Reading Proust: Place-Names: The Place
The title of Within a Budding Grove is a lyrical rather than a literal translation of second book to Proust’s novel. The book’s more accurate rendering from the French is In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, which is even more lyrical but also more sensual and perhaps a tad scandalous to English readers of the 1920’s. This part of the novel was ready for printing in 1914 but was delayed due to the outbreak of World War One. Finally published in 1919, it won France’s highest prize for literature and made Proust, already somewhat famous for his literary criticism, translations, and other works, a sensation across cultured Europe.
Though the boy’s naïve love relationship with Gilberte in the book’s first part plays into this title, the “young girls in flower” are principally the topic of the book’s second part, “Place-Names: The Place.” Here, the narrator has grown into adolescence which transforms the quality of the narration to into a much more exciting, detailed, and passionate articulation of what was brewing within him since he met “the lady in pink” in Swann’s Way.
This part of the novel was my favorite during my first two readings and it is easy to understand why. The reader becomes immersed in sheer joy of the teenage experience and how it expands the narrator’s sensual relationship not only with girls but with nature and the world. Proust’s writing is this section is an immense pleasure to read.
We begin at a train station some “two years” after the events of “Madam Swann at Home.” The narrator is traveling to the ritzy seaside resort of Balbec with his grandmother. This is his first extended time away from his mother, with whom, it will be recalled from the first book, the narrator has a strong, almost neurotic attachment. The trip is a rite of passage of the boy becoming a teenager. It also marks the point in the novel where his special relationship with his grandmother is brought into sharp focus.
Proust’s novel is filled with humor. There are almost as many funny passages dotting the narrative as there are philosophical explorations. An example of this is found early on in this section when the narrator, who suffers from anxiety and asthma and frequent fatigue (much like Proust himself did), follows his doctor’s advice when confronted with the psychological challenge of leaving his mother and going on a long train ride to an unfamiliar destination. The doctor prescribes partaking of alcohol to create a state of “euphoria” that is supposed to off-set any anxiousness.
“When I had explained to my grandmother how unwell I felt, her distress, he kindness were so apparent as she replied, ‘Run along then, quickly; get yourself some beer or a liqueur if it will do you good,’ that I flung myself upon her and smothered her with kisses. And if after that I went and drank a great deal too much in the bar of the train it was because I felt that otherwise I should have too violent an attack, which was what would distress her most. When at the first stop I clambered back into our compartment I told my grandmother how pleased I was to be going to Balbec, that I felt everything would go off splendidly, that after all I should soon grow used to being without Mamma, that the train was most comfortable, the barman and the attendants so friendly that I should like to make the journey often so as to have the opportunity of seeing them again.” (pp. 311-312) I’ve been there, funny.
At one stop along the train journey, the narrator notices a “milk-girl” in the early morning, servicing the train. It is apparent that this sensual boy is now in his teens. “Flushed with the glow of morning, her face was rosier than the sky. I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness.” (page 318)
Proust observes that in our daily routine our behavior becomes habitual and it is out of habit that beauty and happiness are diminished. But being on the train, in a strange place and time, the narrator breaks through habit and becomes excited. He imagines life with the milk girl there in the village. “I felt the need to be noticed by her. She did not see me; I called to her.” (page 319) But the girl never sees him. This allows Proust to display the power of our imaginations upon our experiences as the narrator contemplates her after the train has pulled away. Proust’s theory of habit is another philosophical element to the novel.
Initially, the narrator finds it difficult to make friends and is a bit jealous and frustrated with the way his grandmother so easily interacts with others at the resort. Eventually, however, his friend Bloch shows up and he makes a new acquaintance, Robert de Saint-Loup, who will become his closest friend for most of the rest of the novel.
Saint-Loup is a sophisticated, charming young man, serving in the military, with a fine sense of humor and beholding a manner that easily meshes with the narrator. Robert is engaged to be married and has a mistress that he regrets having to part with. A routine of leisure is established. The narrator meets another important character, the Baron de Charlus, a middle-aged gentleman who strangely treats the narrator in a bipolar way of being friendly toward him one moment then utterly indifferent the next. He connects with the narrator in that he lends him a book by Bergotte, both admire the author.
Proust also conjures up in this section of the novel his fictitious painter, Elster, who resides at Balbec painting masterpieces known throughout Europe. The artist befriends our teen and allows him to spend time in his studio. Casually thumbing through odds and ends the narrator discovers a painting of Odette rendered by Elster around the time of the height of her affair with Swann.
