Often, when M. de Cambremer hailed me from the station, I had just been taking advantage of the darkness with Albertine, not without some difficulty as she had struggled a little, fearing that it was not dark enough. "You know, I'm sure Cottard saw us; anyhow, if he didn't, he must have noticed your breathless voice, just when they were talking about your other kind of breathlessness,' Albertine said to me when we arrived at Douville station where we took the little train home. But if this return journey, like the outward one, by giving me a certain impression of poetry, awakened in me the desire to travel, to lead a new life, and so made me want to abandon any intention of marrying Albertine, and even to break off our relations for good, it also, by the very face of their contradictory nature, made this breach easier. For, on the homeward journey just as much as on the other, at every station we were joined in the train or greeted from the platform by people whom we knew; the furtive pleasures of the imagination were overshadowed by those other, continual pleasures of sociability which are so soothing, soporific. Already, before the stations themselves, their names (which had so fired my imagination ever since the day I had first heard them, that first evening when I had travelled down to Balbec with my grandmother) had become humanised, had lost their strangeness since the evening when Brichot, at Albertine's request, had given us a more complete account of their etymology.
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1134-1135
A couple different times, I think, we've discussed the shorthand (phrasing) that couples have for sex. There's that point in the early over-heated days of a relationship where one partner will say to the other something like, "Look, we really need to fuck now!" and some office or stairwell or elevator or public restroom or park bench will be appropriately defiled/sanctified in short order. However, after that point, and rather organically, the command/request takes on a more personal and prosaic terminology that reflects a shared intimacy and history. "Let's get lost" is still one of my favorites, an homage to the Chet Baker classic but also to removing yourself from the mundane and appropriate and seeking out the transcendent and gloriously inappropriate; in fact, it might still work with me today, even though I am, as we all know, free of the carnal whirlwind..It is easy to see how "taking advantage of the darkness" could easily be transformed into essential couple shorthand.
Now, more importantly (as if anything is more important than "taking advantage of the darkness"), I am drawn to this passage: "But if this return journey, like the outward one, by giving me a certain impression of poetry, awakened in me the desire to travel, to lead a new life . . ." Yes, I've just returned from a week and a half out of the country, and I'm already in the mood to travel again. My friend Steve will often opine that I'm the only person he knows wherein wanderlust is an actual physical condition. It seems to me that the key line here is how the journey was giving Marcel "a certain impression of poetry." I've often told students that often poetry can say more in a few quatrains than prose can in a few hundred pages, but why is this so? Maybe it is something as simple as the fact that poetry hints at things as compared to spelling them out, and that forces us to fill in the blanks by bringing ourselves into the discussion. It brings us out of ourselves and into the world, and maybe this is what travel does. I've often told students that they will one day have that travel experience from which they will never return, in which, to paraphrase Proust here, we will get lost in the poetry.
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