but at the same time in harmony, not with the season, with the hour; promise of that immediate pleasure which the day will deny or fulfill, and thereby of the one paramount immediate pleasure, the pleasure of loving and of being loved; more soft, more warm upon the stone than even moss is; alive, a ray of sunshine sufficing for its birth, and for the birth of joy, even in the heart of winter."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 416

You know, I could write at length about Proust's use of metaphor and specifically ivy as metaphor, but in the end I think I'll leave this alone with one comment: it's beautiful.

My Year With Proust - Day 77

"During this month - in which I went laboriously over, as over a tune, though never to my satisfaction, these visions of Florence, Venice, Pisa, from which the desire that they excited in me drew and kept something as profoundly personal as if it had been love, love for another person - I never ceased to believe that they corresponded to a reality independent of myself, and they made me conscious of as glorious a hope as could have been cherished by a Christian in the primitive age of faith, on the eve of his entry into Paradise.  Moreover, without my paying any heed to the contradiction that there was in my wishing to look at and to touch with my organs of sense what had been elaborated by the spell of my dreams and not perceived by my senses at all - though all the more tempting to them, in consequence, more different from anything that they knew - it was that which recalled to me the reality of these visions, which inflamed my desire all the more by seeming to hint a promise that my desire should be satisfied.  And for all that motive force of my exaltation was a longing for aesthetic enjoyments, the guide-books ministered even more to it than books on aesthetics, and, more again than the guide-books, the railway time-tables.  What moved me was the thought that this Florence which I could see, so near and yet inaccessible, in my imagination, if the trace which separated it from me, in myself, was not one that I might cross, could yet be reached by a circuit, by a digression, were I to take the plain, terrestrial path."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 411

What struck me as I was reading this section was the thought that growing up I don't know if I had a mystical location that fired my imagination, which seems like an odd admission from someone that so many of my friends equate with foreign travel.  Hoosiers are such odd creatures; we just don't leave the state.  If you're from Indiana and have traveled widely you're viewed with some suspicion, much like admitting that you don't like basketball (which I also don't like). The supposition is that it's some recessive gene popping up or you were adopted from some other state.  As I think I've discussed before, my brother Eric still lives in Indianapolis and can't imagine why anyone would not want to do the same.  I think his dream is that I'll move there and get a house in his neighborhood, not only so that we could spend more time together (which, truthfully, would make me very happy) but also because he'd be freed from making excuses for my unexplained absence from the state.  Growing up it was just inconceivable that we would leave the state, and this even showed up in our choice of colleges (all four of us matriculated in state). Since we had such a limited physical universe I more than made up for it by developing a far broader intellectual and literary universe, and my mystic places were literary ones: 221B Baker Street or the Shire or Winesburg, Ohio. Maybe the closest to an actual location was Tahiti, but even that related to Somerset-Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence and thus it never was truly tangible and more aesthetic.

Now, to be fair, I suppose I've more than made up for it since then, and, as I've detailed in other posts, have visited many of the places that came to hold a mystic place in my imagination.  When I went to Yemen I only told two people about it, Laura, my girlfriend at the time, and David, my best friend, and they were both angry/worried and either actively or gently encouraged me not to go.  However, I could not not go, especially since I was living in Abu Dhabi and it was a ridiculously short flight. Essentially, they were echoing the concerns of the Yemeni ambassador, who I had to meet to get my visa, "why DO you want to go to Yemen?"  Undoubtedly, part of it related to the fact that I'm a historian and who has more history than Yemen?  However, there was that mystic sense of the place that haunted my imagination, and even if I knew in my heart of hearts that it would not end of being that place (although, truthfully, it was, and more so) I still had to go.  Zanzibar, which I'll be revisiting now in about four days (yikes) had much the same pull, although with very few of the concerns that hung over the Yemen trip.  Ancient Indian writers on aesthetics talk about rasa, which has several meanings, but at its heart calls for an immersion, almost on the genetic level, with a piece of art. They would not understand that classic western sense of the need for a scholarly distance, much discussed by Kant and Hume, between the viewer and the piece of art.  Instead, with rasa you really need to become one with the piece of art.  I think I must have the same view toward foreign travel, at least with the places that rise to the level of Yemen or Zanzibar in my imagination.  So, in a sense I could explain to the Yemeni ambassador, and my friends, why I wanted to go to Yemen, but I also couldn't explain why I wanted to go. I don't think it's that way with all the places that I want to go, but it is still true of those mystic places.  I HAVE to be there, to be a part of it.  What is left?  Now that's another post altogether.

