"The twittering of the birds at daybreak sounded insipid to Francoise. Every word uttered by the maids upstairs made her jump; disturbed by all their running about, she kept asking herself what they could be doing. In other words, we had moved. True, the servants had made no less commotion as in the attics of our old home; but she knew them, she had made of their comings and going something friendly and familiar. Now she listened to the very silence with painful attentiveness. And as our new neighbourhood appeared to be as quite as the boulevard on to which we had hitherto looked had been noisy, the song (distinct even at a distance, when it was still quite faint, like an orchestral motif) of a passer-by brought tears to the eyes of the exiled Francoise. Hence, if I had been tempted to scoff at her when, in her misery at having to leave a house in which one was 'so well respected by all and sundry,' she had packed her trunks weeping, in accordance with the rites of Combray, and declaring superior to all possible houses that which had been ours, on the other hand, finding it hard to assimilate the new as I found it easy to abandon the old, I felt myself drawn towards our old servant when I saw that moving into a buildings where she had not received from the hall-porter, who did not yet know us, the marks of respect necessary to her spiritual wellbeing, had brought her positively to the edge of prostration . . . Which, it is high time now that the reader should be told - and told also that we had moved into it because my grandmother, not having been at all well (though we took care to keep this reason from her), was in need of better air - was a flat forming part of the Hotel de Guermantes."
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 3-4
And so we have officially moved on to the third volume, The Guermantes Way, of Remembrance of Things Past. I don't know if I have anything utterly profound to say about this introductory passage (or any passage, for that matter), but I thought it was important to include it for context. That said, the response of Francoise is interesting here because she, while trying to put her best face forward, clearly fears change. As the excellent Sanford Zale reminds us, "cats don't like change," which is generally part of his view that things were clearly better in the past. My ex-wife probably would have been happier living with Sanford, because she also really hated change. She one time said that she wanted to do the same thing at work every day, which for me would have been a fate associated with one of the lower levels of Dante's hell. I think I tend to be more like Proust himself in this occasion because I tend to welcome change. Oh, and speaking of change, I've started volunteering at the Chittenden Emergency Food Shelf. I used to volunteer when we lived in Atlanta at the Georgia Radio Reading Program, but once I moved to Vermont things always seems to crazy - starting with the three hours I spend commuting back and forth from Barre. And then for years I ran the Global Modules program. I've reached the point where, while I am balancing several projects (which already need more attention), I seem to have great control over my day, so I wanted to get back to volunteering. Plus, I've just come to believe that it's essential to give back, a belief that has been amplified by some personal changes I've made, which I'll get around to talking about some time. Oddly, I spent four and a half hour this morning just washing dishes, and actually liked the monotony of doing the same thing. Hmmm.
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