He has another moment of ephiphany, similar to the madeleine experience in Swann’s Way. While riding atop a carriage he catches sight of the juxtaposition of three tall trees. He connects these with the happiness of his Combray experiences earlier in the novel. “That pleasure, the object of which I could only dimly feel, which I must create for myself, I experienced only on rare occasions, but on each of these it seemed to me that the things that had happened in the meantime were of little importance, and that in attaching myself to the reality of the pleasure alone could I at length begin to lead a new life.” (page 405)
There are several marvelous passages about observing the ocean throughout this section. The reader will recall that we caught a glimpse of this toward the end of Swann’s Way when, his memories wandering almost aimlessly, the narrator is suddenly found in his room at the Grand Hotel overlooking the sea with mahogany book cases underneath the spacious windows. Now, we have returned to that same room. Proust admires the beauty of the sea as he would hawthorn bushes. Each day’s sea is unique to that moment. No two seas are exactly alike.
“When, in the morning, the sun came from behind the hotel, disclosing to me the sands bathed in light as far as the first bastions of the sea, it seemed to be showing me another side of the picture, and to be inviting me to pursue, along the winding path of its rays, a motionless but varied journey amid all the fairest scenes of the diversified landscape of the hours. And on this first morning, it pointed out to me far off, with a jovial finger, those blue peaks of the sea which bare no name on any map, until, dizzy with its sublime excursion over the thundering and chaotic surface of their crests and avalanches, it came to take shelter from the wind in my bedroom, lolling across the unmade bed and scattering its richest over the splashed surface of the basin-stand and into my open truck, where, by its very splendor and misplaced luxury, it added still further to the general impression of disorder.” (pp. 342-343)
Among other things, In Search of Lost Time is a sexual novel but it is more so a sensual one. Proust constantly interweaves intimate human experience with nature to powerful effect. This is another part of Proust’s philosophy of habit. By break through habitual behavior and actually seeing the intimacy of the moment connected with nature or with other persons we can recall the power of memory or make a new memory when the ordinary becomes extraordinary. “…for existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand, when some trivial incident becomes a springboard for romance. Then a whole promontory of the inaccessible world emerges from the twilight of dreams and enters our life, our life in which, like the sleeper awakened, we actually see the people of whom we had dreamed with such ardent longing that we had come to believe that we should never see them except in our dreams.” (pp. 607-608)
The central force of the story which overshadows the interaction the many characters and the other happenings and experiences of the narrator is a “little band of girls” with whom the he becomes obsessed. Actually, two bands. He first encounters a group of “Norman girls”. He immediately picks a taller, tanned girl. “But it was not only to her body that I should have liked to attain; it was also the person that lived inside it, and with which there is but one form of contact, namely to attract its attention, but one sort of penetration, to awaken an idea in it.” (pp. 402-403) Proust’s translator repeatedly uses the word “penetrate” throughout this section for its obvious sexual connotation but also for all aspects of these girls, who are mysteries to be discovered by our narrator.
But this first group is but another passing opportunity for the teenager’s romantic imagination to run wild. It is with a second “band” that the story truly becomes absorbed. “I was going through one of those phases of youth, devoid of any particular love, as it were in abeyance, in which at all times in all places – as a lover the woman by whose charms he is smitten – we desire, we seek, we see Beauty.” (page 502)
The beauty he most immediately appreciates is that of physical attraction. “…thanks either to its growing wealth and leisure, or to new sporting habits, now prevalent even among certain elements of the working class, and a physical culture to which had not yet been added the culture of the mind, a social group comparable to the smooth and prolific schools of sculpture which have not yet gone in for tortured expression, produces naturally, and in abundance, fine bodies, fine legs, fine hips, wholesome, serene faces, with an air of agility and guile. And were they not noble and calm models of human beauty that I beheld there, outlined against the sea, like statues exposed to the sunlight on a Grecian shore?” (page 506)
These girls are initially unapproachable by the teen and his imagination runs wild on the scantest of evidence. “…for no more than a pretty outline, the glimpse of a fresh complexion, had sufficed for me to add, in entire good faith, a ravishing shoulder, a delicious glance of which I carried in my mind for ever a memory or a preconceived idea…” (page 515) He must make do with not knowing them. And this goes on for awhile.
