You Wanna “Debate”?

 

What do you want to debate? How much the president paid – or, more to the point, didn’t -- in federal income tax? Whether or not there should be hearings for a Supreme Court nominee not only in an election year but as the election process is already underway? What each candidate proposes as far as the nation’s health care is concerned? 

 

No, I will not be watching – or listening, either. What each man will say is pretty much a foregone conclusion, and my only question is how big a train wreck it will be. Will there be name-calling? Shouting? Will there be onstage stalking? We will find out soon enough, but the morning after will be soon enough for me, so although I know many of you will, I don’t need to follow it “in the moment.” I’d rather be elsewhere.

We are having a lot of rain this week here in northern Michigan, but bright, fast-changing colors gleam in the rain, and this morning we had a shot of bright, bright sunshine, welcome for however long it may last. And yes, I am here in Michigan. But I am also on the Great Plains, and for a few minutes of every morning and evening I am in France before I was born. Mine, you see, is a magical life, and if you are a reader (as I hope you are), your life is magical, too, not limited by time or space. Is that not a rich blessing?

 

The drowsy heat of middle August lay heavy as a furred robe on the upper country of the Shell River, the North Platte of the white man. Almost every noon the thunders built themselves a dark cloud to ride the far crowd of Laramie Peak. But down along the river no rain came to lay the dust of the emigrant road, and no cloud shaded the ‘dobe walls and bastions of Fort Laramie, the soldier town that was only a little island of whites in a great sea of Indian country two thousand miles wide. 

 

-      Mari Sandoz, Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas

 

So it begins, this lyrical biography called “one of the great stories of the West” (Atlantic Monthly), a “glorious hero tale” (John C. Neihardt in the New York Times), and “a splendidly done thing” (Washington Star). Mari Sandoz wrote many books set in her native Great Plains country (Old Jules, the story of her father, among them), and thanks to the University of Nebraska Press, with their Bison Books imprint, these titles are available in well-designed modern paperback form for a new generation of readers, as well as those of us still catching up to books missed earlier in our lives. I’m already thinking that Crazy Horse belongs on the American classics list. Maybe Old Jules, too. (I’m sure many people would think so.) The books Sandoz wrote were and probably are still considered “regional,” but every book set in the United States is set in one or more regions of the land; there is no reason, then, to set “regional” in opposition to “American,” in my opinion, that is, the opinion of someone who loves to travel, either by automobile, train, or armchair.

 

If you’re the kind of reader I am, you usually have more than one book going at a time (sometimes as many as four, in my case), and the other one I’m enjoying at an extremely leisurely pace -- only a page or two at a time -- is one I’ve read before, the first volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. I’ve written about Proust before and will not try your patience with a long quote in French, but I’ll tell you that the two pages I read this morning performed a near-miracle, pulling me out of the Slough of Despond and into the light of day. “Life is worth living so we can read Proust,” I exclaimed happily to the Artist over our morning coffee. “He saw and felt and noticed every last detail in his surroundings and then every association those details called up. What a rich life!” The Artist was amused.

 

Once in a while the Artist gets bogged down, as so many of us do, in the relentless stream of what seems like uniformly bad national and world news. “They’re not telling us the good things,” I say, and he asks rhetorically, “What good things? What’s happening that’s good?” In truth, sometimes I’m the one who’s down, and he has to remind me of all our blessings. I’m only reporting our conversation from this one Tuesday morning.

 

There was bad news from the agencies too – more soldiers there, with little soldier chiefs for agents and more treaty men coming to buy the Black Hills, making a strong talk of starving the Indians into going to the Missouri or the south place called Indian Territory.

 

The news! When has it ever been good? One of the hardest things about reading the story of Crazy Horse is that he lived during dreadful times for the Lakota Sioux. “Culture clash” is one way those times are sometimes described, but the phrase completely leaves out the power dynamics of a strong, armed national government and a relentless flood of pioneering homesteaders overwhelming traditions of those who had lived off the land for generations. 

 

The news! Big, bad happenings! Disastrous events and ongoing horror shows! 

