Friday, November 29, 2019
I’m a member of the Proust class, one of the four (or more?) concurrent reading groups Evelyn was in. We are trying to process what it means not to be able to have a conversation with her anymore, to hear her laser-sharp comments, to probe her vast knowledge for some obscure fact (if she didn’t know, her smartphone would be whipped out and the information accessed in a millisecond), to help us plot our fantasy trip to Proust’s Paris (she was thumbs up on the group riding horseback through the Bois de Boulogne), to find out what books she was reading (the latest was a 1000-page book written as one sentence—eat your heart out, Proust!). One of the last classes she had with us was about a chapter from In Search of Lost Time called “Intermittences of the Heart” in which the narrator who lost his grandmother when he was younger, suddenly has a wrenching realization of what he has lost. But the chapter ends with a glorious paean to the apple trees in spring, “in full bloom, unbelievably luxuriant, their feet in the mire beneath their ball dresses, heedless of spoiling the most marvelous pink satin that was ever seen, which glittered in the sunlight.” That is how I envision Evelyn. Her memory is a treasured book to read and reread.
