I've been couch-ridden for about a week, experiencing all the COVID-19 symptoms without the fever (and thus apparently without the main criterion that would make me eligible for testing in Massachusetts). Yesterday I started reading Swann's Way, and let me just say that a quarantine is a great time to start reading this masterpiece of lying around in bed.
Amidst pages upon pages of the narrator waiting for his mom to walk upstairs to give him a kiss goodnight, there's this, which seems to be about Zoom dinner parties or the internet or something:
No doubt the Swann who was known at the same time to so many clubmen was quite different from the one created by my great-aunt, when in the evening, in the little garden at Combray, after the two hesitant rings of the bell had sounded, she injected and invigorated with all that she knew about the Swann family the dark and uncertain figure who emerged, followed by my grandmother, from a background of shadows, and whom we recognized by his voice. But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part. In the end they swell his cheeks so perfectly, follow the line of his nose in an adherence so exact, they do so well at nuancing the sonority of his voice as though the latter were only a transparent envelope that each time we see this face and hear this voice, it is these notions that we encounter again, that we hear. No doubt, in the Swann they had formed for themselves, my family had failed out of ignorance to include a host of details from his life in the fashionable world that caused other people, when they were in his presence, to see refinements rule his face and stop at his aquiline nose as though at their natural frontier; but they had also been able to garner in this face disaffected of its prestige, vacant and spacious, in the depths of these depreciated eyes, the vague, sweet residue—half memory, half forgetfulness—of the idle hours spent together after our weekly dinners, around the card table or in the garden, during our life of good country neighborliness. The corporeal envelope of our friend had been so well stuffed with all this, as well as with a few memories relating to his parents, that this particular Swann had become a complete and living being, and I have the impression of leaving one person to go to another distinct from him, when, in my memory, I pass from the Swann I knew later with accuracy to the first Swann—to that first Swann in whom I rediscover the charming mistakes of my youth and who in fact resembles less the other Swann than he resembles the other people I knew at the time, as though one's life were like a museum in which all the portraits from one period have a family look about them, a single tonality—to that first Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the smell of the tall chestnut tree, the baskets of raspberries, and a sprig of tarragon (19–20).
Waiting to talk to a nurse about symptoms did drive me to this 2014 episode of This American Life about "Opus No. 1," the best hold music song, and then this 2014 How to Dress Well song that samples it.
I've been reacquainting myself with my mom's old kindle, onto which I years ago downloaded "Swann's Way." Now's the time...
ReplyDeleteI'm really trying to avoid the literature of convalescence because it just gets me spiraling down, but in emailing with friends a lot of us are interested in watching the films of convalescence: looong ones. We've been mentioning Paul Thomas Anderson ones, but I'd personally recommend Bela Tarr's magical tale of a giant whale, "Werckmeister Harmonies," or Bergman's "Fanny and Alexander." If anyone recommends "Jeanne Dielman" they are probably trolling you even if it's an important movie to exist in the world.
ReplyDeleteAll the Wiseman docs are on Kanopy. We were thinking of diving into the NYPL one!
DeleteYes! Wiseman!
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