"But the moment that Francoise herself approached, some evil spirit would urge me to attempt to make her angry, and I would avail myself of the slightest pretext to say to her that I regretted my aunt's death because she had been a good woman in spite of her absurdities, but not in the least because she was my aunt; that she might easily been my aunt and yet have been so odious that her death would not have caused me a moment's sorrow; statements which, in a book, would have struck me as merely fatuous.
And if Francoise then, inspired like a poet with a flood of confused reflections upon bereavements, grief, and family memories, were to plead her inability to rebut my theories, saying: 'I don't know how to espress myself' - I would triumph over her with an ironical and brutal common sense worthy of Dr Percepied; and if she went on: 'All the same she was a geological relation; there is always the respect due to your geology,' I would shrug my shoulders and say: 'It is really very good of me to discuss the matter with an illiterate old woman who cannot speak her own language,' adopting, to deliver judgment on Francoise, the mean and narrow outlook of a pedant, whom those who are most contemptuous of him in the impartiality of their own minds are only too prone to copy when they are obliged to play a part upon the vulgar stage of life."
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 162-163
As with most of the passages from Proust that I'm culling out, I have several thoughts. As my excellent friend Cinse Bonino would recognize me saying, "OK, two things, . . ." before launching into my response. However, I'll restrict myself to one, and that is my recognition of the fact that I can certainly be guilty of "the mean and narrow outlook of a pedant." In my last Proust-related post I referenced my time working in the cardboard box factory, and how it made me an even more avid reader. I remember one night I was talking to a woman who, I'm sure at the time seemed ancient, but was probably in her early 40s. She had unpacked her lunch (for us, really, supper) and was alternating between eating spaghetti and some jello. I proposed that it was an odd combination, and she replied that she was eating because she was happy with her weight. She was eating spaghetti to gain weight and jello to lose weight. Amused, I pointed out that it didn't work that way, which immediately drew three other folks in to heap foul scorn (gently) on the head of the idiot college student "who don't know nothin'". Actually, the memory makes me smile and cringe at the same time, because, all things considered, they were very nice to me (I'm sure nicer than I deserved). A week later I was sitting in the break room next to the same woman. It was late July, and even at night the temperature in the factory was sweltering (it was right on the river in Aurora, Indiana; I wonder/doubt if it's still there). It's funny the things you remember, because, as I've discussed, I don't think of myself as a person with a very good memory - but I remember this incident quite clearly. I had been staring into space, and I broke my reflecting/pouting by saying something like, "Jesus, I've got four more weeks." That is, I had another month of work, time in the real world, before I was able to pass back into the academic world (and societal and cultural bubble) of college. She looked at me, harshly, at first, like I was an ignorant spoiled brat (which in some ways I clearly was/am), but then with more of an exhausted and resigned expression, and said, "I have twenty-five more years." Maybe the reason why I remember that moment so clearly is that it was a defining moment. It revealed something profound to me about myself and how I viewed the world, and it wasn't a very pleasant realization. I should have said I'm sorry, but instead we exchanged sad, tired smiles, sealing an unspoken agreement to let it go. I think I did become a better person after that, more understanding of how lucky I was, and with a more balanced sense of the world and the people in it. Years later, when I had my first full-time teaching job down in Atlanta, my friend Jim Gonzalez would sometimes point out, "I don't get you. You'll say 'yes, ma'am' and 'no, ma'am' to every waitress in every restaurant, but then you'll turn around and tell any administrator to go fuck themselves." Reflecting back on it now, I guess it all makes sense.
On a side note, in real time I finished Swann's Way last night and moved on into Within a Budding Grove. It's part of a boxed three volume Vintage collection, same translator (the classic C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation, although with some adaptions and corrections by T. Kilmartin) as the Barnes & Noble version of Swann's Way that I had been reading. The page numbers, naturally, will be a tad different. Being a historian (and a nerd) I will doubtless come back some day and recreate my notes from the B&N version on the Vintage version of Swann's Way, and then come back and adapt the page numbers in the blog. Why, who knows. As the song goes, "I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me." There is a gap between what I'm reading and what I'm commenting on because I can read faster than I can write, but also because I'm making notes and then leaving a little time to consider and reconsider my reactions and thoughts, which means I might be getting further and further behind. This means I need to either write faster or take a break from reading so I don't get two volumes behind. That's a tough call. I'm busy and don't have endless time to write on Proust if I'm ever going to get my book finished, but I'm also hooked on Proust and don't want to stop reading. Of course, I could also write less in my commentary. In the end I'm really only writing for myself, so it's not as if the world is going to rise up in revolt and feel cheated because I'm not sharing enough of my pseudo-intellectual observations. Hmmmm.
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