Come to discover that Proust’s seaside resort, Balbec, was inspired by Cabourg, a city in northern France.

I learned the details from Proust Ink, which divulges images and secrets from the Grand-Hôtel where Proust spent every summer from from 1907 to 1914:

This seaside resort on the Normandy coast is the model for the hotel in the novel that Proust locates in the fictional coastal town of Balbec. During his long vacations at the hotel, Proust wrote many of the passages for his book. The building, its dining room, and the esplanade (now the Promenade Marcel Proust) that runs in front of the hotel along the beach are the models for the Grand-Hôtel at Balbec in the novel. Proust’s stays at the hotel ended due to the outbreak of World War I, during which time the hotel served as a hospital for wounded soldiers. The Grand-Hôtel remains virtually unchanged from Proust’s era and continues to operate as a luxury hotel. Proust’s room, no. 414, was recreated with period furnishing and décor.

"A memory without fault is not a very powerful incentive to studying the phenomena of memory.”

Balbec is soaked by the memories of his grandmother.

Proust doesn’t allow us to forget this. When the parties get fiery, he drags us back to the presence of his grandmother’s absence.

Languishing between reverie and resurrection, the speaker positions her photo as an aide-memoire that enables him to fondle memories of her. He fondles prodigiously. A plethora of fondling occurs.

Even puns and literary misunderstandings are infused with grief’s resonance, as in this passage from Sodom and Gomorrah where the narrator expands to inhabit multiple temporalities in order to play with a misheard word:

Syncope.

Sincup.

Utter brilliance, this comedy of textual errors that reveals class through diction.

The absence of a grandmother. The misunderstandings among humans of various classes.

And that "strange tonal novelty" that Proust says arouses "the most painful sensations."

Even laughter is harnessed to carry the data of intonation, as when Proust later gives us Charlus' "inherited" ancestral laugh, and adds a note about "phonetic imitation" to layer the textures of characterization:

It is 11:11 pm and my head wants to wander more closely through Proust’s textual richness—-

Or to consider it in relation to Helen Vendler’s definition of aesthetic criticism, as formulated on the first two pages of The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics—-

“The aim of a properly aesthetic criticism, then, is not primarily to reveal the meaning of an art work or disclose (or argue for or against) the ideological values of an art work. The aim of an aesthetic criticism is to describe the artwork in such a way that it cannot be confused with any other artwork (not an easy task), and to infer from its elements the aesthetic that might generate this unique configuration. (Ideological criticism is not interested in the uniqueness of the work of art, wishing always to conflate it with other works sharing its values.) Aesthetic criticism begins with the effort to understand the individual work (aided by whatever historical, philosophical, or psychological competence is necessary for that understanding); it is deeply inductive, and goes from the single work to the decade of work, from the decade of work to the lifetime of work, from the lifetime of work to the interrelation with the work of other artists.”

Or to split one more beer with the night and watch my silhouette degenerate into a shape easily mistaken for the pompadour of a pimp and cover my face with my hands and beg the book I’m writing to meet me somewhere I can finish —