Good grief - thanks for the compliment Jonathan but please - it is just my usual obsession with finding some understanding, that I am convinced are in myths and symbols, so that life will finally make sense - plus, making connections is the way I think - can't help it -
Since a kid I see every issue in life, every film, every piece of music and every book as a schematic of colored lines against a black void. Sharing I'm just following the lines and the connections, often at right angles and then, the understory, like the understory of trees in a forest, I see the next level of colored lines reaching up, down, horizontal and so forth - Thanks to Sister Imelda, 4th grade, who told us every sentence is only a question answered by the next sentence therefore, my seeing connecting colored lines was justified as my head has a continuous dialogue of questions, without words, strung together with an answer making a connection that becomes another system of lines/questions.
Here on Senior Learn I can share the connections as I see them where as, most folks including family simply roll their eyes. The biggest problem is trying to explain, put words to the connections and how they are further connected --- I often laugh at myself trying so hard to speak these colored lines and connections. This book is a wonder opening my head to building scaffolding that grows and grows in all directions. As Towles says, rooms within rooms...
OK - Random reading - found on line Proust Remembrance of Things Past - years ago I read Swan's Way but the other 6 out of 7 books I had not read - After thinking on the losses the Count was experiencing and his continuous remembering the past I opened up Proust's book to Time Regained and within chapter II, M. de Charlus during the war, his opinions, his pleasures came across this which sits well with the Count's, sting of envy when Mishka, with pleasure, re-tells the story of his romantic skirmish. The Count remembers roles reversed and realizes, reversed or not, he will no longer dine with 60 and there will be no more late night esoteric discussion in basement cafe's with an impressionable young student at his side - Mishka and other new faces will continue without him. Life will renew and go on... Regardless the splendor of the menu the Count dines alone and is becoming passé.
Proust says,"The ladies in the new hats were young women come one hardly knew whence, who had become the flower of fashion, some during the last six months, others during the last two years, others again during the last four. These differences were as important for them as, when I made my first appearance in society, were those between two families like the Guermantes and the Rochefoucaulds with three or four centuries of ancient lineage.
The lady who had known the Guermantes since 1914 considered another who had been introduced to them in 1916 a parvenue, gave her the nod of a dowager duchess while inspecting her through her lorgnon, and avowed with a significant gesture that no one in society knew whether the lady was even married. "All this is rather sickening," concluded the lady of 1914, who would have liked the cycle of the newly-admitted to end with herself.
These newcomers whom young men considered decidedly elderly and whom certain old men who had not been exclusively in the best society, seemed to recognize as not being so new as all that, did something more than offer society the diversions of political conversation and music in suitable intimacy; it had to be they who supplied such diversions for, so that things should seem new, whether they are so or not, in art or in medicine as in society, new names are necessary (in certain respects they were very new indeed).
Thus Mme. Verdurin went to Venice during the war and like those who want at any cost to avoid sorrow and sentiment, when she said it was "épatant", what she admired was not Venice nor St. Mark's nor the palaces, all that had given, me delight and which she cheapened, but the effect of the search-lights in the sky, searchlights about which she gave information supported by figures. (Thus from age to age a sort of realism is reborn out of reaction against the art which has been admired till then.)"
I put the breaks in to make this section from Proust easier to read.
And on the next level, "(Thus from age to age a sort of realism is reborn out of reaction against the art which has been admired till then.)" easily translates to the wider story of Russian History, as the Proletariat is the realism reborn out of reaction against the art which had been admired by the Count and the old Tsarist regime.
So now a new character - we will discover, along with the Count, if the willowy actress Anna Urbanova is a 'child' reborn or, a 'child' who admire the art which had been admired. Will she, like the girl who prefers yellow, find the child within the Count?
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