At lunch today I pushed through the revolving doors and walked onto Madison Avenue, which in the direct sunlight of the December day appeared almost blue, or perhaps even 'azure,' to use a word that has been appearing frequently in the volume of Proust I am currently reading.
Now that I'm a little further into the second volume, I'm less bothered by the translation; only rarely does a word jump out at me for seeming needlessly English. I am far more entranced by Proust's obsessive infatuation with the Swann family, his miraculous ability to describe not only the physical details of his surroundings -- the clothes, the architecture, the streets of Paris, the physical characteristics of the people he meets -- but also the constantly shifting emotional landscape that represents a person falling into and out of love, essentially -- to put it in something more like his terms -- replacing one self with another, so that life becomes a succession of people who inhabit the same body, as opposed to a single entity.
I crossed the street and held my iPhone camera up to the sun, as if to challenge it.
It was not a challenge I would win, at least in the long run, but for the moment I felt grateful to be relieved of the tedium of the workday, the forces of habit -- or as Proust refers to it, Habit -- that all too often obliterates our powers of observation and creativity.
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