I’m not sure if it’s appropriate to think of the structure of Swann’s Way, because it is only the first volume of a seven volume book and it doesn’t seem to make sense necessarily to think of the structure of the volume without knowing first the structure of the book. Still there is something obvious about this that bears remarking on:

That the story of Swann’s love of Odette, which compromises the middle-most and longest portion of the volume, is book-ended or bracketed by accounts of two of the narrator’s personal experiences: in the first instance, encountering the richness of the past through memory; in the second instance, encountering the charmlessness of the present, to which nothing in imagination or memory corresponds.

Kanyakumari
Puranas Ganesha
Memphis Group squidge
cohete Toi invasion violac
Archibald Lampman…. cark
1 (0); 2 (1); 3 (0); 4 (0);
8 (2); 9 (0); (0); 11 (2);
(0); 19 (0); (0); 21(0);
; 28 (1); 29 (1); 30 (0);
37 (1); 38 (2); 39 (0); 40
(0); 47 (0); 48 (0); 49 (0);
Archibald Lampman…. cark
cohete Toi invasion violac
Memphis Group squidge
Puranas Ganesha
Kanyakumari

Finished Ship Fever (Andrea Barrett) and have been recommending it to my lady reader friends. Not that it is a book for ladies in particular but most of what I read is not in the ballpark of what these lady readers would like, while this is. General theme, women in science. Short stories, historical fiction, National Book Award, 1998.

Finished Swann’s Way. Believe it’s the third time I’ve read this and could probably not tell you much about his ideas of love and memory, but have been more trying to inculcate in myself his extraordinary sensitivity toward experience, which of course itself quite often takes the form of remembering. I was delighted to find that most times I felt the need to make a mark in the margins of a passage, I had already done so.

Woke with the thought that it might be interesting to contrast Molly Bloom and Odette de Crecy. Three points they have in common: they are intellectually limited relative to their partner, they are sexually promiscuous relative to their partner, and their partners accept these facts about them.

This may be my first time I’ve read the Iliad straight through in over a decade. I encountered some issues I want to look into more deeply, but some superficial things that I noticed about it include:

— there are some downright weird things that happen in this poem, like Achilles being addressed by his horses, or his dream with the recently deceased Patroclus, that had somehow escaped me on previous readings.

— the gods are much more heavily involved than I’d realized; really, equal partners with the mortals in this.

— the books have their own distinct characters. Maybe not in every book but in passels of them, certain similes, phrases, situations, themes, behaviors, are likely to predominate.

— the minor characters are more individual and subtly drawn than I’d previously credited them with being. Brisies’ brief eulogy of Patroclus, for instance, gives us a clear glimpse into his nature — Achilles’ gentler side.

— I found the ending quite moving, which I never had before. Poor Hector, poor Troy, sad situation.

— Finally, reconfirmed for myself that this is certainly a classic of world literature. Far more than an interesting story with good characters, it is a wonderfully structured work of art with a lot to notice and think about.

My four ideas with the Iliad these days (have read through book 18):

— I’m looking at the parallelism of the two duels (between Paris and Menelaos and Hector and Aias), and that of the fights over the corpses of Sarpedon and Patroclus (which prefigure the concerns over Hector’s body) and wondering how many other such parallelisms there are that I’m missing and wondering in general what these parallelisms are about.

— I’m also thinking about how different gods seem to dominate different portions of the narrative: Athena the first third, Poseidon the second, now Apollo seems to be making an appearance.

— I’m looking at the theme of fire. Is it my imagination or is it the case that ever since Hector lit fire to the ships, more and more of the similes involve the idea of fire? as if the literal has become the figurative — the literal has become the emotional.

— Finally, the idea of taunting. There seem to be one or two books, I can’t remember which, in which it suddenly became a common behavior for warriors to taunt their killed, defeated adversaries. Why?

“Traveling around now the way I do, I see thousands of people doing work they hate, simply because they don’t believe they could make it doing something they really love. Some of these people are great successes at their jobs, if you measure success by how much money you make or how high up the ladder you climb. Almost to a person they talk about how they’re not happy because they’d rather be doing something else. When you ask them why they don’t do that, they usually answer by saying, ‘Oh, I could never do that.’ It all adds up to one thing — the fear of failing.” ~Merle Haggard, Sing Me Back Home.

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