"And so, if I always imagined the woman I loved as in a setting of whatever places I most longed, at the time, to visit; if in my secret longings it was she who attracted me to them, who opened to me the gate of an unknown world, that was not by the mere hazard of a simple association of thoughts; no, it was because my dreams of travel and of love were only moments - which I isolate artificially to-day as though I were cutting sections, at different heights, in a jet of water, rainbow-flashing but seemingly without flow or motion - were only drops in a single, undeviating, irresistible outrush of all the forces of my life."
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 90
Once again, Proust is focused in like a laser on an essential truth. Abu Dhabi and Beirut and Dubrovnik and Salalah and London and Zanzibar. Burlington and Vienna and Villach and Lucca and Moscow and Toronto. Amman and Melbourne. Johannesburg. Atlanta and Omaha and Barcelona. Chicago. Amman and Minneapolis. Franklin and Cincinnati and Atlanta and Savannah. I remember a candidate for a position once, as part of his interview, handing out words that he had clipped from poems and we, the audience, were supposed to construct them and thus the poem; making sense of the puzzle. I can create puzzle pieces relating to some of my favorite places, which I associate with women that I have been fortunate enough to have loved, been loved by, and sometimes even by some divine accident been in love with at the same time And, as I've been brooding over in previous posts, I don't know if I can separate the places from the emotions. As Proust opines, "my dreams of travel and of love were only moments - which I isolate artificially to-day as though I were cutting sections, at different heights, in a jet of water, rainbow-flashing but seemingly without flow or motion - were only drops in a single, undeviating, irresistible outrush of all the forces of my life." If Proust is right then the very attempt is "artificial.," cutting sections from flowing water.
No comments:
Post a Comment