My Years With Proust - Day 410

   Ever since Mme Verdurin had been at la Raspeliere she had pretended for the benefit of the faithful to be under the disagreeable obligation of inviting her landlords for one evening.  By so doing she would obtain better terms next year, she explained, and was inviting them merely out of self-interest.  But she affected to regard with such terror, to make such a bugbear of the idea of ding with people who did not belong to the little group, that she kept putting off the evil day.  The prospect did indeed alarm her slightly for the reasons why she professed, albeit exaggerating them, if at the same time it enchanted her for reasons of snobbery which she preferred to keep to herself.  She was therefore partly sincerely, for she believed the little clan to be something so unique, one of those perfect entities which it takes centuries to produce, that she trembled at the thought of seeing these provincials, ignorant of the Ring and the Meistersinger, introduced into its midst, people who would be unable to play their part in the concert of general conversation and were capable of ruining one of those famous Wednesdays, masterpieces as incomparably fragile as those Venetian glasses which one false note is enough to shatter.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 914

Somehow this section seem terribly fitting coming on the heels of my weekend trip to Cincinnati to see my old friends and draft (poorly) my latest fantasy baseball team.  Proust tells us that Mme Verdurin "believed the little clan to be something so unique, one of those perfect entities which it takes centuries to produce, that she trembled at the thought of seeing these provincials, ignorant of the Ring and the Meistersinger, introduced into its midst, people who would be unable to play their part in the concert of general conversation and were capable of ruining one of those famous Wednesdays, masterpieces as incomparably fragile as those Venetian glasses which one false note is enough to shatter."  In my upcoming blog post for Week 51 of our running Discography music discussion I'll talk more about friendship (and self-perception) but at this point I'll point out that our "little clan" is one of those "perfect entities" and making the trip into Cincinnati to spend time with them is one of the highlights of my year.  Since the passing of our friend Bob Sawma we've been down to seven members (Dave Kelley, Gary Beatrice, Jack Schultz, Daryl Evans, Kelly Hamad, Mike Bergman and some old dude from Indiana).  Truthfully, we could probably really use an eighth or ninth member (if nothing else it would restore balance to the bidding on Closers) but I think there is also this feeling that any addition would be a subtraction.

I'll add a more complete description in a separate post later, but here's the crew at the traditional post-draft Skyline debrief and sand-bag fest: Daryl Evans, Kelly Hamad, Dave Kelley, Gary Beatrice, Jack Schultz and Mike Bergman.