My Year With Proust - Day 362

But on reaching the road I found a dazzling spectacle.  Where I had seen with my grandmother in the month of August only the green leaves and, so ti speak, the disposition of the apple-trees, as far as the eye could reach they were in full bloom, unbelievably luxuriant, their feet in the mire beneath their ball-dresses, heedless of spoiling the most marvelous pink satin that was ever seen, which glittered in the sunlight; the distant horizon of the sea gave the trees the background of a Japanese print; if I raised my head to gaze at the sky through the flowers, which made its serene blue appear almost violent, they seemed to draw apart to reveal the immensity of their paradise.  Beneath that azure a faint but cold breeze set the blushing bouquets gently trembling.  Blue-tits came and perched upon the branches and fluttered among the indulgent flowers, as though it had been an amateur of exotic art and colours who had artificially created this living beauty. but it moved one to tears because, to whatever lengths it went in its effects of refined artifice, one felt that it was natural that these apple-trees were there in the heart of the country, like peasants on one of the highroads of France.  Then the rays of the sun gave place suddenly to those of the rain; they streaked the whole horizon, enclosing the line of apple-trees in their grey net.  But these continued to hold aloft their pink and blossoming beauty, in the wind that had turned icy beneath the drenching rain: it was a day in spring.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 808-809

And so ends "Part Two: Chapter One" of Cities of the Plain, the fourth of the seven volumes that make up Remembrance of Things Past.  In a work as enormous as Remembrance of Things Past it doesn't hurt to remind ourselves of where we are along the path.  However, I didn't include it just to be completest or to act as a road sign.  I suppose there are people who describe nature better than Proust, but it would have to be a pretty short list.  Over the last year I've quoted his line, "It was in vain that I lingered before the hawthorns" so many times that it has almost become my personal mantra.  Mencius proposed that you can't trust the sense organs because they are magnetically drawn to beauty, and this was doubtless true of Proust.  Rarely would I disagree with Mencius, but I might in this instance.  If you're going to drawn to anything what could be better than beauty, as long as it is true beauty?  "But these continued to hold aloft their pink and blossoming beauty, in the wind that had turned icy beneath the drenching rain: it was a day in spring."