Proust in Greece

Like Gregory, I was plodding. The distracted self! In an effort to keep up and abreast of the challenge, I took "Swann's Way" with me on my recent trip to Greece. It was an interesting experience. I find that reading while traveling--in motion to an elsewhere that is unfamiliar--I experience a book simultaneously with the physical journey and the two become inseparable and linked in my memory. To do this with Proust was ironic and extremely pleasurable. I spent time in Greece as a child, and I often found myself on some street in Athens inhaling a sudden smell that jolted me back to a lost childhood memory and the sensation of vertigo of mind, the reliving of a moment, the physical supplication to memory that Proust captures and returns to again and again in "Swann's Way". There is great pleasure in experiencing a book like this, especially in Greece (human/cultural mecca) where time and millenniums are so elusive.

I am surprised to find the novel so amusing. I laugh all the time while reading it, not in any particular section, all the time. The awkwardness and angst of first love, unrequited love, bad love--I suppose I am laughing with Proust. Although engaging, I felt great relief at the end of "Swann in Love". Not hopeful (poor Swann, poor Odette!), but relieved. "To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!" Ah Proust.