"Once I nearly made up my mind, bur she had 'gone t press,' another time she was in the hands of the 'hairdresser,' an old gentleman who never did anything to the women except pour oil on their loosened hair and then comb it. And I grew tired of waiting, even though several of the humbler denizens of the place (so-called working girl, though they always seemed to be out of work), had come to make tea for me and to hold long conversations to which, despite the gravity of the subjects discussed, the partial or total nudity of my interlocutors gave an attractive simplicity. I ceased moreover to go to this house because, anxious to present a token of my good-will to the woman who kept it and was in need of furniture, I had given her a few pieces - notably a big sofa - which I had inherited from my aunt Leonie. I used never to see them, for want of space had prevented my parents from taking them in at home, and they were stored in a warehouse. But as soon as I saw them again in the house where these women were putting them to their own uses, all the virtues that pervaded my aunt's room at Combray at once appeared to me, tortured by the cruel contact to which I had abandoned them in their defencelessness! Had I outraged the dead, I would not have suffered such remorse. I returned no more to visit their new mistress, for they seemed to me to be alive and to be appealing to me, like those apparently inanimate objects in a Persian fairy-tale, in which imprisoned human souls are undergoing martyrdom and pleading for deliverance. Besides, as our memory does not as a rule present things to us in their chronological sequence but as it were by a reflection in which the order of the parts if reversed, I remembered only long afterwards that it was upon that same sofa that, many years before, I had tasted for the first time the delights of love with one of my girl cousins, with whom I had no known where to go until she somewhat rashly suggested our taking advantage of a moment in which Aunt Leonie had left her room."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 621-622
Proust is relating more stories associated with his visits to various houses of assignation, including his temporary fascination with one woman named Rachel. As the mistress of the house tells him, "She's Jewish. How about that? . . . That of that, my boy, a Jewess! Wouldn't that be thrilling? Rrrrr!" In this anecdote he has to stop visiting one particular brothel because he realizes that it features a couch which used to belong to his aunt Leonie, and which he had given to the mistress of the houses because she was short on furniture. He imagines the couch was like one of "those apparently inanimate objects in a Persian fairy-tale, in which imprisoned human souls are undergoing martyrdom and pleading for deliverance." He proposes that, "Had I outraged the dead, I would not have suffered such remorse." It is odd how we will imbue inanimate objects with animation and personality, and sometimes feel more deeply toward them than their human counterparts. I remember being in downtown Omaha, Nebraska at a conference one time and stopping in front of a consignment shop. In the front window it featured a number of well-worn older suitcases, and I remember feeling a sense of loss and sadness, and even pity, that this suitcases, who, in my imagination had traveled the world, were now condemned to spend their days in used furniture shop in Omaha, Nebraska. I felt this overpower urge to smash the windows and set them free, and take them on one last great adventure.
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