84. Within a Budding Grove (In Search of Lost Time #2)

I cannot believe that I am actually starting to really LIKE this whole thing! It is evoking in me some emotions about my own life that have been really cathartic. I cried like a baby yesterday morning while listening to it (I am combining text to speech with reading the text). So, YAY Proust! I caused George and me to have a very deep discussion about love and loss and life. Good stuff. 

This is about his teenage years. The first is about his love for Gilberte, Odette and Swann's daughter. It is also about his trip to Balbec (in real life, it is Cherbourg). He is a teenager with all his raging hormones when he gets to Balbec and is over Gilberte. The literal translation of this title from French to English is "a l'ombres" [in the shade] "des jeunes" [of young] "illes" [girls] "en fleur" [in bloom]). This quote from it gives you the title:

As a plant whose flowers, open at different seasons, I had seen, expressed in the form of old ladies, on this Balbec shore, those shriveled seed-pods, those flabby tubers which my friends would one day be. But what matter? For the moment it was their flowering time. 

I laughed out loud of this, and it reminded me of days on Manhattan Beach in Southern California in the 70s in our bikinis in our early teens. We were all girls in bloom, melting cocoa butter bars on our bellies until we could smear it all over our bodies as boys hoovered all around us. We are all 60 now, like those "shriveled seed-pods, those flabby tubers" on the beach.  It also made me think of a chapter in a book by Lamont, I think it was Traveling Mercies where girls are laughing at her in a bathing suit (or her friend), and she mused about the fact that we all end up at this place, and their time will come where they will "bloom" and then eventually become a "shriveled seed-pod" too. I wish I could remember where and in what book that I found this. It was a humorous part of book I did not particularly care for (but maybe I would appreciate more now). 

This is the volume that Andre Aciman, the foremost expert on Proust, was encouraged to read FIRST when he was a teenager because his father thought he could relate to it better than the first volume. Aciman loved all of Proust, and I am beginning to understand why it is so great. I think. 

I found it more engaging than Swann's Way, but that might be because I am understanding the purpose behind this whole big TOME. I am letting myself be taken away into my own autobiography in the process. Thus why I was musing about my own time of being a "young girl in bloom." Maybe I will write a TOME on my own life, coming of age in the beach culture of the 70s with Quentin Tarantino as the manager of the video store in Manhattan Beach (he really was). 

I am 45 days into my recovery from my broken leg, but I started weight-bearing on Day 42. So, I may have less time to lazily read Proust. But I am determined to finish all 3031 (some put it at 4000+) pages! I am about 1/3rd of the way through, and I think I can finish it. I will take it gradually. 

Reading is like a big elephant that you eat one bite at a time! 

Munching away.