Countdown to Iceland

My son and I will be leaving for our trip to Iceland in just over a week, and the trip is almost entirely planned.  We ended up changing the itinerary, and simplifying it, which is usually a good idea.  I'm quite guilty of over-cramming trips, just as I do with courses, figuring, I guess, that I can just cut things later.  Every trip provides it's own challenges, as the trips to Jordan, Zanzibar, Spain/Portugal and India/Sri Lanka prove.  In the case of the Iceland trip one of the things we've been struggling with is the precious few hours of daylight we have to play with.  On the one hand that's sort of the point of the trip - it dramatically increases the chance that we'll get a rousing display of Northern Lights (which was the original impetus for the journey).  On the other hand, it means that we need to maximize the daylight hours we have.  Essentially, we don't want to do doing unprofitable travelling (obviously, some travelling is breathtaking) during our four and a half hours of daylight every day.  We originally considered just taking the entire Ring Road around Iceland, but that sounds more like a summer trip with more time, than a week during the first week of January.  So, we've decided to restrict it to three locations.  We fly out of Montreal on the afternoon of 1 January, and arrive in Reykjavik at 4:30 in the morning on 2 January.

Our itinerary should, by all rights, have been finalized, but it's been maddeningly out of focus, which is not necessarily a bad thing.  Part of it is our own inability to focus and our whimsical view of the trip.  A couple days ago Gary sent me a link to an article about whether or not the volcano at Hekla was getting ready to blow or not, and this led us to change our itinerary to go see it - finally deciding to go check it out on my birthday.  As my friend Mike Kelly opined, "it would make me really sad if Gary were killed in a volcanic eruption, but for you it would make a great 'drop the mike' moment as you walk off stage."  Can't argue with that.  The Icelanders have also been a bit difficult to lock down.  We wanted to go further up into the Westfjords (see below) to stay at the Hotel Djupavik (half the pictures in their gallery are of the Northern Lights), but they finally responded by email this morning: "It's possible if the road is open.  It can be tricky some time to come here in the middle of the winter.  Let's stay in touch around 1st of January and see how the conditions are :)" I love the attitude.  After forwarding the email on to my son, and proposing that I really want to stay there, but am somewhat uncomfortable with the uncertainty, my son replied, "I like the uncertainty."  Clearly, the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree.

Our initial plan was to spend a day or two in the capital before heading out, but then we figured that we wouldn't be able to get into our room that day until afternoon - or if we did we'd just collapse into bed and waste half a day.  Instead we're going to rent a car and immediately head north, with the goal of making it to the Westfjords, which should be around a four hour drive.  I suspect we're going to end up staying in Holmavik, which initially drew our attention because it's the home of the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft.  That said, we may go further to Djupavik, as described above, but I'd really like to lock this in today just to be done with it.  What are we going to do in the Westfjords?  I don't know, guess we'll figure out when we get there.  There is also a museum devoted to sea monsters, but it's even harder to get to than Djupavik.  After that we're going to head south and spend a couple days on the Sneafellnes Peninsula, getting a hotel in Stykkishholmur.  We're staying at the Hofdagata Guesthouse, and we've been swapping emails with a very nice woman named Ella.  Then the last two nights will be spent in Reykjavik itself, probably one night at the Kex Hostel and then one night out by the airport at the Base Hotel (which we ended up getting a free night stay from Travelocity because they screwed up something and I complained, which was nice of them).  Initially we were going to duck it because it's free anyway, but it seems appropriately quirky so we're OK with it.  All this means that we're just going to be scratching the surface of the western coast, with the one trip into the interior to try and get close to the Hekla volcano.  That said, Andy Burkhardt sent me  a cool story about a cryptid giant worm in the far east of Iceland and . . .

