The Gentleman Who Pockets Your Spoons

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"I don't play golf...like so many of my friends. So I should have no excuse for going about in sweaters as they do" (Proust, 668)

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Absolutely related to nothing at all that I've found of weight in today's pages. But, in light of finding entirely too much to write about in the past 100 and some more pages I read today (after, Justin, so decidedly stating that I did not want to read today at all) it seemed as though I could not lead this with anything but some tangential and unrelated quotation. 

Throughout today's bits of text, Proust further asserted that Budding Grove is a faster, more gratifying read than the first part of his work. Certainly, this is a reflection of my modern, Western sentiments, whereupon I place heavier value upon the dramatic, quickly-paced sections of plot than in the slower, and perhaps more lucid, sections. That, however, is a shortcoming I have already berated myself for, good DAY to you sir.

Some years ago at exactly this time, I attempted to read Swann's Way, in hopes of, eventually, tackling all the installments of the major work. Halfway through it, I fizzled and moved onto Nabokov. In that time, I found many relatable sentiments; however, I could not have known how crucial the reflections of Budding Grove would have been to me at that time. Though this importance may have only been imparted to Proust's musings via the lens of memory and nostalgia, I suspect that, even then, I would have caught a scent of their importance.

Perhaps, too, he could have spared me some heartache, some complication, and some embarrassment, as the young Marcel proceeded through a love affair so similar to one of my own (in his mind and heart, that is, but far different in terms of physical reality - though even that, perhaps, is closer in parallel than I see even now) that as I read, I am catapulted back in time and forced to realize my own follies and delusions. The view of the past, so sharpened by the tightening perimeter of the image by the closing of years around it as an aperture around a given field of vision, is "adorned with the halo with which we are bound before to invest her, and is imparted if not with the frequent solace of hope," (Proust, 675) to the chagrin of historical accuracy in nearly all cases. 

Not to cheapen the power of memory, or the value of nostalgia; but rather, I must constantly remember the power of that tightening focus, and all that its closing begins to eliminate from the frame. For as the subject becomes clearer in some ways via a narrower field of contrast, many of the details which allowed a true view of the given subject are entirely eliminated and lost to that black perimeter of time past, time lost.

And any further, I'll just fall right off the edge.