Yesterday I arrived at the airport just in time to see the sun setting over the Siberian plain of the airstrip.
The planes entered and exited the scene in front of me like giant prehistoric animals. Or perhaps extraterrestrial; I thought that this is what it will be like for people in ____ years after they are living on space colonies, where they will watch the inhospitable planet beyond from behind thick sheets of glass.
But at the same time, because I was reading 'The Guermantes Way,' the third volume of Proust, my mind was also occupied by the past.
And not just 100 years ago, or the scene at the opera described by Proust; rather, I remembered the first time I read the work, perhaps ___ years ago, and how at the exact moment when I came across this scene -- in which the narrator describes several aristocrats in the boxes behind where he sits in the orchestra as if they were immortal gods living in an underwater grotto -- I had been traveling across Pennsylvania with Stephen, en route to visit his parents in Michigan. At the time he was driving, and to both pass the time and to give him a taste of Proust (with whom I was becoming increasingly enthralled), I read the scene aloud. And as I read it again now, this time silently, I could remember how my heard beat frantically, almost reverentially with a sense of discovery as this scene unfolded, and how it seemed oddly perfect -- in the way opposites sometimes do, when they are placed one against the other -- as we sped across the most remote and uninhabited portions of Pennsylvania, in the north along Route 80.
'And when I looked over toward their box, far more than on the ceiling of the theater, which was painted with lifeless allegories, it was like seeing, thanks to some miraculous break in the customary clouds, the assembly of the Gods contemplating the spectacle of mortals, beneath a red canopy, in a clear patch of light, between two pillars of heaven. My eyes studied this momentary apotheosis with a disquiet that was partly attenuated by the feeling that I was unknown to the Immortals; the Duchesse had certainly seen me once but could surely have retained no memory of that, and it did not disturb me that she should find herself so placed in her box that she could gaze down at the anonymous collection of madrepores in the orchestra, for I was happy to be dissolved in their midst; and then, at the moment in which, by virtue of the laws of refraction, the blurred outline of the protozoan with no individual existence which I was must have been reflected in the impassive current of her two blue eyes, I saw them light up: the Duchesse, goddess turned woman, and for that moment a thousand times more beautiful, raised in my direction the white-gloved hand that had been resting on the edge of the box and waved it as a sign of friendship; my eyes were met by the spontaneous incandescence and the flashing eyes of the Princesse, who had unwittingly set them ablaze merely by the movement of looking to see whom her cousin had just greeted, and the latter, who had recognized me, showered upon me the sparkling and celestial rain of her smile.'
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