 

I think the good things -- some of the best things – never make the news cycle precisely because they are not disasters or horror shows. Not “newsworthy,” in other words. Instead they are background constants, such the regularity of night and day and the annual round of seasons; parts of ordinary life too easily taken for granted because of their ordinariness, like family and friends and health and beauty; and stunning moments encountered in the natural world or in human interaction that surprise us with their grace. A peach tree growing in the compost or an understanding smile where we fearfully anticipated an angry frown.

 

May you experience today moments of grace, as well as the strength, although we cannot literally shake hands these days, to extend a metaphorical hand of friendship to someone rather than yield to the temptation of an angry gesture. Are we to be outdone by bonobos?

 

Scent of Apples, Lead Me On and Carry Me Back

But when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, upon the ruins of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory. 

 - Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

This, friends, is why one reads Proust! He penetrated so deeply into the passing moments of his life that he fixed them, for us, and for all literate time. When other books disappoint, when sleeplessness comes in the dark of the night (as it did to the narrator of Remembrance of Things Past), one can pick up any volume of Proust, open to any page, and be calmed and made happy. It is even possible to close wakeful eyes (without turning on a light to read) and rehearse in one’s mind the beginning of a lengthy section of the story – the differences between the boy’s bedroom in Combray and his hotel room in Balbec, the ways in which his expectations of Balbec fell short of its complicated reality, his imagination’s pictures of places not yet visited and the magic of their place names....

And so I put aside Daniel Defoe one night in favor of Proust, and the next day another magical book came my way, Wallace Stegner’s unclassifiable Wolf Willow. Almost immediately, reading the introduction by Page Stegner, my Proustian literary antennae began quivering.

It is the history of a small town called Eastend (renamed Whitemud in the narrative), where Wallace Stegner spent the most formative years of his childhood. And it is also, by synecdoche, the chronicle of a process of white settlement on the northern plains, a process that reaches its climax and end in this particular short-grass subdivision of southwestern Canada. 

 But Wolf Willow is utterly atypical of conventional history. What we have here is history filtered through the evocative and judgmental mind (and memory) of the region’s most illustrative native son; Stegner’s response to his subject is a kind of stratified formation of anthropology, sociology, geography, geology, and ecology applied to a literal place—and to literal place as a state of mind.

Yes! This, I think, is the book that will, finally, lead me into the work of Wallace Stegner, a writer whose novels have previously resisted my attempted incursions. The first sentence of the first chapter is everything I want it to be:

An ordinary road map of the United States, one that for courtesy’s sake includes the first hundred miles on the Canadian side of the Line, will show two roads, graded but not paved, reaching up into western Saskatchewan to link U.S. 2 with Canadian 1, the Trans-Canada Highway.

Road map! Unpaved roads! U.S. 2 and the Trans-Canadian Highway! (Place names!) With Stegner's words and lines my imagination flies northwest-west from the northern lower peninsula of Michigan, past the Dakota of my birth, and up to the northern borderland. With the author, I explore and remember the place where he grew up, hearing as a child about “the Cypress Hills,” thinking it somewhere nearby by and not realizing that he lived in the region so named. The town he finds has changed dramatically. Once “bare as a picked bone,” it is now full of trees. The change is charming, but he cannot find in the landscape his own and his family’s past until, coming down to the river itself, where today’s children are playing, he is assailed by a familiar smell, “pungent and pervasive” but at first eluding identification. He investigates further, inhaling the odor of the old bathhouse shack, sniffing a handful of mud. Finally...

I stand [on the bridge] above the water and sniff. On the other side I strip leaves of wild rose and dogwood. Nothing doing. And yet all around me is that odor that I have not smelled since I was eleven, but have never forgotten—have dreamed, more than once. Then I pull myself up the bank by a gray-leaved bush, and I have it. The tantalizing and ambiguous and wholly native smell is no more than the shrub we called wolf willow, now blooming with small yellow flowers.

This smell, Stegner writes, is as evocative as Proust’s madeleine and tea.

For the moment, reality is made exactly equivalent with memory, and a hunger is satisfied. The sensuous little savage that I once was is still intact inside me.

Old apples along farm lane

Is September more redolent of memory-evoking aromas than other months in the Midwest? Sun-kissed apples on trees or in the grass, warm to the touch, or rain-wet apples glistening on branches or bowls of apples on the porch on a rainy day, filling the dense, humid air with their perfume -- apples and sunshine or apples and rain – either conjunction holds volumes, and those volumes open to a succession of years.

