Impressionism

. . . a pink cloud paints a last touch of life in the tranquil sky. A few drops of rain fall without noise on the water, ancient but still in its divine infancy coloured always by the weather and continually forgetting the reflexions of clouds and flowers. And after the geraniums have vainly striven, by intensifying the brilliance of their scarlet, to resist the gathering darkness, a mist rises to envelop the now slumbering island; one walks in the moist dimness along the water's edge, where at the most the silent passage of a swan startles one like, in a bed, at night, the eyes, for a moment wide open, and the swift smile of a child whom one did not suppose to be awake. Then one
would like to have with one a loving companion, all the more as one feels oneself to be alone and can imagine oneself to be far away from the world. ("The Guermantes Way II.106)

I love the image of water forgetting its reflections. Water is like the mind here, but Proust makes the water a constant tabula rasa, whereas, we hope human beings would retain the memories of their colored impressions. Perhaps that's the point. We do retain precisely impressions. We don't recall exactly how the pink cloud looked, but we recall the sensation of the pink cloud, the feeling of aloneness or quietude or appreciative beauty as it dissolves before our eyes. We also have a build-up of impressions. Proust worked a lot with memory. He helped develop the idea that our memories are not always, or even often, under our control. They are spontaneous and take on an independent life. Seeing a pink cloud in 10 years could remind me of eating the dark chocolate I'm snacking on right now as I write about it. Or the next time I eat chocolate, I could think about pink clouds. Our senses take us back through the past, often in an unpredictable time machine. We often suddenly remember something from our childhood, perhaps a loving memory of a grandparent when we smell fresh baked cookies. Our impressions to a large extent become our identity, but they are more wild than we like to admit.

I love most the line about the geraniums, intensifying their scarlet, against the darkness. This is one of the most beautiful features of a grey day. Of course, poor geraniums, it's a losing battle. But, they do seem to glow more vibrantly in the onset of the gloom.

There's a lot here in this passage. I think I can work with this, but I don't know why I am. Sometimes you have to have faith. All I know is that Merrill marked it, his check is by the word "dark-ness" as it breaks like a enjambed line. I know too that he worked with the imaginative connection between sight and memory, between all the senses and memory, and especially the nature of reflexion/reflection.

He also has a major poem about swans and childhood, which he wrote in college around the same time as his thesis on Proust... could I perhaps have discovered the source / a source? Perhaps just another impression along the way to its formation, either way, it's promising I think.

p.s. I forgot to add too, the very nature of the passage, with it's flowing from one image and idea to the next builds or enacts this functioning of the human mind. We move rapidly from the pink cloud, to water, to red geraniums, to mist and swans, to awake eyes, to a child's smile, to the desired sensation of walking with one's imagined, beloved companion.