My Year With Proust - Day 243

   Although it was simply a Sunday in autumn, I had been born again, life lay intact before me, for that morning, after a succession of mild days, there had been a cold fog which had not cleared until nearly midday; and a change in the weather is sufficient to create the world and ourselves anew.  Formerly, when the wind howled in my chimney, I would listen to the blows which it struck on the iron trap with as keen an emotion as if, like the famous chord with which the Fifth Symphony opens, they had been the irresistible calls of a mysterious destiny.  Every change in the aspect of nature offers us a similar transformation by adapting our desires so as to harmonise with the new form of things.  The mist, from the moment of my awakening, had made of me, instead of the centrifugal, being which one is on find days, a man turned in on himself, long for the chimney corner and the shared bed, a shivering Adam in quest of a sedentary Even, in this different world.

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, p. 358

And we say begin Chapter Two of The Guermantes Way.  Chapter One had ended with the passing of Marcel's grandmother, and here he is starting to shake himself loose.  Coming back into the world, whether we're recovering from true tragedy or simply a prolonged case of the blues, is in many ways a mysterious and inexplicable phenomenon.  Sometimes we can "force" the issue by changing our environment or taking on new habits or getting out and dating again, and other times we just wait it out and the change occurs more organically.  Recently I downloaded the wonderful Patty Griffin album Living With Ghosts, which I can't seem to stop playing.  In her song Time Will Do the Talking, she sings, "Time will do the talking/ years will do the walking/ I'll just find a comfy spot and wait it out."  Other times you need to find someone, even just a new friend or a rediscovered old friend, and they can help you pull yourself out of the well; naturally, I'd default to Neil Young's Don't Let It Bring You Down.  Maybe the key is the recognition of your own miserable self.  There's a great Milan Kundera line which is teasing me at the moment but won't come into view - and I need to head to class - so it looks like I'll be coming back to this post.

Young's After the Gold Rush, still the best album cover ever.  He was just climbing out of one of my many early dark periods, and thus it formed a lovely metaphor.