I’ve been reflecting on Proust for the last few days. Here’s a passage about going home again:<\/p>\n
Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But there are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years. And great fatigue followed by a good night’s rest can to a certain extent help us to do so. For in order to make us descend into the most subterranean galleries of sleep, where no reflexion from overnight, no gleam of memory comes to light up the interior monologue — if the latter does not itself cease — fatigue followed by rest will so thoroughly turn over the soil and penetrate the bedrock of our bodies that we discover down there, where our muscles plunge and twist in their ramification and breathe in new life, the garden where we played in our childhood. There is no need to travel in order to see it again; we must dig down inwardly to discover it. What once covered the earth is no longer above but beneath it; a mere excursion does not suffice for a visit to the dead city: excavation is necessary also. But we shall see how certain fugitive and fortuitous impressions carry us back even more effectively to the past, with a more delicate precision, with a more light-winged, more immaterial, more headlong, more unerring, more immortal flight, than these organic dislocations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been reflecting on Proust for the last few days. Here’s a passage about going home again: Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But there are most hazardous pilgrimages, which … <\/p>\n
Continue reading “Don’t Go Back to Rockville”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-travel"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-cA","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8234,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/what-profit-is-there-from-my-death","url_meta":{"origin":780,"position":0},"title":"What profit is there from my death?","author":"Gil","date":"September 27, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"The professor, scholar, literary historian, husband and father D.G. Myers died yesterday, after a long bout with prostate cancer. Last March, we recorded what may be my favorite episode of the podcast. You can listen to it here: I just wrote this for a tribute festschrift being collected by Patrick\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "literature"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"dgmyers","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/dgmyers.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":77,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/correction","url_meta":{"origin":780,"position":1},"title":"Correction","author":"Gil","date":"November 28, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Turns out the ferry was to Picton, through the Marlborough Sound, which was the eeriest experience I've ever had. More to come.We drove from there to Nelson. Yesterday, I went for a three-hour hike in the Abel Tasman National Park, followed by a visit to The Grumpy Mole, where one\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "New Zealand"","block_context":{"text":"New Zealand","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/travel\/new-zealand"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":806,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/rhetorical-engine","url_meta":{"origin":780,"position":2},"title":"Rhetorical Engine","author":"Gil","date":"January 17, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"I would've run this yesterday, but the guy who wrote it didn't get back to me about it until today. So, here's a post-MLK Day rhetorical analysis by John Castro (John went completely nuts a few years ago when some internet company tried using the speech in a commercial about\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "literature"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":919,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/bald-win","url_meta":{"origin":780,"position":3},"title":"Bald Win!","author":"Gil","date":"April 19, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"I follow Page 6 in the New York Post pretty devotedly. I've never been one for the supermarket tabloids & gossip mags, with their overriding fixation with pregnancy, but Page 6 usually gets is just right, with embarrassing celebrity stories, blind items that Amy & I occasionally suss out, and\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 4 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 4 comments","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/bald-win#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":161,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/that-was-peter-sellers-my-dear-now-go-away-he-implored","url_meta":{"origin":780,"position":4},"title":"“That was Peter Sellers, my dear \/ Now go away,” he implored","author":"Gil","date":"March 29, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Peter Ustinov died this weekend. I never really followed his work in movies and TV, but Lauren Christy did.","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2139,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/its-always-the-end-of-the-world-for-somebody","url_meta":{"origin":780,"position":5},"title":"It’s always the end of the world for somebody","author":"Gil","date":"July 21, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Courtesy of Hit & Run, here's a neat article from World Affairs on how the current crop of \"America-in-decline\" books & articles is nothing new: As with the pessimistic intellectual troughs that followed the Depression, Vietnam, and the stagflation of the late 1970s and early 1980s, there is a tendency\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Politics (explicit)"","block_context":{"text":"Politics (explicit)","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/politics-explicit"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}