My Year With Proust - Day 76

   "But if their names thus permanently absorbed the image that I had formed of these towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subordinating its reapparance in me to their own special laws; and in consequence of this they made it more beautiful, but at the same time more different from anything that the towns of Normandy or Tuscany could in reality be, and, by increasing the arbitrary delights of my imagination, aggravated the disenchantment that was in store for me when I set out upon my travels.  They magnified the idea that I formed of certain points on the earth's surface, making them more special, and in consequence more real.  I did not then represent to myself towns, landscapes, historic buildings, as pictures more or less attractive, but out from here and there of a substance that was common to them all, but looked on each of them as on an unknown thing, different from all the rest, a thing for which my soul was athirst, by the knowledge of which it would benefit.  How much more individual still was the character that they assumed from being designated by names, names that were only for themselves, proper names such as people have.  Words present to us little pictures of things, lucid and normal, like the pictures that are hung on the walls of schoolrooms to give children an illustration of what is meant by a carpenter's bench, a bird, an anthill; things chosen as typical of everything else of the same sort.  But names present to us - of persons and of towns which they accustom us to regard as individual, as unique, like persons - a confused picture, which draws from the names, from the brightness or darkness of their sound, the colour in which it is uniformly painted, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, on account of the limitations imposed by the process used in their reproduction, or by a whim on the designer's part, are blue or red not only the sky and the sea, but the ships and the church and the people in the streets."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 407-408

As I've been reading and discussing Proust on this blog I would hope that no one (and, oddly enough, around a hundred people pop in a day to read it) would ever take this as a replacement for reading Remembrance of Things Past. Even if this blog is written by an idiot, this is not meant to be an Idiot's Guide to Proust. While I'm mainly interested in my own deeply personal desire to read Proust and to use it as a tool for understanding myself, there is a small (obviously delusional) notion in the back of my mind that these words might inspire people to read the entire work.  In fact, even in today's e-world it would also be perfectly acceptable to buy Remembrance of Things Past, as it would be a purchase you would never  regret.  I know I will be revisiting it repeatedly until I shuffle off this mortal coil. There are multiple reasons why this silly blog should never take the place of reading Proust, one of the biggest ones being why would you deny yourself the beauty of his words?  I'm picking out a few sections, but I'm sure they're not the ones that would inspire other folks. Plus, as Proust opines above, there are always "limitations imposed by the process used in their reproduction." Essentially, in this case Proust's words and ideas are being filtered through a medium, in this case me, and your perceptions and your reality are fundamentally different, and thus you need to read Remembrance of Things Past unfiltered.

OK, and now, as they would have said on The Young Ones, back to the acting.

I had several thoughts as I was reading this section, some of which I'll discuss now and others I'll have to revisit because I'm still processing them.  One of the things that popped into my mind, and this is clearly written within the shadow of the upcoming trip, is how some names just have an exotic and almost otherworldly feel to them. What amazes me is how many of these places I've managed to stumble into.  I often will say that I've been lucky enough to visit around forty countries, although I have to also say that in my long career their aren't too many times when anyone gave me anything.  I've had a lot of opportunities, but I think it's because I've put myself into the situation to take advantage of a lot of opportunities.  I'm pretty bright, but sometimes I think I've just worked other folks into the ground, so I guess I should also thank my father for instilling a strong work ethic.  However, of course, we never see ourselves that way.  For years I would have sworn that I was the laziest person in the world, and then I remember people at Champlain identifying me as a workaholic.  Now, I don't know if that is necessarily true, but I've certainly seen a lot more of the world than a marginally intelligent kid from southern Indiana should have seen.  So, I'll put it down as hard work, with a little luck thrown in.  Mainly I just feel fortunate for health and happiness.

Anyway, here are a few pictures snapped on various and sundry trips.  And they were just the ones that were sitting on my computer desktop for one reason or another.  It sort of boggles the mind.  Shit, I may just be lucky . . .