“…they did not come. But to this primary uncertainty as to whether I should see them or not that day, there was added another, more disquieting: whether I should ever set eyes on them again, for I had no reason, after all, to know they were not about to set sail for America, or return to Paris. This was enough to make me begin to love them. One can feel an attraction towards a particular person. But to release that fount of sorrow, that sense of the irreparable, those agonies which prepare the way for love, there must be – and this is perhaps, more than a person, the actual object which our passion seeks so anxiously to embrace – the risk of an impossibility.” (pp. 561-562)
“I loved none of them, loving them all….these girls eclipsed my grandmother in my affection….But when, even without knowing it, I thought of them, they, more unconsciously still, were for me the mountainous blue undulations of the sea, the outline of a procession against the sea. It was the sea that I hoped to find, if I went to some town where they had gone. The most exclusive love for a person is always a love for something else.” (page 563)
Ultimately, the teen meets the girls through Elstir, who knows them. In particular, he meets Albertine Simonet, his true love for most of the rest of the novel. “…the young cyclist of the little band, with her polo-cap pulled down towards her plump cheeks, her eyes gay and slightly challenging; and on that auspicious path, miraculously filled with the promise of delights, I saw her, beneath the trees, address to Elstir the smiling face of a friend, a rainbow that bridged for me the gulf between our terraqueous world and regions which I had hitherto regarded as inaccessible.” (page 578)
Late in the book, he still has yet to interact much with Albertine and her friend Andree is always nearby. The narrator must make do with projecting his imagination into things, as is not uncommon in adolescence. “Already, in itself, and even without the consequences which it would probably have involved, the contact of Albertine’s hands would have been delicious to me. Not that I had never seen prettier hands than hers. Even in the group of her friends, those of Andree, slender and far more delicate, has as it were a private life of their own, obedient to the commands of their mistress, but independent, and would often stretch out before her like thoroughbred greyhounds, with lazy pauses, languid reveries, sudden flexing of a finger-joint, seeing which Elstir had made a number of studies of these hands; and in one of them, in which Andree was to be seen warming them to a fire, they had, with the light behind them, the golden diaphanousness of two autumn leaves. But, plumper than these, Albertine’s hands would yield for a moment, the resist the pressure of the hand that clasped them, giving a sensation that was quite peculiar to themselves. The act of pressing Albertine’s hand had a sensual sweetness…This pressure seemed to allow you to penetrate into the girl’s being, to plumb the depths of her senses, like the ringing sound of her laughter, indecent in the way that the cooing of doves or certain animal cries can be.” (pp. 680-681)
He and Albertine eventually find time alone together. “She looked at me and smiled. Beyond her, through the window, the valley lay beneath the moon. The sight of Albertine’s bare throat, of those flushed cheeks, had so intoxicated me…that it destroyed the equilibrium between the immense and indestructible life which circulated in my being and the life of the universe, so puny in comparison….I bent over Albertine to kiss her. Death might have struck me down in that moment and it would have seemed to me trivial, or rather an impossible thing, for life was not outside me but in me….in the state of exaltation in which I was, Albertine’s round face, lit by an inner flame as by a night-light, stood out in such relief that imitating the rotation of a glowing sphere, it seemed to me to be turning, like those Michelangelo figures which are being swept away in a stationary and vertiginous whirlwind.” (page 700-701)
But Albertine doesn’t allow him to kiss her. Once more, the narrator experiences disappointment. The book concludes with several pages addressing his relationship to both Albertine and to her friend Andree. In Albertine Proust explores how one person can seem to be many things to another person. The book ends on an unsatisfying note. The teen is sick and cannot go out of doors. Meanwhile, Albertine and her friends go off to spend the day elsewhere as the season comes to a close and the time arrives to leave the Grand Hotel at Balbec.
The manner in which our teen narrator experiences life is different from the boy in the first book. The narrator in “Place-Names: The Place” possesses a defined attraction to things and a highly developed sensual appreciation for art and nature and the girls, of course. These are no longer “vague” impressions. He is acting upon tangible impulses within him.
