NOT EVEN A TOKEN

Deep in Proust Country, dontcha-ya know. And even though I am there, I am not sure what it all means. I might have mentioned that I have read the first book, Combray, about four or five times now. And it seems like the first time. I think I got it this time.

So much of this work, or what I have read so far is about our imaginations, what we bring to situations and people. And that, of course, ties in with my ongoing ruminations about Romanticism.

...Our belief that a person takes part in an unknown life which his or her love would allow us to enter is, of all that love demands in order to come into being, what it prizes the most, and what makes it care little for the rest.

I am still teasing out the person and the reality behind my last long relationship, although it ended awhile ago. Giving up my ideas about who he was, and who I was, and how we acted and why, is difficult.

"...I had not yet had time to imagine that the woman who appeared before me could be Mme. de Guermantes)... this entirely recent, unchangeable image, the idea: ... But this Mme. de Guermantes of whom I had so often dreamed, now that I could see that she actually existed outside of me, acquired an even greater power over my imagination ...
  And—oh, the marvelous independence of the human gaze, tied to the face by a cord so lax, so long, so extensible that it can travel out alone far away from it..."
...I was impelled to consider it beautiful by all the thoughts I had brought to bear on it—and perhaps most of all by what is a kind of instinct to preserve the best parts of ourselves, by the desire we always have not to be disappointed...."

I hope these excerpts make sense. It has been noisy tonight with car tires on the road, the smoking drunks laughing on a Thursday night, and some frustrated pacing footsteps in the building.

And I think of my favorite Richard Thompson song, When The Spell Is Broken.


All your magic and your ways and schemes
All your lies come and tear at your dreams
When the spell is broken 
(Can't cry if you don't know how)
When the spell is broken
Now you're handing her that same old line
It's just straws in the wind this time
When love has died, 
There's none starry-eyed
No kiss, no tears, 
No farewell souvenirs
Not even a token, 
when the spell is broken