Zanzibar, Tanzania

Lisbon, Portugal

Dubrovnik Croatia

Istanbul, Turkey

Gaza, Egypt

Fez, Morocco

Salalah, Oman

Sana'a, Yemen

  

Kuya Says Relax

It's hard to believe that I'm going to be back in Tanzania in a week, as part of our whirlwind student trip that features stops in Dar Es Salaam, Pemba and Zanzibar.  It's been an exhausting trip to plan, both because of the classically fluid east African sense of time but also because of general buffoonery from our Champlain administration.    Steve's ulcer is demanding attention and I've had a series of cluster headaches, including a couple days when I couldn't really see much of anything except for ripples of colored lights.  In the end you've just got to let it go.  We've devoted more time to planning this trip than any trip I've ever been associated with, even going back to my Global Module days.  I think every time I've gone to Africa it's started out as an unimaginable clusterfuck, but in the end it always turns mystic.  The students will learn so much, and it will be utterly transformative.  So, in the end it's worth all the colored ripples.

I'm on my way, brothers.  Trying to keep in mind, "pole pole."

Oh, and the obscure reference.  Kuya Mbogoya is our contact in Dar Es Salaam, who has proved immensely helpful.  Although no one can compare to the mythic Kombo Bakar on Pemba, who Steve may try and sneak back in his luggage.

My Year With Proust - Day 75

   "But while, and hour after his awakening, he was giving instructions to the barber, so that his stiffly brushed hair should not become disarranged on the journey, he thought once again of his dream; he saw once again, as he had felt them close behind him, Odette's pallid complexion, her too thin cheeks, her drawn features, her tired eyes, all the things which - in the course of those successive bursts of affection which had made of his enduring love for Odette a long oblivion of the first impression that he had formed of her - he had ceased to observe after the first few days of their intimacy, days to which, doubtless, while he slept, his memory had returned to seek the exact sensation of those things. And with that old, intermittent fatuity, which appeared in him now that he was no longer unhappy, and lowered, at the same time, the average level of his morality, he cried out in his heart: 'To think that I've wasted years of my life, that I've longed to die, that I've experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn't appeal to me, who wasn't even my type!'"

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 400-401

And so we come to the conclusion of the lengthy section "Swann in Love" from Swann's Way, although not the end of Swann being in love (although it might really be the end of Swann actually being in love), even if it's not the end of Swann and Odette. As we all know, there's nothing more fraught to blow up in our faces than making a declaratory statement, especially a concluding declaratory statement, when it comes to love.

Note to self: make use of the word fatuity more.

My Year With Proust - Day 74

"'Life is indeed astonishing, and holds some fine surprises; it appears that vice is far more common than one has been led to believe.'"

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 385

Here Swann, in the midst of his Odette-centric misery, reflects on life. In some ways it is a throwaway line, but I still find it interesting.  First off, it shows that, as much as he's miserable, Swann is coming to terms with it, and is starting to view the situation with a little more perspective, which we need to get past these love affairs.  OK, but if that's true, then why does he end up with Odette in the end (spoiler alert)?  See, now you're delving into the mysteries of the human psyche, and you'd need someone much smarter than me (which would be essentially everyone) to answer that question.  That said, my theory is that when you end up with the person who caused you so much pain it somehow brings it all full circle and makes your actions logical. If you devote so much time and energy and emotional capital to someone you did not end up with in the end then it makes your suffering seem all the more foolish.  However, if you end up with that person, even if you probably shouldn't be with that person, it somehow validates all your actions.  This is why God, and psychologists, invented cognitive dissonance.

I'll also go ahead and add my spin on Proust's comment: "Life is indeed astonishing, and holds some fine surprises; it appears that virtue is far more common than one has been led to believe." When you reach a level of intellectual sophistication (or, in my case, pseudo-intellectual pseudo-sophistication) the default setting becomes that people are mainly amoral brutes and there is nothing to believe in. The problem is that I don't think I've ever believed that, even when I technically believed it, and I certainly don't believe it now.  I've been fortunate enough to travel to something like forty countries around the world and I've encountered such extraordinary kindness and support, even when I probably didn't deserve it.  My son has hitchhiked across the country a couple times and he tells these stories of people who went way out of their way to help him out, when they didn't know him from Adam.  My father has hiked the Appalachian Trail twice, and has a closet full of stories about people who helped him out along the way. When Sanford and I, on the Trip of Excellence, drove halfway across the country we met so many truly good people.  I can remember driving through North Vernon, Indiana and telling Sanford that I used to date a girl from that small town.  Sanford (who is also proof positive of the existence of truly good people in the world) decided that my dating history justified stopping at the post office there to mail postcards.  While there we talked to a really nice woman behind the counter who was amused/amazed by our quest.  As we were pulling out we saw her running out of the post office to flag us down, so we pulled over.  She ran after us solely to tell us about a restaurant where we should eat; she didn't want us to miss it.  

