My Year With Proust - Day 181

"My room seemed to me to have become suddenly a new place.  Of course, for a long time past, it had not been the hostile room of my first night in it.  All our lives, we go on patiently modifying the surroundings in which we live; and gradually, as habit dispenses us from feeling them, we suppress the noxious elements of colour, shape and smell which objectified our uneasiness.  Nor was it any longer the room, still with sufficient power over my sensibility, not certainly to make me suffer, but to give me joy, the well of summer days, like a marble basin in which, half way up its polished sides, they mirrored an azure surface steeped in light over which glided for an instant, impalpable and white as a wave of heat, the fleeting reflection of a cloud; nor the purely aesthetic room of the pictorial evening hours; it was the room in which I had been now for so many days that I no longer saw it.  And now I was beginning again to open my eyes to it, but this time from the selfish angle which is that of love.  I liked to feel that the fine slanting mirror, the handsome glass-fronted bookcases, would give Albertine, if she came to see me, a good impression of me.  Instead of a place of transit in which I would stay for a few minutes before escaping to the beach or to Rivebelle, my room became real and dear to me again, fashioned itself anew, for I looked at and appreciated each article of its furniture with the eyes of Albertine."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 987-988

Initially I included this section because it is another example of Proust's almost unmatched ability to recreate a scene, both through his powers of observation and mastery of imagination and language.  It also brings back a bit of a melancholy memory, which I guess is perfectly for a pretty dreary summer Vermont day.  A few days ago I posted a picture, borrowed from Google Earth, of Yas Island in Abu Dhabi, where I spent a year while on sabbatical.  I lived in a hotel, which should have been the very definition of the "place of transit," except, like Proust, I fell in love there and then it became home.  Instead of a place where I would either retreat from the world - or spend as few minutes in as possible because it emphasized my loneliness - it became a place that will always have a place in my heart.  However, there is also the tyranny of time and place, as we were essentially bound within the confines of that world and faced too many demons, both real and imagined, to try and exist together in a wider world. Or, as Proust reminds us, "In a world thronged with monsters and gods, we know little peace of mind." So, in our little contained universe we knew no monsters and gods, and thus we had plenty of peace of mind.  However, in the end those same monsters and gods that plague us so horribly also allow us to grow and come to terms with the world.  Maybe we just needed to more deliberately face them.