My Year With Proust - Day 323

"Ah, now!  There's a happy man, if you like, that Jupien," said Francoise, who had a tendency to minimise or exaggerate people's generosity according as it was bestowed on herself or on others.  Not that, in this instance, she had any need to exaggerate, nor for that matter did she feel any jealousy, being genuinely fond of Jupien.  "Oh, he's such a good man, the Baron," she went on, "such a nice, religious, proper sort of man.  If I had a daughter to marry and was one of the rich myself, I'd give her to the Baron with my eyes shut." "But, Francoise," my mother observed gently, "she'd be well supplied with husband, that daughter of yours.  Don't forget you've already promised her to Jupien."  "Ah!  Lordy, now," replied Francoise, "there's another of them that would make a woman happy.  It doesn't matter whether you're rich or poor, it makes no difference to your nature.  The Baron and Jupien, they're just the same sort of person."

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 654

This is one of those sections where you can't decide whether Proust is just trying to be funny or simply ironic.  Two women are discussing whether M. de Charlus or Jupien would make a better match.  Either Proust is proposing that the women are just terribly out of it or they're being terribly clever.  Certainly, the Baron and Jupien are just the same sort of person.  However, the other way to think of about it is that it speaks to a very different concept of what made a successful marriage.  As we've discussed, the idea of marrying for love is a pretty recent concept, and in some parts of the world it still rare.  In the end, what did it matter what M. de Charlus or Jupien thought in the true selves at 3:00 in the morning or what they did with their spare time?

My Year With Proust - Day 322

As for M. de Charlus's part in the transaction, I noticed later on that there were for him various kinds of conduction, some of which, by their multiplicity, their scarcely visibile instantaneousness, and above all the absense of contact between the two actors, recalled still more forcibly those flowes that in a garden are fertilised by the pollen of a neighbouring lower which they may never touch.  There were in face certain persons whom it was sufficient for him for him to invite to his house, and to hold for an hour or two under the domination of his talk, for his desire, inflamed by some earlier encounter, to be assuaged.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 652

This reminds me of a friend of mine (and I think I already shared this story), who shall remain nameless, who was famous/infamous for, as a senior in college, for ending up with freshmen or sophomore women at his room (usually they were the instigators - he was considered quite the catch) on the weekend.  He would never have sex with them.  Instead, they would usually end up in some state of undress, if not completely undressed, and he would end up sending them home.  He wasn't being mean, rather it was a combination of him truly not wanting to take advantage of them - and for him it was enough that they wanted to have sex.  Actually having sex was almost beside the point.  It sounds like for M. de Charlus that was sometimes more than enough.  Although, Proust certainly punctuates that sentence with enough sexually charged words to make it seem more powerful: hold, domination, desire, inflamed.  For me, I will testify that at times it was as much a turn-on that another woman actually wanted to have sex with me than the reality of having sex.

My Year With Proust - Day 321

The most extraordinary stratagems that nature has devised to compel insects eto ensure the fertilisation of flowers which without their interveion could not be fertilised because the male flowers is too far away from the female - or the one which, if it is the wind that must provide for the transportation of the pollen, makes it so much more easily detachable from the male, so much more easily snatched from the air by the female flower, by eliminating the secretion of the nectar, which is no longer of any use since there are no insects to be attracted, and even the brilliance of the corollas which attract them - and the device which, in order that the flower may be kept free for the right pollen, which can fructify only in that particular flower, makes it secrete a liquid which rends it immune to all other pollens - seemed to me no more marvellous than the existence of the subvariety of inverts destined to guarantee the pleasures of love to the invert who is growing old: men who are attracted not by all other men, but - by a phenomenon of correspondence and harmony similar to those that govern the fertilisation of heterostyle trimorphous flowers like the lythrum salicaria - only by men considerably older than themselves.  Of this subvariety Jupien had just furnished me with an example, one less striking however than certain others which every human herbalist, every moral botanist, will be able to observe in spite of their rarity, and which will show them a frail young man awaiting the advances of a robust and paunchy, quinquagenarian, and remaining as indifferent to hose of other young men as the hermaphrodite flowers of the short-styled primula veris remain sterile so long as they are fertilised only by other primulae veris of short style also, where they welcome with joy the pollen of the primula veris with the long style.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 651-652