The apple tree in my parents’ backyard was an entire universe. That world’s year began for me in spring when the tree burst into generous bloom, its delicate white petals tinged with fugitive pink, bouquet upon bouquet, fragile flowers inviting bees with rich yellow pollen and heavenly scent. During that season I imagined the tree my tropical island, where the staff of life was blossoms in place of bread.

In summer I often retreated high into the tree’s leafy branches with a book, hidden from the busy world of family below and in the house. How seldom human beings look up! They could have seen me much oftener than they did, but I was happy to be invisible, enjoying that childhood fantasy. Sometimes, though, a friend would be invited to join me, and when the playmate was Jimmy the tree became what we called back then a “rocket ship.” We broke off twigs to leave sharp, raw ends and impaled on those points small, hard, green apples to be the control knobs of our ship. We would “blast off” over and over again, leaving earth far behind. Did the earthbound, pedestrian world have any idea what was happening above their heads?

We knew nothing of apple varieties in our family. Fruits of the backyard tree we called “pie apples,” to distinguish them from the “applesauce apples” of the trees in the side yard (the second lot that was also home to a pear tree and raspberry patch). One thing all three apple trees had in common was that the fruit would fall faster than we could usefully gather it up. Good apples went immediately into pies and sauce and, for longer-term storage, into bushel baskets to be stored in the basement “cold room.” (The “cold room” was in the back of the house; frontmost in the basement was the “coal room” with an iron door opening to the driveway for delivery of coal. Learning to distinguish the two names sounding so much alike felt like a giant step forward to my three-year-old self.) But punky, mushy brown, wormy apples had to be picked up, too. They could not be left in the grass to rot. We two little girls, my sister and I (the baby sister still too young for the job), had no objection to the firm, crisp apples (white-fleshed and tart when bitten into), but the others were repulsive to the touch, and my father had to bribe us with coins if he wanted the job done well.

One year when I was six and Deborah three and our baby sister newborn in July, Deborah and I were taken to spend a month with our grandparents outside Springfield, Ohio. Their backyard was orchard but no monoculture: there were apple trees of different varieties, different kinds of plums, peaches, pears, and a grape arbor heavy with fruit over the brick-lined walk from house to outhouse. Here, too, the branches of the apple trees were my private world. One August afternoon as a storm approached I clung near-frenzied to the branches of an apple trees that swayed wildly in the wind until compelled by my grandmother to come down and into the house. (I saw myself as a wild thing of Nature; she saw me as a little child.) The storm arrived and raged. In the aftermath, my grandparents’ transformed orchard was a shocking sight. Fruit littered the ground like hailstones, and it was impossible to take a single barefoot step without treading on bruised and shattered apples, peaches, plums, or grapes. Fruit cultivated lovingly for winter use, as well as for sale, had been laid waste in less than an hour. Nature might not be cruel, but she was definitely unconcerned with human plans.

My adult Septembers continue to be rich in apples. Old orchards in Alger County in the Upper Peninsula, planted to supply lumberjack camps, survive as remnants of those old days, producing apples year after year. Along town streets, washboard roads, and two-tracks, branches hang heavy, trees drop riches to the ground, and the air is filled with apple perfume and wasp flight. Every year I look out again for one particular tree in Grand Marais and remember a long-ago yard sale and the old man who encouraged me to gather up as many of his sweet, yellow-skinned apples as I could carry away.

Then there was the autumn I picked for John and Phyllis Kilcherman. Paid by the box, it was as much as I could do, picking as fast as ever my hands could fly, to fill a single box in two hours. What was the pay per box? That I honestly don’t remember. What I remember is the scent of apples all around, in every kind of weather, cold rain on wet days running down the back of my neck, hands turning numb when the fall weather turned cold, and distant voices from crews in other parts of the orchard, drifting on the wind to where I worked my solitary assignment.

Did my sisters and I offer apples to our teachers when back-to-school time came around? I suppose, perhaps. But the scent of apples does not carry me back to school, I’m happy to say. It takes me outdoors instead, along dusty roads, and up into the trees themselves, branches swaying in the wind.

Comfort me with apples! Bring back to life that "sensuous little savage"!

