My Year With Proust - Day 139

   "While I heard my grandmother, who betrayed no sign of annoyance at his listening to her with his hat on his head and whistling through his teeth, ask him in an artificial tone of voice 'And what are . . . your charges?   Oh! far too high for my little budget,' waiting on a bench, I took refuge in the inner-most depths of my being, strove to migrate to a plane of eternal thoughts, to leave nothing of myself, nothing living, on the surface of my body - anaesthetised like those of certain animals, which, by inhibition, feign death when they are wounded - so as not to suffer too keenly in this place, my total unfamiliarity with which was impressed upon me all the more forcibly by the familiarity with it that seemed to be evinced at the same moment by a smartly dressed lady to whom the manager showed his respect by taking liberties with the little dog that followed her acorss the hall, the young 'blood' with a feather in his hat who came in asking if there were 'any letters,' all of these people for whom climbing those imitation marble stairs meant going home. And at the same time the triple state of Minos, Aeacus and Rhadmanthus (into which I plunged my naked soul as into an unknown element where there was nothing now to protect it) was bent sternly upon me by a group of gentlemen who, though little versed perhaps in the art of receiving, yet bore the title 'reception clerks,' while sitting in a reading-room for the description of which I should have had to borrow from Dante alternately the colours in which he paints Paradise and Hell, according as I was thinking of the happiness of the elect who had the right to sit and read there undisturbed, or of the terror which my grandmother would have inspired in me if, in her insensibility to this sort of impression, she had asked me to go in there and wait for her by myself."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 713-714

I culled out this section for a couple reasons.  One, is that it features something that we normally don't associate with Proust: a sort of whimsical sense of humor.  He is, obviously, routinely very clever and his observations border on the cruelly sarcastic, but we (and maybe this is more indicative of my own ignorance) don't normally think of him as funny.  I laughed a couple of times when reading this paragraph; well, maybe not truly laughed, but it was definitely more than a knowing grin.

The second reason why I liked this section is that I saw myself in Proust's behavior.  Very frequently when I was younger "I took refuge in the inner-most depths of my being, strove in migrate to a plane of eternal thoughts, to leave nothing of myself, nothing living, on the surface of my body."  Essentially, I often lived very comfortably deep within my own self.  For a long time I confused this with being intensely introverted.  Now, this doesn't mean that I'm not an introvert, because all of those silly tests you take that claim, usually farcically, to identify your personality type have always pegged me as an introvert.  Instead, I just think that I was really adroit at, like a tortoise, pulling my head inside my shell when I didn't like my environment.  As I've noted, one of my father's great complaints about me was that I was never really present, even when I was there, and this is doubtless one way of describing my disappearing act.  My mother used to drag the kids up to Cincinnati to go on these nightmare shopping trips to (which also would make one think of Dante's Inferno) and she would actually compliment me for being a good and patient shopper.  Reflecting back on it, I'm sure in my own peculiar way I was because I was so clearly not there.