"I knew that my friends were on the front, but I not not see them as they passed before the links of the sea's uneven chain, at the far end of which, perched amid its bluish peaks like an Italian citadel, could occasionally be distinguished, in clear weather, the little town of Rivebelle, picked out in minutest detail by the sun. I did not see my friends, but (while there mounted to my belvedere the shout of the newsboys, the 'journalists' as Francoise used to call them, the shouts of the bathers and of children at play, punctuating like the cries of sea-birds the sough of the gently breaking waves) I guessed their presence, I heard their laughter enveloped like the laughter of the Nereids in the soft surge of sound that rose to my ears. 'We looked up,' said Albertine in the evening, 'to see if you were coming down. But your shutters were still closed when the concert began.' At ten o'clock, sure enough, it broke out beneath my windows. In the intervals between the blare of the instruments, if the tide were high, the gliding surge of a wave would be heard again, slurred and continuous, seeming to enfold the notes of the violin in its crystal spirals and to be spraying its foam over the intermittent echoes of a submarine music. I grew impatient because no one had yet come with my things, so that I might get up and dress. Twelve o'clock struck, and Francoise arrived at last. And for months on end, in this Balbec to which I had so looked forward because I imagined it only as battered by storms and buried in the mist, the weather had been so dazzling and so unchanging that when she came to open the window I could always, without once being wrong, expect to see the same patch of sunlight folded in the corner of the outer wall, of an unalterable colour which was less moving as a sign of summer than depressing as the colour of a lifeless and composed enamel. And after Francoise had removed her pins from the mouldings of the window-frame, taken down her various cloths, and drawn back the curtains, the summer days which she disclosed seemed as dead, as immemorially ancient as a sumptuously attired dynastic mummy from which our old servant had done no more than cautiously unwind the linen wrappings before displaying it to my gaze, embalmed in its vesture of gold."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 1017-1018
And so we bid adieu to Balbec, but also to Within a Budding Grove. "For we had had to leave Balbec at last, the cold and the damp having become too penetrating for us to stay any longer in a hotel which had neither fireplaces in the rooms nor central heating." And, I guess, metaphorically, Proust is being forced to move on from a life that, despite his best efforts (or maybe in need of his best efforts), has failed to provide the emotional superstructure to survive winter's chill. I'm trying to decide how Proust has changed over the first two volumes of Remembrance of Things Past. He's certainly more self-aware, but still very emotionally clumsy, although I don't know if he's abnormally so on either front as compared to anyone else his age. His powers of perception and analysis and self-reflection in many ways make him seem much older than his actual age.
"And after Francoise had removed her pins from the mouldings of the window-frame, taken down her various cloths, and drawn back the curtains, the summer days which she disclosed seemed as dead, as immemorially ancient as a sumptuously attired dynastic mummy from which our old servant had done no more than cautiously unwind the linen wrappings before displaying it to my gaze, embalmed in its vesture of gold." Not surprisingly, this sentences brings me back to the times when I've transitioned from one phase of my life to another: leaving for college; starting graduate school and getting my first apartment; selling and moving our of our first house in Atlanta; getting a divorce; moving out of my hotel after a year in Abu Dhabi. In all of them it's amazing to think of how quickly vibrant life became the ancient dead.
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