NPPR "fainting fit": lines 146-156

[Jasper Fidget]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
> Behalf Of Michael Joseph
> Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2003 11:26 PM
> To: Pynchon-L
> Subject: RE: NPPR "fainting fit": lines 146-156
> 
> 
> From Mircea Eliade's "Autobiography. Vol I: 1907-1937" p. 4-5.
> 
>      "I think that I was four or five years old, and was clinging to my
> grandfather's hand as we walked down Strada Mare one evening, when I
> noticed among the trousers and dresses that were passing us a girl about
> my own age, also holding her grandfather's hand. We gazed deeply into each
> other's eyes, and after she had passed I turned to look at her again and
> saw that she too had stopped and turned her head. For several seconds we
> stared at each other before our grandfathers pulled us on down the street.
> I didn't know what had happened to me; I felt only that something
> extraordinary and decisive had occurred. In fact, that very evening I
> discovered that it was enough for me to visualize the image from Strada
> Mare in order to feel myself slipping into a state of bliss I had never
> known, and which I was able to prolong indefinitely. During the months
> that followed, I would call up that image several times a day at least,
> especially before falling asleep. I would feel my whole body draw up into
> a warm shiver, then stiffen; and in the next moment everything around me
> would disappear. I would remain suspended, as if an unnatural sigh
> prolonged to infinity. For years the image of the girl on Strada Mare was
> a kind of secret talisman for me, because it allowed me to take refuge
> instantly in that fragment of incomparable time."
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Michael

I'll obligingly copy/paste the passage from Proust this reminded me (and
probably everyone else) of:

"And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to
recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past
is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in
some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give
us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance
whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die. Many years had
elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the
theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me,
when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold,
offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first,
and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for  one
of those short, plump little cakes called 'petites  madeleines,' which look
as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell.
And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a
depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had
soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs
with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I
stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An
exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no
suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become
indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory-this new
sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a
precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had
ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come
to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the
taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours,
could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What
did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?"  (_Swann's Way_, 34).