My Year With Proust - Day 73

   "'Odette, my darling,' he began, 'I know, I am being simply odious, but I must ask you a few questions.  You remember what I once thought about you and Mme Verdurin?  Tell me, was it true?  Have you, with her or anyone else, ever?'

   She shook her head, pursing her lips together; a sign which people commonly employ to signify that they are not going, because it would bore them to go, when someone has asked, 'Are yo coming to watch the procession go by?', or 'Will you be at the review?' But this shake of the head, which is thus commonly used to decline participation in an event that has yet to come, imparts for that reason and element of uncertainty to the denial of participation in an event that is past.  Furthermore, it suggests reasons of personal convenience, rather than any definite repudiation, any moral impossibility.  When he saw Odette thus make him a sign that the insinuation was false, he realized that it was quite possibly true.

   'I have told you, I never did; you know quite well,' she added, seeming angry and uncomfortable.

   'Yes, I know all that; but are you quite sure?  Don't say to me, "You know quite well"; say, "I have never done anything of that sort with any woman"'.

   She repeated his words like a lesson learned by rote, and as though she hoped, thereby, to be rid of him: 'I have never done anything of that sort with any woman.' . . .

   ". . . Odette, do not prolong this moment which is torturing us both.  If you are willing to end it at once, you shall be free of it for ever.  Tell us, upon your medal, yes or no, whether you have ever done these things.'

   'How on earth can I tell?' she was furious.  'Perhaps I have, ever so long ago, when I didn't know what I was doing, perhaps two or three times.'

   Swann had prepared him for all possibilities. Reality must, therefore, be something which no relation to possibilities, any more than the stab of a knife in one's body bears to the gradual movement of the clouds overhead, since those words 'two or three times' carved, as it were, a cross upon the living tissues of his heart. A strange thing, indeed, that those words, 'two or three times', nothing more than a few words uttered in the air, at a distance, could so lacerate a man's heart, as if they had actually pierced it, could sicken a man, like a poison that he had drunk.

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 380-382

In this section Swann is questioning, or maybe interrogating (I was waiting for him to ask if she was now or had ever been a member of the Communist Party - or how frequently had she met other witches in the woods at the sabbat), on his suspicion that she had previously been with other women.

So many things jump to mind here.  One of the first is how homosexuality plays a role in the story once again, and how it relates back to Proust's own homosexuality in the telling of the story.  We were discussing Lesbian/Gay literary criticism yesterday in my Heroines & Heroes class so this was well timed.  In the end it speaks also to the mature, sophisticated nature of the novel, and how, beyond its beauty and merit aesthetically, it was also an important novel historically and in the evolution of the modern novel.

Odette's admission of "two or three times" is also interesting because it could mean that she has had numerous assignations with several women.  Normally when a person admits to something the reality is far greater.  If you partner admits to one drunken make-out session at a bar then she's probably meeting a couple regularly for threeways.  And if you admit that you did bump into an ex-girlfriend at a party you probably did actually sleep with her.  However, there is the very real possibility that Odette is just sick to death of Swann's incessant jealousy and paranoia and is hoping to inflict as much pain on him as possible.  In a previous post we discussed the notion of her emotional revenge upon him for giving herself so totally and hopefully to him in the early days of the relationship.  I wonder if her admission here is cut from the same cloth.

It also shows the folly of driving your lover crazy with questions about their past.  All of us have a past, and all those memories, both good and bad, made us into the person you are today.  If your present partner had a lot of lovers in the past, then you're probably benefiting from it because she/he has a lot of sexual experience and knows a few tricks - and she/he has a lot of emotional experience and thus probably much more forgiving of your own foibles.  If you look for something you'll find it. As Marcus Aurelius reminds us, what you control is this one moment and what are you going to do with it.  He warns us never to make of ourselves a cancer or an abscess in the universe, and Swann is clearly doing that in this exchange.