Proust Moment, May 19, 2003

Line of Demarcation

The church faces the Rue Saint Hillaire and is bordered by the homes of M. Rapin and Mme. Loiseau, yet it is distinct and seperate, existing in its own holy space. Even as the overgrown fuchsias from Mme. Loiseau's window-sill touch the church wall, they aren't really touching it, in Marcel's mind, because the church is untouchable; material yet impervious to material reality. Flowers are living things, things of the organic world; the church is eternal, and will survive every living thing that surrounds it, visits it, touches it, attends it, looks at it.

"The church! A dear, familiar friend; close pressed in the Rue Saint-Hilaire, upon which its north door opened, by its two neighbours, Mme. Loiseau's house and the pharmacy of M. Rapin, against which its walls rested without interspace; a simple citizen of Combray, who might have had her number in the street had the streets of Combray borne numbers, and at whose door one felt that the postman ought to stop on his morning rounds, before going into Mme. Loiseau's and after leaving M. Rapin's, there existed, for all that, between the church and everything in Combray that was not the church a clear line of demarcation which I have never succeeded in eliminating from my mind. In vain might Mme. Loiseau deck her window-sills with fuchsias, which developed the bad habit of letting their branches trail at all times and in all directions, head downwards, and whose flowers had no more important business, when they were big enough to taste the joys of life, than to go and cool their purple, congested cheeks against the dark front of the church; to me such conduct sanctified the fuchsias not at all; between the flowers and the blackened stones towards which they leaned, if my eyes could discern no interval, my mind preserved the impression of an abyss."

--"Combray," Swann's Way