We were in California tending the grandchildren (a girl, 6, and a boy, 4) while "the daughter" and her husband were on a sun-and-sand vacation down in Baja. The children are in the habit of coming into their parents' bed when they have trouble going to sleep. We're in the habit of reading aloud before putting out the lights. At present, I'm reading Swann's Way. One night, the children, as is their custom, came in to snuggle. After they settled down, I resumed reading: "I was not quite Bergotte's only admirer; he was also the favorite writer of a friend of my mother's, a very well read woman, while Dr. du Boulbon would keep his patients waiting as he read Bergotte's most recent book; and it was from his consulting room, and from a park near Combray, that some of the first seeds of that predilection for Bergotte took flight...." The children fell almost immediately to sleep; Proust's undiagrammable sentences were too much for them.
The next night, same scenario. We're in bed. The children came in to snuggle; they thrashed about for a few moments, giggled, eventually settled down. I picked up Monsieur Proust. "To Mme. Verdurin's great surprise, Swann never abandoned them. He went to meet them wherever they were, sometimes in restaurants in the outlying districts where no went went much yet, because it was not the season, more often to the theater, which Mme. Verdurin liked very much; and because one day, at her house, she said in his presence that on evenings when there were premieres, or galas, a pass would have been useful to them, that it had inconvenienced them very much not to have one the day of Gambetta's funeral...." And then, the young lady looked at the young man, and he looked at her, and without a word, the two of them rose from our bed and padded back to their own room.
Literary criticism in its most elemental manifestation.
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