Proust ruminates about the amazing and seemingly inexplicable varieties of sexual desire, in this case that the fact that Jupien might actually desire M. de Charlus, and not just his station in life or the associated wealth.  I've often joked that there is not one sub-variety of sexual desire that doesn't have its well-trolled website: librarians, girls with glasses, librarians with glasses, well pedicured feet of librarians with glasses, etc. One of the things that I struggled with when I was dating the beautiful British woman was the age difference (as I was twenty-two years older).  She always said that it made no difference, but it really bothered me, and it took me a long time to get over; and even when I got over it I didn't like to see pictures of the two of us together (essentially, who was that old guy with that beautiful young woman?).  It didn't make me feel young and vibrant, but instead seem to validate my decay.  Even when I was relatively OK with it I assumed that she was with me because I was more mature (arguably, anyway) and stable and at a place in my life where I could put aside some of my desires and view our life and relationship with a more balanced sense of what was important.  So, it didn't really occur to me that she would find me physically attractive, and that she mainly "put up with me" physically because of my other attributes.  However, Proust is saying the opposite here.  When I was a younger man I had the opposite experience in that I dated older women, sometimes much older; for example, when I was a senior I had a fling with a woman who was forty-five.  So, in the long arc of my life I've operated within a range of forty-five years (twenty-two years older and twenty-three years younger) and despite some initial clumsy moments I was happy with all those relationships.  Having said that, it also implies that I didn't have a "type" per se in that I wasn't always drawn to older women when I was younger nor have I been drawn to younger women when I've been older.  Mainly I've just been surprised when any woman would talk to me, especially now that I've reached the age of total invisibility.

My Year With Proust - Day 320

The feud of the Capulets and the Montagues was as nothing compared with the obstacles of every sort which have been surmounted, the special eliminations to which nature has had to surject the chances, already far from common, which bring about love, before a retired tailor, who was intending to set off soberly from his office, can stand quivering in ecstasy before a stoutish man of fifty; this Romeo and this Juliet may believe with good reason that their love is not a momentary whim but a true predestination, determined by the harmonies of their temperaments, and not only by their own personal temperaments but by those of their ancestor, by their most distant strains of heredity, so much so that the fellow-creatures who is conjoined with them has belonged to them from before their birth, has attracted them by a force comparable to that which governs the worlds on which we spent our former lives.  M. de Charlus had distracted me from looking to see whether the bumble-bee was bringing to the orchid the pollen it had so long been waiting to receive, and had no chance of receiving save by an accident so unlikely that one might call it a sort of miracle.  But it was a miracle also that I had just witnessed, almost of the same order and no less marvelous.  As soon as I considered the encounter from this point of view, everything about it seemed to me instinct with beauty.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 651

And Proust returns to one of his favorite topics: love.  There are times when his analysis of M. de Charlus seems, well, a tad clunky, or at least very much a product of his age.  That cuts both ways, obviously.  Who else was showing this level of understanding of homosexuality when Proust was writing?  He doesn't describe the relationship between M. de Charlus and Jupien as perversity, rather he describes it as a love story, even if a seemingly inexplicable one: a "retired tailor, who was intending to set off soberly from his office, can stand quivering in ecstasy before a stoutish man of fifty."  Still, the two men, like everyone in love, felt the same thing and asked the same question, even down to wondering if their love was somehow predestined.  Proust concludes, "As soon as I considered the encounter from this point of view, everything about it seemed to me instinct with beauty."

