Miglos- Ariege, France
August 18, 2014
‘An exquisite, ingenious and limpid jelly…’
Shifts in daily rhythms are the gift of holidays—moving out of the gears of habit, we may glimpse our lives anew or from a fresh angle. Cooking in a unfamiliar kitchen or sleeping in strange rooms, immersed in horizons shaped by unknown rocks and newly-met peaks moves the mind to stand back and reawaken wonder. The current vogue of mindfulness seems more accessible in unshaped days of hiking, swimming and eating when hungry not when the schedule demands. All of these refreshed modes are fattened by reading Proust. A single sentence must be inhabited for open moments—starting, for example, by locating in language the precise nature of how human and domestic smells in an inhabited room converge with memory, the reader must develop an elasticity of attention to glide along the paths of meaning:
These were the sort of provincial rooms which—just as in certain countries entire tracts of air or ocean are illuminated or perfumed by myriad protozoa that we cannot see—enchant us with the thousand smells emanating from the virtues, wisdom, habits, a whole secret, invisible, superabundant and moral life which the atmosphere holds in suspense; smells still natural, certainly, and the colour of the weather like those of the neighboring countryside, but already homey, human and enclosed, an exquisite, ingenious and limpid jelly of all the fruits of the year that have left the orchard for the cupboard…
The Way by Swann’s, p. 52
And that is only half of it.
My daughter asks me why I work when we are on holiday—and I realize that first I must get her to understand that reading and thinking about literature and language is not work but a way of life (I know—I didn’t actually explain this to her but put aside my notes and went to play Ping-Pong). To truly understand what we are and how we come to be creatures of self-knowledge and compassion, art forms that query and capture the life of the mind must have the room (both time and place) to be held in wonder. And to this reflection a gathering of lively minds may bring to light ‘a whole secret, invisible, superabundant and moral life which the atmosphere holds in suspense…’.
I am relishing the delicious luxury of allowing my thoughts to meander in the heavy afternoon sun of the Pyrenees.
