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Travel
By-The-Book : Senior
Women's Travel : Favorite
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Stan Burnett's Musings on Proust in Paris
Whether one is here for a day, a week, or a year, every day in Paris brings one closer to Marcel Proust. Yes, even in the 21st century. There are, of course, the obvious and planned moments when one touches Proust, and these have value and pleasure, whether it’s the sight of the author’s bed and ink well in the Carnavelet, a stroll in Illiers-Combray, or a visit to Parc Monceau where Proust found his first love or to the parkland of the Champs Elysees where his Narrator played with Gilberte. These put some real flesh on the bones of a Proustian’s imagination. But Proust gave equal, in fact, superior, value to accident. The unintended memory gives the Narrator, in a flash (even if the flash lasts eighty pages), more than a memory, a full return to another time. I find that Paris is full of Proustian accidents. I bump into them several times a day. It may be a man leaping through the closing doors of the Metro, seen from several yards away, with an action that looks exactly as Saint Loup’s dive through the doors of the bordello must have looked.
Am I suggesting that Frenchmen dive through doors in a special way? I guess I am. Or the aroma coming from a boulangerie that must certainly match what the Narrator enjoyed in Combray and sure enough, the pink icing looks slightly better than the white icing. Or it’s a snatch of overheard conversation that might have come from the mouth of Mme. Cottard. These accidents are no accident. Even over the gulf of a century, they are the products of a culture, an everyday culture, that flows from the same decisions, over many years, about how life should be lived. Stan Burnett Mary Ann Zimmerman www.poshnosh.com maryann@poshnosh.com 917 880 6732 |
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