How Proust handles this unfulfilled erotic awakening is one reason I enjoy this section of the novel. But there are also philosophical reflections on love and habit and memory, a myriad of new characters to discover, instances of humor, and a largely joyful and lyrical quality to the writing that invokes a remembrance of adolescence in the reader. I have skimmed this section of the novel more than any other through the years since my last reading. I hold this section dear because I can actually, if briefly, touch youth in this prose. Somehow, the magic is there and Proust the magician casts a marvelous spell catapulting us into the next book, the novel’s longest.
Though the boy’s naïve love relationship with Gilberte in the book’s first part plays into this title, the “young girls in flower” are principally the topic of the book’s second part, “Place-Names: The Place.” Here, the narrator has grown into adolescence which transforms the quality of the narration to into a much more exciting, detailed, and passionate articulation of what was brewing within him since he met “the lady in pink” in Swann’s Way.
This part of the novel was my favorite during my first two readings and it is easy to understand why. The reader becomes immersed in sheer joy of the teenage experience and how it expands the narrator’s sensual relationship not only with girls but with nature and the world. Proust’s writing is this section is an immense pleasure to read.
We begin at a train station some “two years” after the events of “Madam Swann at Home.” The narrator is traveling to the ritzy seaside resort of Balbec with his grandmother. This is his first extended time away from his mother, with whom, it will be recalled from the first book, the narrator has a strong, almost neurotic attachment. The trip is a rite of passage of the boy becoming a teenager. It also marks the point in the novel where his special relationship with his grandmother is brought into sharp focus.
Proust’s novel is filled with humor. There are almost as many funny passages dotting the narrative as there are philosophical explorations. An example of this is found early on in this section when the narrator, who suffers from anxiety and asthma and frequent fatigue (much like Proust himself did), follows his doctor’s advice when confronted with the psychological challenge of leaving his mother and going on a long train ride to an unfamiliar destination. The doctor prescribes partaking of alcohol to create a state of “euphoria” that is supposed to off-set any anxiousness.
“When I had explained to my grandmother how unwell I felt, her distress, he kindness were so apparent as she replied, ‘Run along then, quickly; get yourself some beer or a liqueur if it will do you good,’ that I flung myself upon her and smothered her with kisses. And if after that I went and drank a great deal too much in the bar of the train it was because I felt that otherwise I should have too violent an attack, which was what would distress her most. When at the first stop I clambered back into our compartment I told my grandmother how pleased I was to be going to Balbec, that I felt everything would go off splendidly, that after all I should soon grow used to being without Mamma, that the train was most comfortable, the barman and the attendants so friendly that I should like to make the journey often so as to have the opportunity of seeing them again.” (pp. 311-312) I’ve been there, funny.
At one stop along the train journey, the narrator notices a “milk-girl” in the early morning, servicing the train. It is apparent that this sensual boy is now in his teens. “Flushed with the glow of morning, her face was rosier than the sky. I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness.” (page 318)
Proust observes that in our daily routine our behavior becomes habitual and it is out of habit that beauty and happiness are diminished. But being on the train, in a strange place and time, the narrator breaks through habit and becomes excited. He imagines life with the milk girl there in the village. “I felt the need to be noticed by her. She did not see me; I called to her.” (page 319) But the girl never sees him. This allows Proust to display the power of our imaginations upon our experiences as the narrator contemplates her after the train has pulled away. Proust’s theory of habit is another philosophical element to the novel.
Initially, the narrator finds it difficult to make friends and is a bit jealous and frustrated with the way his grandmother so easily interacts with others at the resort. Eventually, however, his friend Bloch shows up and he makes a new acquaintance, Robert de Saint-Loup, who will become his closest friend for most of the rest of the novel.
Saint-Loup is a sophisticated, charming young man, serving in the military, with a fine sense of humor and beholding a manner that easily meshes with the narrator. Robert is engaged to be married and has a mistress that he regrets having to part with. A routine of leisure is established. The narrator meets another important character, the Baron de Charlus, a middle-aged gentleman who strangely treats the narrator in a bipolar way of being friendly toward him one moment then utterly indifferent the next. He connects with the narrator in that he lends him a book by Bergotte, both admire the author.
Proust also conjures up in this section of the novel his fictitious painter, Elster, who resides at Balbec painting masterpieces known throughout Europe. The artist befriends our teen and allows him to spend time in his studio. Casually thumbing through odds and ends the narrator discovers a painting of Odette rendered by Elster around the time of the height of her affair with Swann.
