ADVENTURES IN PROUST (D22.2)

Today I started reading Proust's Swann's Way (yes I WILL finish Remembrance of Things Past, unlike my earlier attempt to learn the Arabic script) and I hardly got very far at all without coming across a passage I absolutely had to share with all my imaginary readers.

I typed it out just for you, these three very long sentences!

Even the simple act which we describe as 'seeing some one we know' is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen. And so, no doubt, from the Swann they had build up for their own purposes my family had left out, in their ignorance, a whole crowd of the details of his daily life in the world of fashion, details by means of which other people, when they met him, saw all the Graces enthroned in his face and stopping at the line of his arched nose as at a natural frontier; but they contrived also to put into a face form which its distinction had been evicted, a face vacant and roomy as an untenanted house, to plant in the depths of its unvalued eyes a lingering sense, uncertain but not unpleasing, half-memory and half-oblivion, of idle hours spent together after our weekly dinners, round the card-table or in the garden, during our companionable country life. Our friend's bodily frame had been so well lined with this sense, and with various earlier memories of his family, that their own special Swann had become to my people a complete and living creature; so that even now I have the feeling of leaving some one I know for another quite different person when, going back in memory, I pass from the Swann whom I knew later and more intimately to this early Swann - this early Swann in whom I can distinguish the charming mistakes of my childhood, and who, incidentally, is less like his successor than he is like the other people I knew at that time, as though one's life were a series of galleries in which all the portraits of any one period had a marked family likeness, the same (so to speak) tonality - this early Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the scent of the great chestnut-tree, of baskets of raspberries and a sprig of tarragon.

I loved how this passage brought to mind a few people I know who just seem to move and behave in a way that seems to perfectly embody my impressions of them. A friend whose hand holds a pen and writes with all of the whim she brings to everyday life. A relative whose awkward yet confident walk fits perfectly with her musings on everything, especially herself. And then thinking about people who you seem to understand so much better, or at least read much more charitably, after learning previously unknown bits and peices of their pasts or presents. Here I am thinking about an American I thought was a total bitch until I learned she had just lived in Russia for two years. It makes so much sense now (can we be friends plz?)!