My Year With Proust - Day 31

   "For there were, in the environs of Combray, two 'ways' which we used to take for our walks, and so diametrically opposed that we would actually leave the house by a different door, according to the way we had chosen: the way towards Meseglise-la-Vineuse, which we called also 'Swann's way', because, to get there, one had to pass along the boundary of M. Swann's estate, and the 'Guermantes way'.  Of Meseglise-la-Vineuse, to tell the truth, I never knew anything more than the way there, and the strange people who would come over on Sundays to take the air in Combray, people whom, this time, neither my aunt nor any of us would 'know at all', and whom we would therefore assume to be 'people who must have come over from Meseglise.' As for Guermantes, I was to know it well enough one day, but that day had still to come; and during the whole of my boyhood, if Meseglise was to me something as inaccessible as the horizon, which remained hidden from sight, however far one went, by the folds of a country which no longer bore the least resemblance to the country round Combray; Guermantes, on the other hand, meant no more than the ultimate goal, ideal rather than real, of the 'Guermantes way', a sort of abstract geographical term like the North Pole or the Equator.  And so to 'take the Guermantes way' in order to get to Meseglise, or vice versa, would have seemed to me as nonsensical a proceeding as to turn to the east in order to reach the west.  Since my father used always to speak of the 'Meseglise way' as comprising the finest view of a plain that he knew anywhere, and of the 'Guermantes way' as typical of river scenery, I had invested each of them, by conceiving them in this way as two distinct entities, with that cohesion, that unity which belongs only to the figments of the mind; the smallest detail of either of them appeared to me as a precious thing, which exhibited the special excellence of the whole, while, immediately beside them, in the first stages of our walk, before we had reached the sacred soil of one or the other, the purely material roads, at definite points on which they were set down as the ideal view over a place and the ideal scenery of a river, were no more worth the trouble of looking at them than, to a keen playgoer and lover of dramatic art, are the little streets which may happen to run past the walls of a theatre.  But, above all, I set between them far more distinct than the mere distance in miles and yards and inches which separated one from the other, the distance that there was between the two parts of my brain in which I used to think of them, one of those distance of the mind which time serves only to lengthen, keeping them for ever upon different planes. And this distinction was rendered still more absolute because the habit we had of never going both ways on the same day, or in the course of the same walk, but the 'Meseglise way' one time and the 'Guermantes way' another, shut them up, so to speak, far apart and unaware of each other's existence, in the sealed vessels - between which there could be no communication - of separate afternoons."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 141-142

Up to this point I've been trying to write commentary that followed the chronological flow of the novel, although I don't particularly know why - especially with a novel that relies so much upon memory and past reflection.  Essentially, I was trying to not hop back several pages, although, again, I don't know why/  I'm mentioning simply because in this case I am hopping back a few pages to Proust's discussion of the difference between the 'Meseglise way' (Swann's way) and the 'Guermantes way'.  I'm doing this because, well, I should have included it earlier, first off.  Why?  Partially because it is important because both are mentioned repeatedly and obviously give their names to different volumes, so it is, at the least, necessary information.

More importantly, there is the clear metaphor of different paths that Proust, or for that matter all of us, take during our lives.  And sometimes these paths seem as polar opposites as the Meseglise way and the Guermantes way seemed to the young Proust.  For example, for me I have the Hoosier way and the International way, and reaching one from the other seems as logical as "to turn to the east in order to reach the west." I certainly have a tortured relationship with my Indiana roots, and, before deactivating Facebook, I had defriended several old high school acquaintances who had tracked me down and sent unexpected friend requests because of their archly conservative and at times blatantly racist and Islamophobic screeds.  So, to reach the International way from the Hoosier way almost seems to defy logic.  And, in turn, travelling on the Hoosier way after walking the International way is essentially impossible, as much as my brother Eric would love me to move to Indianapolis (although I would love to see him and his family more).  That said, I'm sure these two disparate ways communicate and influence each other inside my addled brain and tattered soul, in much the same ways that the Aztecs and Incas indirectly influenced each other even though they didn't know that the other existed. Maybe when I'm in Sana'a or Kasgar or Zanzibar I'm still that kid from Rising Sun who never completely left the Hoosier way, but also vice versa.