He has another moment of ephiphany, similar to the madeleine experience in Swann’s Way. While riding atop a carriage he catches sight of the juxtaposition of three tall trees. He connects these with the happiness of his Combray experiences earlier in the novel. “That pleasure, the object of which I could only dimly feel, which I must create for myself, I experienced only on rare occasions, but on each of these it seemed to me that the things that had happened in the meantime were of little importance, and that in attaching myself to the reality of the pleasure alone could I at length begin to lead a new life.” (page 405)
There are several marvelous passages about observing the ocean throughout this section. The reader will recall that we caught a glimpse of this toward the end of Swann’s Way when, his memories wandering almost aimlessly, the narrator is suddenly found in his room at the Grand Hotel overlooking the sea with mahogany book cases underneath the spacious windows. Now, we have returned to that same room. Proust admires the beauty of the sea as he would hawthorn bushes. Each day’s sea is unique to that moment. No two seas are exactly alike.
“When, in the morning, the sun came from behind the hotel, disclosing to me the sands bathed in light as far as the first bastions of the sea, it seemed to be showing me another side of the picture, and to be inviting me to pursue, along the winding path of its rays, a motionless but varied journey amid all the fairest scenes of the diversified landscape of the hours. And on this first morning, it pointed out to me far off, with a jovial finger, those blue peaks of the sea which bare no name on any map, until, dizzy with its sublime excursion over the thundering and chaotic surface of their crests and avalanches, it came to take shelter from the wind in my bedroom, lolling across the unmade bed and scattering its richest over the splashed surface of the basin-stand and into my open truck, where, by its very splendor and misplaced luxury, it added still further to the general impression of disorder.” (pp. 342-343)
Among other things, In Search of Lost Time is a sexual novel but it is more so a sensual one. Proust constantly interweaves intimate human experience with nature to powerful effect. This is another part of Proust’s philosophy of habit. By break through habitual behavior and actually seeing the intimacy of the moment connected with nature or with other persons we can recall the power of memory or make a new memory when the ordinary becomes extraordinary. “…for existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand, when some trivial incident becomes a springboard for romance. Then a whole promontory of the inaccessible world emerges from the twilight of dreams and enters our life, our life in which, like the sleeper awakened, we actually see the people of whom we had dreamed with such ardent longing that we had come to believe that we should never see them except in our dreams.” (pp. 607-608)
The central force of the story which overshadows the interaction the many characters and the other happenings and experiences of the narrator is a “little band of girls” with whom the he becomes obsessed. Actually, two bands. He first encounters a group of “Norman girls”. He immediately picks a taller, tanned girl. “But it was not only to her body that I should have liked to attain; it was also the person that lived inside it, and with which there is but one form of contact, namely to attract its attention, but one sort of penetration, to awaken an idea in it.” (pp. 402-403) Proust’s translator repeatedly uses the word “penetrate” throughout this section for its obvious sexual connotation but also for all aspects of these girls, who are mysteries to be discovered by our narrator.
But this first group is but another passing opportunity for the teenager’s romantic imagination to run wild. It is with a second “band” that the story truly becomes absorbed. “I was going through one of those phases of youth, devoid of any particular love, as it were in abeyance, in which at all times in all places – as a lover the woman by whose charms he is smitten – we desire, we seek, we see Beauty.” (page 502)
The beauty he most immediately appreciates is that of physical attraction. “…thanks either to its growing wealth and leisure, or to new sporting habits, now prevalent even among certain elements of the working class, and a physical culture to which had not yet been added the culture of the mind, a social group comparable to the smooth and prolific schools of sculpture which have not yet gone in for tortured expression, produces naturally, and in abundance, fine bodies, fine legs, fine hips, wholesome, serene faces, with an air of agility and guile. And were they not noble and calm models of human beauty that I beheld there, outlined against the sea, like statues exposed to the sunlight on a Grecian shore?” (page 506)
These girls are initially unapproachable by the teen and his imagination runs wild on the scantest of evidence. “…for no more than a pretty outline, the glimpse of a fresh complexion, had sufficed for me to add, in entire good faith, a ravishing shoulder, a delicious glance of which I carried in my mind for ever a memory or a preconceived idea…” (page 515) He must make do with not knowing them. And this goes on for awhile.
