In Search of Lost Lunch
For a long time, I went to bed early, and for a longer time, I lay there wishing someone would come and tell me it was worth it.
It was a Tuesday, or possibly the Tuesday of my childhood, which is the sort of distinction one makes after a second Manhattan. My aunt, who in the great tradition of aunts had never once been right about anything, offered me a small, shell-shaped cake and a cup of lime-blossom tea. I dipped the one into the other, and a shudder ran through me. Reader, I would like to say it was a profound intimation of the past. It was, in fact, the cake.
But then, as the crumbs dissolved upon my tongue, the whole of Combray came rushing back: the hawthorns, the steeple, the little garden, my grandmother in the rain, my mother declining to kiss me goodnight with a firmness I have been paying a man in Vienna to explain ever since. Three hundred pages passed in this manner. I don’t say I minded. I merely observe that nobody in the room was in a position to leave.
I was in love, naturally, with a girl named Albertine, who was always on the point of arriving and, when she arrived, was always on the point of leaving, which I suppose is what one calls a rich inner life. I watched her sleep. I watched her wake. I watched her watch me watching, and by the end I had written eleven pages on the matter and she had gone to the movies with a cousin.
They tell me the sentence is a cathedral. I only know I went in on Monday and was let out in time for the Armistice.
Still, one must be fair. Time was regained, and I was glad of it, having mislaid so much of my own in the process.
Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University