I Turn For Relief: The Comforts of Baking and Re-Reading

Feeling overwhelmed by time’s fullness and breakneck speed may be brought on by a crowded calendar, concerns of business, or any number of activities, even by reading itself. The consumption of too many books and book reviews and political articles in succession, particularly with a felt obligation to have something intelligent to say about each one, culminates every now and then in a crash. The system, as it were, goes down.

Baking

And so, tired of thinking and have nothing to say, of days passing without inspiration, I turn to the most spotted, dog-eared pages in my oldest cookbook. Comfort! A pan of brownies in the oven smells delicious in the evening, and nothing brightens a grey, cold November morning like hot oatmeal muffins dripping with butter. And now, it being a cold, grey, wet, windy November morning as I draft this post and wait for my oven to preheat, I’m thinking I might as well include a couple of recipes I’ve adapted over the years from the Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook, edited by Ruth Berolzheimer. (My mother used the 1950 edition of this cookbook, and I received my own copy of the 1964 edition in 1966 and used it until it fell to pieces, to be replaced by a 1967 copy.) Admonitions are my own additions, as should go without saying, but I’m saying.

OATMEAL MUFFINS

Sift together (or mix well together, as I do, with a wire whisk):

2 cups flour (I use Bob’s Red Mill)

1 T baking powder

2 T sugar

½ tsp. salt

1 egg

2/3 cold cooked oatmeal (see below)

1 cup milk

Beat the egg well, and add to it the cold cooked oatmeal and milk, mixing ONLY until dry ingredients are thoroughly moistened. DO NOT OVERMIX! Here you do not want an electric mixer or food processor or even a whisk but simply a spoon or fork. Also, DO NOT USE INSTANT OATMEAL OR “QUICK” OATS! You might as well eat a bowl of sugar! What you want is either whole or steel-cut oats (Bob’s Red Mill has both), and the thing to do is to cook twice the amount you want for breakfast the day before, and to save time that morning you will put the oats and water to soak in the top of a double boiler the night before, and to save even more morning time bring the oats to a boil the night before, leaving them covered for morning reheating.

Bake muffins in a HOT oven, 425 degrees, for about 25 minutes. The recipe makes a dozen muffins. OVEN TEMPERATURE IS CRUCIAL FOR MUFFINS! Few things from an oven are more disappointing than muffins with raw middles. You want them brown and crisp on top, fluffy inside, and baked clear through.

CHOCOLATE BROWNIES

4 oz. melted dark baking chocolate (NOT “baking squares”)

½ cup melted butter (use other shortening at your own peril)

1 cup flour

(Salt and baking powder are really not necessary.)

4 eggs

2 cups sugar

1 tsp. vanilla

Melt chocolate and butter in the top of a double boiler and stir until shiny and smooth. Mix dry ingredients together with a whisk as you did with the muffin batter in the other recipe. Add sugar gradually, beating until very light.

Add melted chocolate-butter to sugar-egg mixture and then stir in dry ingredients. Spread in a shallow baking pan and bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes.

My modifications to the original cookbook brownie recipe include doubling the amounts of chocolate, shortening (and always using butter for “shortening”), eggs and sugar and eliminating salt and baking powder, resulting in a chewy rather than a light, cakelike brownie. The key here, again, is making sure that the brownies are baked all the way through. Test with a clean knife or toothpick. If it comes out gooey rather than clean, give the brownies another 5 minutes and test again. You should have a crunchy top and a rich, dense brownie.

I baked brownies from this recipe on Friday night and took them to the bookshop on Saturday morning. There were no complaints from browsers or customers.

Reading

I’ve been a re-reader all my life and cannot comprehend people who say they never re-read. To me, that would be like meeting a pleasant, interesting person, having a wonderful conversation, and never wanting to see that person again. In grade school, I read all the Walter Farley books over and over, along with The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, The Borrowers, Palmer Brown’s The Silver Nutmeg, and my mother’s old copy of Anne of Green Gables, to name only a select few. To be honest, I still enjoy revisiting these favorites, but in more recent decades I’ve added to this list all of Jane Austen’s novels, but especially Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Maggie-Now, my favorite Betty Smith books; the beginning and end (not the middle volumes, which bore me to tears) of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past; Harlan Hubbard’s Shantyboat, Thoreau’s Walden, of course; Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; and, the most recent addition, Ellen Airgood’s South of Superior, which I have read four times and expect to re-read for the rest of my life.

