There's a beautiful flower that I like to visit at the bluffs.
It has been a launching pad for some of my most important investigative work.
It has also crossed my mind that if I were to position myself strategically I could use this flower and its foliage as part of a disguise to render me scary and warriorlike, as the elephants did when fighting the rhinoceri in Babar's Travels.
Just a thought.
Danielle came by to visit. We discovered that we share similar interests in dogs (her: pugs; me: me) and home improvement. I got out my hammer to show it to her. Then we relaxed on the sofa together while she perused Domino: The Book of Decorating and I thought big thoughts about interior design.
The topic: The Wired magazine story about the guy who tried to get off the grid.
Although only two members attended, we had a lively discussion.
The tea and madeleines took me back....
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me....
And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognizable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.
-From Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1: Swann's Way.
