My Year With Proust - Day 30

   "But it was in vain that I lingered before the hawthorns, to breathe in, to marshal before my mind (which knew not what to make of it), to lose in order to rediscover their invisible and unchanging odour, to absorb myself in the rhythm which disposed their flowers here and there with the lightheartedness of youth, and at intervals as unexpected as certain intervals of music; they offered me an indefinite continuation of the same charm, in an inexhaustible profusion, but without letting me delve into it any more deeply, like those melodies which one can play over a hundred times in succession without coming any nearer to their secret.  I turned away from them for a moment so as to be able to return to them with return strength. My eyes followed up the slope which, outside the hedge, rose steeply to the fields, a poppy that had strayed and been lost by its fellows, or a few cornflowers that had fallen hazily behind, and decorated the ground here and there with their flowers like the borders of which appears triumphant in the panel itself; infrequent still, spaced apart as the scattered houses which warn us that we are approaching a village, they betokened to me the vast expanse of waving corn beneath the fleecy clouds, and the sight of a single poppy hoisting upon its slender rigging and holding against the breeze its scarlet ensign, over the buoy of rich black earth from which it sprang, made my heart beat as does a wayfarer's when he perceives, upon some low-lying ground, an old and broken boat which is being caulked and made sea-worthy, and cries out, although he has not yet caught sight of it, 'The Sea!'"

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 146

In earlier posts I discussed passages which suggested the potential for greatness to come.  This is one of those passages where that greatness, that almost sublime beauty, is delivered as promised. I think the line, "But it was in vain that I lingered before the hawthorns" may have carved itself onto my tombstone.  For years I've proposed that I would feature the passage from T.S. Eliot:

     Between the desire and the spasm
     Between the potency and the existence
     Between the essence and the descent
     Falls the shadow

And while I still love those lines, I don't know if they match the evocative power of Proust's words. Essentially, I think Eliot contains a world whereas Proust suggests a universe.

But why do I like it so much?  I do think we are drawn to beauty, and that it is almost impossible to linger before it.  The ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius warned that only the heart (mind) could be trusted because all the sense are drawn almost magnetically toward beauty.  And that's OK, because that is, I would argue, human nature at its best.  Rumi reminds us to "judge a moth by its candle." That is, judge a person or a society by what it finds beautiful.  It is arguably folly to resist it.

Why does the suggestion of something more profound stay with us in a way that the reality of something just as marvelous doesn't?  Maybe the promise is destined to always be greater than the reality, just as the edge of love is inevitably more powerful than love itself. We read Othello is one of our first year classes, as we will often discuss that our fascination with Iago is based on him telling us that "we know what we know" and never saying more.  If we would have followed it with a detailed Powerpoint and action plan we would have stopped reading the play years ago. Proust writes that the hawthorns "an inexhaustible profusion, but without letting me delve into it any more deeply, lie those melodies which one can play over a hundred times in succession without coming any nearer to their secret." I've talked elsewhere about my love of Brooks Hansen's The Chess Garden, a book that no one but my great friend Sarah Cohen and I seem to appreciate. I'm sure I've read the novel at least four times, and I cry at certain points - well, actually, much like David Copperfield and It's a Wonderful Life, it seems the number of crying points keeps expanding - but I don't know if I'll ever truly understand it.  I feel that in Dr. Gustav Uyterhoeven's adventures there is some transcendent truth which is just beyond my ability to grasp, and that keeps me coming back, not simply to figure out that evasive truth, but rather to revel in that shadow world.  And maybe it's why I've always liked Neil Young so much; his music is more evocative than definitive.  In much the same way there's a lot of R.E.M. I love, including my favorite of theirs Country Feedback (I'll include a link of a performance where they played the song with Young at one of his performances to fund his Bridge school - nerd alert, it doesn't get any better than this).

Finally, I love that he had to look away from them to regain his strength before tackling them again. For some reason it reminds me of the final scene from American Beauty (maybe because I showed it to my students in Heroines & Heroes this morning) where Lester says that the beauty is sometimes too much and he has to relax and let it wash over him.

OK, I guess that wasn't final after all.  The next section is even more beautiful.