Re-reading for me has all the advantage of “escape,” with the added comfort of familiarity. The characters and their worlds are old friends, and I enter once again into their lives and adventures. Even knowing how things will come out in the end, I vicariously re-experience all the confusions and doubts, hopes, fears, and excitement of the people in these books. And yet, always, somehow, there are a few lines that strike me as if I’m reading them for the first time. The time never feels wasted or the experience repetitious.

Because I’m currently re-reading Proust on assignment for a group discussion coming up soon, it was Jane Austen I turned to at dark 3 a.m. one recent morning. Never feeling a need to justify a re-reading, I did however think this time that it would be worthwhile going through Pride and Prejudice again in preparation for a December discussion of Longbourn, which I’ll also re-read again with pleasure before our group meets.

Here is a passage often quoted:

Upon the whole, therefore, she found, what has been sometimes found before, that an event to which she had looked forward with impatient desire, did not in taking place, bring all the satisfaction she had promised herself. It was consequently necessary to name some other period for the commencement of actual felicity; to have some other point on which her wishes and hopes might be fixed, and by again enjoying the pleasure of anticipation, console herself for the present, and prepare for another disappointment.

“Don’t wish your life away!” my mother always warned me, from my earliest childhood, when I “couldn’t wait” for time to bring around some longed-for event. How many modern self-help books counsel readers not to believe that happiness depends on some conditional “if” event, like falling in love or winning the lottery? The passage is perfectly familiar, as is its sense. But in my most recent reading I was suddenly struck by the last four words: “prepare for another disappointment.” How much dry irony Austen packs into those four simple words, as if anything wished for will disappoint! Is this Eliza Bennett’s skeptical wariness or the author’s own?

Much, much – I often think far too much! – is made of the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice. Finishing the novel this time, I read the afterword by Henry Hitchings with my own skeptical, wary eye. I nodded approvingly over everything he had to say about Jane Austen and David Hume’s philosophical writings on reason (once, back in graduate school, before the tsunami of writings on Austen, I had thoughts of writing something on that subject myself but could not bring myself to read her work with the analytic, academic rigor such a project would demand, because one does not want to analyze love, and I love Jane Austen), but as for what he says of the famous first sentence, I was less than satisfied, as usual.

The novel’s opening sentence is one of the most celebrated in English literature. It alerts us, quite subtly, to Austen’s powers of irony. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged,’ she writes, ‘that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ This seems straightforward, but ought to prompt two questions: is this alleged ‘truth’ really acknowledged ‘universally’, and ‘must’ an affluent man always be ‘in want of a wife’? Austen is not endorsing the view that all affluent men should marry; instead she gently mocks the notion that there can be universal truths, and at the same time she mocks the shallowness of her contemporaries.

Close reading, literary criticism – call it what you will, it has never satisfied me and still does not. So this time I set about trying to figure out and articulate for myself what that sentence is doing, and it strikes me that there is both more and less going on there than the critics would have us believe. Make no mistake: this is one of the best, most successful first lines ever penned in a work of fiction. There is genius in it. And yet, has it ever seemed “straightforward” to any reader? How obtuse and thick-headed would such a reader have to be? Of course the tone is mocking, and the mockery is obvious! That’s why we laugh! But are we really meant to be led by this sentence into reflections on universal truths? Is this the direction Austen would have us go? 

My questions are rhetorical, as I’m sure is obvious, and no is the answer I would convince you is correct. My claim is that it is self-interest in general and the character of Mrs. Bennett in particular that Austen mocks in her opening sentence. Then, move along, move along! We’re entering the world of a story!

As Hitchings says elsewhere, Austen is always, first and foremost, in service to the story she is telling. Any “feminist and revolutionary notes,” and so surely any epistemological or metaphysical considerations, are a lesser priority. The opening sentence introduces the concerns of a particular social group, but most pointedly it introduces one member of that group. The mocking tone calls into question self-interest unwilling (or perhaps unable) to recognize itself. Just as Mrs. Bennett protests that she forces herself out into society only for the sake of her daughters, so she needs to present those daughters as potentially answering the “need” of eligible bachelors. Mrs. Bennett’s almost complete lack of self-awareness is paired with a very high level of self-interest, and it is Mrs. Bennett who is introduced on the first page of the novel, her entrance prepared by two information-rich sentences. Character and story, story and character. How much Austen compresses into a very few words, and how easy it is to overload those simple words with philosophical freight!

