My Year With Proust - Day 33

" . . . my grandfather called me to him, and, pointing to the hedge of Tansonville, said: "You are fond of hawthorns; just look at this pink one; isn't it pretty?

   And it was indeed a hawthorn, but one whose flowers were pink, and lovelier even than the white.  It, too, was in holiday attire, for one of those days which are the only true holidays, the holy days of religion, because they are not appointed by any capricious accident, as secular holidays are appointed, upon days which are not specially ordained for such observances, which have nothing about them that is essentially festal - but it was attired when more richly than the rest, for the flowers which clung to its branches, one above another, so thickly as to leave no part of the tree undecorated, like the tassels wreathed about the crook of a rococo shepherdess, were every one of them 'in colour', and consequently of a superior quality, by the aesthetic standards of Combray, to the 'plain', if one was to judge by the scale of prices at the 'stores' in the Square, or at Camus's, where the most expensive biscuits were those whose sugar was pink.  And for my own part I set a higher value on cream cheese when it was pink, when I had been allowed to tinge it with crushed strawberries.  And these flowers had chosen precisely the colour of some edible and delicious thing, or of some exquisite addition to one's costume for a great festival, which colours, inasmuch as they make plain the reason for their superiority, are those who beauty is most evident to the eyes of children, and for that reason must always seem more vivid and more natural than any other tints, even after the child's mind was realized that they offer no gratification to the appetite, and have not been selected by the dressmaker. And, indeed, I had felt at once, as I had felt before the white blossom, but now still more marvelling, that it was in no artificial manner, by no device of human construction, that the festal intention of these flowers was revealed, but that it was Nature herself who had spontaneously expressed it (with the simplicity of a woman from a village shop, labouring at the decoration of a street altar for some procession) by burying the bush in these little rosettes, almost too ravishing in colour, this rustic 'pompadour'. High up on the branches, like so many of those tiny rose-trees, their pots concealed in jackets of paper lace, whose slender stems rise in a forest from the altar on the greater festivals, a thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler in colour, but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a cup of pink marble, its blood-red stain, and suggesting even more strongly than the full-blown flowers the special, irresistible quality of the hawthorn-tree, which, wherever it budded, wherever it was about to blossom, could bud and blossom in pink flowers alone. Taking its place in the hedge, but as different from the rest as a young girl in holiday attire among a crowd of dowdy women in everyday clothes, who are staying at home, equipped and ready for the 'Month of May', of which it seemed already to form a part, it shone and smiled in its cool, rosy garments, a Catholic bush indeed, and altogether delightful."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 147-148

I love this section, which I guess you could tell by the ungodly amount I included and also how I drew it out over several posts.  To be fair, we're not done yet, because we're getting ready to read Proust's account of seeing Gilberte for the first time, so chopping this all up, albeit clumsily, seemed like the best approach.

As I was reading I was marveling in the beauty of Proust's prose, and his powers of analysis and perception and description. Sadly, we don't normally reach such, well, Proustian heights.  The juxtaposition of Proust's description of the hawthorns, especially the pink hawthorns, with his grandfather's description of them as "pretty" was jarring, but also appropriate. There is a reason why some religious folks write, when forced to do so, the divine as g_d.  The word is too small and petty for something so ineffable.  Similarly, his grandfather's use of the word "pretty" seemed almost like an insult as compared to his grandson's effusive praise.  However, I guess it's all subjective; maybe through his grandfather's eyes (and sensibilities) the word "pretty" was more aesthetically and emotionally complete than Proust's own words.

There is so much more to say, which I'm finding with all of these passages.

I've done a quick perusal and apparently you can grow hawthorns in Vermont, which means that come spring I may have to plant my Proust-inspired Budding Grove in the side yard.