"We felt we simply must come and keep you company, Monsieur," Mme Cottard said kind to the Baron, "and not leave you alone like this in your little corner. It is a great pleasure to us."
"I am greatly honoured," the Baron intoned, bowing coldly.
"I was so pleased to hear that you have definitely chosen his neighbourhood to set up your taber . . ."
She was going to say "tabernacle" but it occurred to her that the word was Hebraic and discourteous to a Jew who might see some innuendo in it. And so she pulled herself up in order to choose another of the expressions that were familiar to her, that is to say a ceremonious expression: "to set up, I should say, your penates." (It is true that these deities do not appertain to the Christian religion, either, but to one which has been dead for so long that it no longer claims any devotees whose feelings one need be afraid of hurting.) "We, unfortunately, what with term beginning, and the Doctor's hospital duties, can never take up residence for very long in one place." And glancing down at a cardboard box: "You see too how we poor women are less fortunate than the sterner sex; even to go such a short distance as to our friends the Verdurins', we are obliged to take a whole heap of impedimenta." . . .
. . . Mme Cottard, after a moment or two, hit upon a subject which she felt to be of more personal interest to the Baron. "I don't know whether you agree with me, Monsieur," she said to him presently, "but I am very broad-minded, and in my opinion there is a great deal of good in all religions as long as people practice them sincerely. I am not one of the people who get hydrophobia at the sight of a . . . Protestant."
"I was taught that mine is the true religion," replied M. de Charlus.
"He's a fanatic," thought Mme Cottard. "Swann, until towards the end, was more tolerant; it's true that he was a convert."
Now the Baron, on the contrary, was not only a Christian, as we know, but endued with a mediaevel piety. For him, as for the sculptors of the thirteenth century, the Christian church was, in the living sense of the word, peopled with a swarm of beings whom he believed to be entirely real: prophets, apostles, angels, holy personages of every sort, surrounding the incarnate Word, his mother and her spouse, the Eternal Father, all the martyrs and doctors of the Church, as they may be seen in high relief thronging the porches or lining the names of cathedrals. Out of all these M. de Charlus had chosen as his patrons and intercessors the Archangels Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, with whom he discoursed regularly so that they might convey his prayers to the Eternal Father before whose throne they stand. And so Mme Cottard's mistake amused me greatly."
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1072-1074
Mme Cottard is trying, and failing pretty magnificently, to navigate through the difficult worlds or religion and religious identity. She appears to assume that M. de Charlus might be Jewish, which is why she self-edits and drops the word tabernacle and replaces it with penates. The penates were the Roman gods associated with home and hearth, and every house would have had a small altar associated with them. Essentially, all that Mme Cottard is trying to say to the notoriously prickly M de Charlus is "welcome to the neighborhood" or at least "congrats on the new house," but she, in an initial effort to say this cleverly, discovers that she has entered into a dangerous terrain.
There are several things that I find interesting in this section, probably the least of which is Mme Cottard referring to men as the "sterner sex." People of a certain generation, and I sadly fall into that category, will sometimes clumsily refer to women as the "gentler sex." I will sometimes say it, although I'm usually saying it in an ironic fashion when talking about some of my more kick-ass female colleagues. Well, if there's going to be a "gentler sex" then I guess we need some nomenclature for men, and I suppose "sterner sex" makes more sense than "rougher sex" (the seeming parallel to "gentler sex"), which has obvious connotations both perverse and tragic.
How one responds to another religion is always fraught with potential for, at best, amusement or, at worst, misunderstanding and hate. When we were in India recently I felt compelled to pull a couple of students aside and explain to them that they were acting like insensitive idiots. We were visiting the Ellora caves and examining the series of reliefs that surround the massive temple when the miscreants in question started mugging next to statues of Krishna. I motioned them off to a quiet corner and asked them if they would go into a Catholic Church and take selfies of themselves mugging with statues of the Virgin Mary or Jesus. They were stunned and more than a bit embarrassed, and said that of course they would not do something so inappropriate. I then asked them if they had somehow forgotten that Hinduism is a living religion, and not just a collection of ancient statues, and how they had managed to insult almost every Indian who walked by us - in addition to reaffirming the opinion that the rest of the world has that Americans are complete idiots. Being at heart good people (if generally witless reprobates), my students were sincerely remorseful. So, there are countless examples of clumsy insensitivity, but, sadly, there are way too many examples of hatred. We've talked a lot recently about the growing Islamophobia in the US, which obviously transcends mere ignorance to encompass the rich vein of racism that runs right beneath the surface in America. There was a time growing up as a white man in dreadfully racist Indiana that I didn't want to think that everything in the US was really about race and racism, but, you know, in the US everything always seems to come back to race and racism. It doesn't mean that it can't be cured, or at least improved, by working to alleviate ignorance, but it's much more difficult to simply wipe away virulent racist hatred. So much of Donald Trump's appeal to a certain group is the alt-right terror at America becoming a minority white nation. Granted, I'm an optimist, but, after the requisite ugly period, this will make the US a much better place because the more diverse neighbors we have (yes, even Muslims) we will actually discover that we share a common humanity. However, we need to get there first. Trump's call for a wall has nothing to do with jobs or security, but instead an alt-right wet dream of keeping America as white as possible for as long as possible.
Happily, there is also the other side of things, which often takes on the comical nature of a more tolerant, and oftentimes more educated, segment of the population giving you a certain intellectual street cred for being a member of a religion that the intolerant crew finds abhorrent. I remember being in China once and we were visiting a Buddhist temple. Now, Buddhism is considered one of the "cool" religions, and I generally agree, irregardless of that unfortunate shoving match I had with the Buddhist monk that time, but the less said about that the better. Anyway, at the temple a Buddhist devotee was in the middle of doing something like ten thousand prostrations before a statue of the Buddha. It was a very impressive and also exhausting effort, as you might imagine, and the woman was wearing oven mittens to reduce wear and tear on her hands. My college professor colleagues were suitably impressed, but I also found it unsettling in a way - not so much her efforts, but our response to her efforts. I found myself pointing out that if the woman were a Southern Baptist wearing oven mittens to pray ten thousand times to Jesus they would consider it the height of hillbilly foolishness and extremism, but because she was a follower of a cool religion it was laudable. All I managed to do was seal my reputation as a curmudgeon. In a similar fashion, as more of my friends find out about my conversion to a faith which has become kind of oddly cool to a certain segment of the population because of it is so passionately hated by another segment of the population, my friends will congratulate me for my choice, which is, I think sweet. However, I'm sure if I told them that I had found Jesus and started attending a local evangelical church (if there are such things in Vermont, maybe in the NEK) they'd probably never talk to me again.
No comments:
Post a Comment