Agree or disagree? Why?

Commuting between Proust and Austen, as I did for several mornings and evenings, I was struck anew by the lack of description in Austen’s work (so rich in Swann’s Way!) but also the economy of expression throughout her work. Wherever not necessary for the explication of character or the forwarding of plot, details are omitted, as in this passing reference to the wedding between Mr. Collins and Charlotte Lucas:

The wedding took place; the bride and bridegroom set off for Kent from the church door, and everybody had as much to say or to hear on the subject as usual.

We already know what the bride and groom respectively looked for in marriage, and in future chapters we will see them at home, quite satisfied, so of the wedding itself nothing more need be said.

Re-reading is a comfort and an escape because the work and characters are familiar, but it’s important for me to re-read books rich enough to show me something new each time through.

I began writing this post while the oven was preheating for oatmeal muffins and finished it up with chicken broth simmering on the stove, redolent with plenty of garlic and celery. Homemade noodles, cut thick, were already dancing in my head as wind and rain whipped tree branches outside our old farmhouse.

Happy baking – and happy reading! 

Letter to a Friend in Pennsylvania on the Rewards of Immersion

Dear Ed,

Comment ça va chez vous? Très bien, j’espère! Nous sommes en bonne forme ici. Ed, I know you read “Books in Northport” regularly, and today’s topic is one I thought you would especially appreciate, so I thought directing it to you might help me put it together. Hope you don’t mind?

Our “intrepid Ulysses group” (as I refer to them, because we first got together to discuss, in seven or eight sessions, Joyce’s monumental work) met recently to talk about Voltaire’s Candide and Zadig, and at the end of that meeting we agreed that five of us would get together in November for a session on Proust, and the whole group would reconvene in early December. That tells you that while a few of us really wanted to read (or re-read, as was the case for several of us) Swann’s Way, the others just as adamantly did not want to do so. And I am not casting stones, by the way! When the group voted to read Faulkner, I took a time-out myself....

Anyway, I re-read of Proust back in August, worried that if I put it off until later, I wouldn’t get through the entire work again in time, but now October is here, and our meeting yet a month in the future, so must I re-read it again? This is always the big question: read so far ahead that the book is not fresh in one’s memory when the group gets together, or wait until the last minute and risk not finishing in time? But then I had a lucky brain wave: this time I’d re-read it in French!

Which brings me back to you and your recent purchase of Flirting with French and your concerns and doubts about your ability ever to be able to master the language. I stand by my statement that immersion is a necessary condition for learning to relax into a second language and to develop some feeling for its nuances. Of course, the younger one is when first immersed, the more successfully the bond will be formed. And, alas! Years spent away from any cultural-linguistic milieu, whether that of one’s first or second language, but especially a second, tend to blunt the edge of mastery. (A graduate school friend of mine from Yugoslavia told me that she and her husband were “losing” their Serbo-Croatian, as they only spoke English in the U.S., even at home with each other.) When young, I had high hopes of someday learning Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, and Russian, but now if I can hang onto my English and French and a smattering of Spanish words and phrases as I ease into old age, I’ll be well satisfied.

But now I’m going to go off into what will probably seem at first a digression, i.e., poetry. Many Americans, I’ve noticed, readers of fiction and nonfiction, are downright afraid of poetry. They turn away from it with a shudder, convinced they’ll never be able to comprehend the poet’s words, and this seems a terrible shame, for they are missing so much beauty, so many startling new visions of the world. “Don’t analyze every line for meaning,” I urge those reluctant ones. “Think of it as a warm spring rain, and just let yourself stand out in it and get soaked.” You see what I’m saying, right? Immersion again. The sound and feel and rhythm – before worrying about the meaning. After all, isn’t this how all children first learn language? Definitions and rules come much later. Analysis and explanation come at the end, not the beginning.

