Thu 11 Apr 2002 14:58
Rememberance of things past, swann's way, proust, translated by: moncreiff and kilmartin
p 184
Presently the course of the Vivonne became choked with water-plants. At first they appeared singly--a lily, for instance, which the current, across whose path it was unhappily placed, would never leave it rest for a moment, so that, like a ferry-boat mechanically propelled, it would drift over to one bank only to return to the other, eternally repeating its double journey. Thrust towards the bank, its stalk would uncoil, lengthen, reach out, strain almost to breaking-point until the current again caught it, its green moorings swung back over their anchorage and brought the unhappy plant to what might fitly be called its starting-point, since it was fated not to rest there a moment before moving off once again. I would still find it there, on one walk after another, always in the same helpless state, suggesting certain victims of neurasthenia, among whom my grandfather would have included my aunt Léonie, who present year after year the unchanging spectacle of their odd and unaccountable habits, which they constantly imagine themselves to be on the point of shaking off but which they always retain to the end; caught in the treadmill of their own maladies and eccentricities, their futile endeavours to escape serve only to actuate its mechanism, to keep in motion the clockwork of their strange, ineluctable and baneful dietetics. Such as these was the water-lily, and reminicent also of those wretches whose peculiar torments, repeated indefinitely throughout eternity, aroused the curiosity of Dante, who would have inquired about them at greater length and in fuller detail from the victims themselves had not Virgil, striding on ahead, obliged him to hasten after him at full speed, as I must hasten after my parents.

p186
After leaving this park the Vivonne began to flow again more swiftly. How often have I watched, and longed to imitate when I should be free to live as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lay flat on his back in the bottom of his boat, letting it drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky gliding slowly by above him, his face aglow with a foretaste of happiness and peace!

p198
I never thought again of this page, but at the moment when, in the corner of the box-seat where the doctor's coachman was in the habit of stowing in a hamper the poultry he had bought at Martinville market, I had finished writing it, I was so filled with happiness, I felt that it had so entirely relieved my mind of its obsession with the steeples an the mystery which lay behind them, that, as though I myself were a hen and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top of my voice.


.