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Thoughts Upon Leaving Combray

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The last pages of the Combray section of Swann’s Way have stuck with me in a manner that I could not exactly put my finger on until now. The narrator is looking back at those days of his youth in the country town of Combray and he says that what he wants to do is go back to that exact place with those  two walks that his family would take depending on the day, the Méséglise way (Swann’s) or the longer  Guermantes way, if they were sure it was not going to rain. He says that if he was shown even more beautiful paths they would not do.

It was as if … I would have wished that the mother who came to say goodnight to me would be one more beautiful and more intelligent than my own.

So it came to me this morning, as I thought about Combray and then my own childhood, that it was Sunday dinner at my grandmother’s house with the macaroni and the pork and those meat balls that I would most want to go back to and how silly it would be to think that even the greatest chef could replace my wonderful grandmother in that kitchen of by-gone days.


Filed under: Books, Family Life Tagged: Antoinette Maillie, Combray, Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

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