So as I’ve already read Swann’s Way in English at least three times and maybe more and once in French, this time in reading the French I am not trying to translate in my head at all but simply immerse myself, swim in it, let it rain down on me. When a word comes along that I don’t recognize, I go blithely on without consulting a dictionary. Certain constructions common in French and never used in English slow me down from time to time, but my goal is always to keep swimming. The story is familiar enough to me that I recognize scenes as they come along, and the words and phrases that are clear to me keep me from drowning.

It is so beautiful! I can hardly believe that for so many years of my life I said to so many people, very self-righteously, as if I’d “seen through” generations of less clear-sighted readers’ passion, “Life is too short to read Proust”! Now I would say that life is too short not to read Proust!

Our past, enchanted, immobilized and imprisoned in material objects unless and until, by chance (le hasard), we encounter it again, in some evanescent taste or smell (l’odeur ou le saveur), those senses which, like some souls (comme des âmes), carry the entire immense edifice of memory. The man sips a spoonful of tea containing crumbs from the cookie he has dunked, and suddenly he is filled with joy. A moment’s reflection makes clear to him that the joy, the truth, is neither in the cookie nor in the tea but in himself. No, it was not in him but was him. ...[C]ette essence n’était pas en moi, elle était moi. ... Il est clair que la vérité que je cherche n’est pas en lui, mais en moi. The past was yet alive, present, in his memories, in images (not limited to visual, bien sur) deep within (au fond de moi).

David can be transported back to childhood by crisp bacon. Dried apricots do that trick for me, as does the sharp perfume of a small, nondescript weed that takes me back to driveway make-believe, at my parents’ home and my grandmother’s little place in the country. For Proust, it was the petite madeleine that was the key to an entire era of his life, his summers in Combray. I read his detailed memories of the stained glass windows of the church at Combray and remember enduring long sermons in my mother’s church by imagining myself a tiny creature with wings (not an angel, mind you, or I would be too big in scale), flying among the intricate Gothic spires of the altarpiece carved by German immigrants. However grey the sky, it was always beautiful in the church, Proust wrote.

The church, his old great-aunt’s eccentricities and those of her maid, the shopping and the meals, his longing for the theatre, an unplanned visit the boy makes to his uncle with no idea in the world that it will be their last meeting.... Immersion! You immerse yourself—in poetry, in another language—and then will come, with poetry some personally salient metaphor, with French some strikingly beautiful word, with either a phrase that goes straight to your heart, and that metaphor or word or phrase is a door leading into another world. Proust describes the theatre posters he saw in the street as a child in terms of their colors. How do you see in your mind the color called lie de vin? Maybe it isn’t even the words but only the music (to me, listening to French is like listening to music), as in the musical phrase le roucoulement du colombe. You hear the dove when you murmur the words aloud.

Yesterday when I began writing this letter, Ed, it was a quiet, dreary, rainy Friday afternoon. I’d had several sales earlier in the day, but somehow when the woman was buying the children’s reader from 1930 and I was writing the date on the sales slip, for the first time it registered with me that the next day (now today) would be (now is) the birthday of my #1 favorite philosopher, Henri Bergson, né à Paris, 1859, the last of the great metaphysical dualists.

Bergson argued so brilliantly against materialism that William James thought there was no longer a need to read Kant: “Bergson,” he wrote, “has resolved all the antinomies.” Bergson’s chief contribution was to bring the attention of philosophy to what the phenomenologists after him called “lived time,” as distinguished from the uniformly measured time of clocks. His own term was ‘duration’ (la durée), and he insisted that duration was real. “Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances,” such that “the past in its entirety is prolonged into the present and abides there actual and acting.” Past images living as memories; consciousness enlarged by an increasing field of choice which in its turn enlarges consciousness; the living being as a center of action, a focus of redirected force, a center of “creative evolution” – all this Bergson proposed over and against the deterministic materialism still, oddly, in vogue today.

Today the 155^th birthday of Henri Bergson, and Bergson was married to a cousin of Marcel Proust, and I love seeing the thoughts of each in the work of the other. I’m inexplicably glad that Bergson’s birthday did not slip by me unnoticed this year.

Alors, heureuse anniversaire, Henri -- et bon courage, Edouard! We’re here now. Cette petite tranche de maintenant (hold it in your hand!) est à nous d’en profiter!

A la prochaine,

toujours amicalement,

Pamela