My Year With Proust - Day 319

Like so many creatures of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, like the plant which would produce vanilla but, because in its structure the male organ is separated by a partition from the female, remains sterile unless the hummingbirds or certain tiny bees convey the pollen from one to the other, or man fertilises them by artificial means, M. de Charlus (and here the word fertilise must be understood in a moral sense, since the physical sense the union of male with male is and must be sterile, but it is no small matter for a person to be able to encounter the sole pleasure which he is capable of enjoying, and that "every creature here below" can impart to some other "his music or his fragrance or his flame"), M. de Charlus was one of those men who may be called exceptional because, however many they may be, the satisfaction, so easy for others, of their sexual needs depends upon the coincidence of too many conditions, and of conditions too difficult to meet.  For men like M. de Charlus (subject to the compromises which will appear in the course of this story and which the reader may already have sensed, enforced by the need of pleasure which resigns itself to partial acceptations), mutual love, apart from the difficulties, so great as to be almost insurmountable, which it encounters in the ordinary run of mortals, entails others so exceptional that what is always extremely rare for everyone becomes in their case well-night impossible, and, if they should chance to have an encounter which is really fortunate, or which nature makes appear so to them, their happiness is somehow far more extraordinary, selective, profoundly necessary than that of the normal lover.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 650-651

I can't figure out the origins of the quoted line "every creature here below . . . his music or his fragrance of his flame", which frustrates me.  It sounds like something from the Song of Solomon or from Corinthians or maybe even from Ecclesiastes, but I have yet to track it down so far.  I'm always hammering away at my students about, in addition to practical work skills or the ability to think and write, that there is also the coin of cultural literacy - and clearly I've failed in this instance because the passage, although it seems familiar, is dancing madly beyond my perception.  Still, I love it, and I do think that, if only we would try, we can impart to others "his music or his fragrance or his flame."  I don't think it is necessary for me to track down this line to understand Proust's point here, but it is definitely driving me crazy.

But back to the action - here Proust continues to dissect the nature and struggles of M. de Charlus, and for that matter all homosexuals during his age.  While I'm sure some, or maybe most, modern readers would chastise Proust for his views on homosexuality, I, again, am reading it in a different way.  It just seems to me that there is more understanding, albeit laced with sympathy and pity, than true condemnation from Proust.  He writes of the pain of these individuals who "enforced by the need of pleasure which resigns itself to partial acceptations."  Love is difficult to achieve even when you have all the societal encouragement and acceptance you can handle, but how difficult must it be when you are facing profound limits and reprimands from society?  Essentially, that all you can ever hope for are "partial acceptations."

Krampus

Social media is, as we all know, an odd thing.  Over the last year I've made a very concerted effort to stay off of Facebook, and instead devoted much more time to this blog and also to Twitter.  However, a couple months back I ended reactivating my FB membership because I was trying to track down a group of American ex-pats living in Lisbon to arrange a Thanksgiving dinner for my students.  If I had any sense, and was truer to my convictions, I would have deactivated the account when I culled out the desired information, but I let it linger and now I check it out a couple times a week.  As I've said before, I'm more and more horrified by the platform because it mainly seems to be a an mechanism to share pre-packaged bits of advertising or fake news.  The other day I was surprised to see a picture of myself, and not from someone who is currently a friend (at least in the FB universe; I would hope she'd still be my friend in the real world).  Next to a picture of me, obviously culled out of my Core Talk series, was the following explanation: "Spotted in the film "Krampus the Christmas Devil."  Separated at birth?"  It was posted by the sister of the lovely British woman that I was engaged to a few years ago.  She had posted it and tagged another friend of ours.  I have not talked to either of the sisters in years.  As I've said I'm still not exactly certain why we broke up, although I think she had been unhappy for a few months - and, hell, no one should be unhappy.  She was, I'm sure is, an amazing woman and I hope she finds someone and is the happiest woman in the world.  So, what to make of the FB posting?  I mean, it is a startling similarity, if nothing else.  I think we all want the people we were involved with to be happy, and also, probably selfishly, to think well of us.  When things fell apart Laura posted a couple snarky things on FB about me before she disappeared, but I think that's normal for breakups.  We were both dealing with a lot of ghosts, and not just Krampus.

Actually, I think it's pretty funny, and I just gave it a Like and let it go.  I took it as affirmation that at least one of them must not hate me so profoundly that they didn't feel free to poke a little fun at me.