“…they did not come. But to this primary uncertainty as to whether I should see them or not that day, there was added another, more disquieting: whether I should ever set eyes on them again, for I had no reason, after all, to know they were not about to set sail for America, or return to Paris. This was enough to make me begin to love them. One can feel an attraction towards a particular person. But to release that fount of sorrow, that sense of the irreparable, those agonies which prepare the way for love, there must be – and this is perhaps, more than a person, the actual object which our passion seeks so anxiously to embrace – the risk of an impossibility.” (pp. 561-562)
“I loved none of them, loving them all….these girls eclipsed my grandmother in my affection….But when, even without knowing it, I thought of them, they, more unconsciously still, were for me the mountainous blue undulations of the sea, the outline of a procession against the sea. It was the sea that I hoped to find, if I went to some town where they had gone. The most exclusive love for a person is always a love for something else.” (page 563)
Ultimately, the teen meets the girls through Elstir, who knows them. In particular, he meets Albertine Simonet, his true love for most of the rest of the novel. “…the young cyclist of the little band, with her polo-cap pulled down towards her plump cheeks, her eyes gay and slightly challenging; and on that auspicious path, miraculously filled with the promise of delights, I saw her, beneath the trees, address to Elstir the smiling face of a friend, a rainbow that bridged for me the gulf between our terraqueous world and regions which I had hitherto regarded as inaccessible.” (page 578)
Late in the book, he still has yet to interact much with Albertine and her friend Andree is always nearby. The narrator must make do with projecting his imagination into things, as is not uncommon in adolescence. “Already, in itself, and even without the consequences which it would probably have involved, the contact of Albertine’s hands would have been delicious to me. Not that I had never seen prettier hands than hers. Even in the group of her friends, those of Andree, slender and far more delicate, has as it were a private life of their own, obedient to the commands of their mistress, but independent, and would often stretch out before her like thoroughbred greyhounds, with lazy pauses, languid reveries, sudden flexing of a finger-joint, seeing which Elstir had made a number of studies of these hands; and in one of them, in which Andree was to be seen warming them to a fire, they had, with the light behind them, the golden diaphanousness of two autumn leaves. But, plumper than these, Albertine’s hands would yield for a moment, the resist the pressure of the hand that clasped them, giving a sensation that was quite peculiar to themselves. The act of pressing Albertine’s hand had a sensual sweetness…This pressure seemed to allow you to penetrate into the girl’s being, to plumb the depths of her senses, like the ringing sound of her laughter, indecent in the way that the cooing of doves or certain animal cries can be.” (pp. 680-681)
He and Albertine eventually find time alone together. “She looked at me and smiled. Beyond her, through the window, the valley lay beneath the moon. The sight of Albertine’s bare throat, of those flushed cheeks, had so intoxicated me…that it destroyed the equilibrium between the immense and indestructible life which circulated in my being and the life of the universe, so puny in comparison….I bent over Albertine to kiss her. Death might have struck me down in that moment and it would have seemed to me trivial, or rather an impossible thing, for life was not outside me but in me….in the state of exaltation in which I was, Albertine’s round face, lit by an inner flame as by a night-light, stood out in such relief that imitating the rotation of a glowing sphere, it seemed to me to be turning, like those Michelangelo figures which are being swept away in a stationary and vertiginous whirlwind.” (page 700-701)
But Albertine doesn’t allow him to kiss her. Once more, the narrator experiences disappointment. The book concludes with several pages addressing his relationship to both Albertine and to her friend Andree. In Albertine Proust explores how one person can seem to be many things to another person. The book ends on an unsatisfying note. The teen is sick and cannot go out of doors. Meanwhile, Albertine and her friends go off to spend the day elsewhere as the season comes to a close and the time arrives to leave the Grand Hotel at Balbec.
The manner in which our teen narrator experiences life is different from the boy in the first book. The narrator in “Place-Names: The Place” possesses a defined attraction to things and a highly developed sensual appreciation for art and nature and the girls, of course. These are no longer “vague” impressions. He is acting upon tangible impulses within him.
How Proust handles this unfulfilled erotic awakening is one reason I enjoy this section of the novel. But there are also philosophical reflections on love and habit and memory, a myriad of new characters to discover, instances of humor, and a largely joyful and lyrical quality to the writing that invokes a remembrance of adolescence in the reader. I have skimmed this section of the novel more than any other through the years since my last reading. I hold this section dear because I can actually, if briefly, touch youth in this prose. Somehow, the magic is there and Proust the magician casts a marvelous spell catapulting us into the next book, the novel’s longest.
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