Take a photo of a barcode or cover
korrick 's review for:
Swann's Way
by Marcel Proust
You stand at a mirror, or what you think is a mirror, for you can see yourself in it well enough. But the image is not steady, parts of your face are blurring and sections of your body are stretching, and all the colors flow like oil. You reach out a hand to steady it, and the reflection ripples, your fingers sink into surface and touch something cool and curved, an arched web running its backbone beneath. Try as you might, you cannot stop it from moving, and finally in frustration you grab at the structure and pull, breaking away a handful of mercury that melts and crystallizes in equal measure. You can see the imprint of your palm in the gripped reflection, but it is no longer your palm, it is the sticky hot temper tantrum of a hot summers day ice cream, it is the wet exhilaration sting high five of a rainy day team win, it is the cold straining muddle ache of an essay test during the middle of winter, the classroom heater wasn't working and you couldn't wait to never have to look at another rhetorical analysis ever again, and you had plans with friends in a far off parking lot where the snow was deep and the space was wide, Christmas was soon and your favorite part has always been the tree, a rotundity of green peeking cheerfully beneath its freezing cape of downy white and an aroma of vibrant life arcing through the chill, fir trees that made up for their absence in your youth with their riotous spread in adulthood, curled around the small house in Washington, so different from that crowded tenement in Illinois, and sometimes you wonder how you ever got so far.
And do you ever wonder at your brain? That seething mass of electrical spitfire that registers and archives and retrieves, much like a library except time is its tricky mistress, and many of the books have lost their pages, or have wandered off to the most obscure realms and melded and branched with others, and checking just one out is near impossible when half the words on a single tome have nestled among twenty-six and a half different genres and the shear act of tugging on a single binding can trigger a reaction as painful and inevitable as an avalanche juggernauting its birth out from a single stone.
An occurrence especially common when it comes to memories of friends, of months of amusement dying into years of annoyance and anger and back again, or of love, that chaotic monster that lies and cheats and steals from itself in the hope of this feeling it has heard so much about, or of family, those first traits and trademarks sculpting the fragile nostalgia that will forever set the tone for reminiscence. Also words on a page for the readers, whirling you away into lands unknown that you still see behind your eyelids upon realizing that yes the light is dying soon on the last page of this latest author who defines your world in ways you can only dream of doing. Also notes on the staffs for the listeners, that motif spanning years and miles on end in repetition, so delicate and small and yet can breach horizons beyond space and time. Also nature, and architecture, and society, aspects of life breathtaking in the sheer existence that are threaded through with the constants of color and light.
Do you see them? Those moments, so ephemeral, so deceptive, so futile, forever lost in the mists of some faint promise that you did indeed exist at that point in time, based on a single sliver of remembrance or worse, external evidence that provokes not the slightest responding recollection. How beautiful they can be, and how heartrending, and oftentimes it is hard to distinguish the pleasure from the pain, sprung from both the remembrance and the forgetting. But how wondrous a structure they form, how they run to and fro and back again along the endless walls and arches of the grandest of cathedrals, with nary a pause for the places that have fallen into disrepair and emptiness, for time heals all wounds and what is left must have some kind of importance. For why else would they exist? Why else would we remember?
And do you ever wonder at your brain? That seething mass of electrical spitfire that registers and archives and retrieves, much like a library except time is its tricky mistress, and many of the books have lost their pages, or have wandered off to the most obscure realms and melded and branched with others, and checking just one out is near impossible when half the words on a single tome have nestled among twenty-six and a half different genres and the shear act of tugging on a single binding can trigger a reaction as painful and inevitable as an avalanche juggernauting its birth out from a single stone.
An occurrence especially common when it comes to memories of friends, of months of amusement dying into years of annoyance and anger and back again, or of love, that chaotic monster that lies and cheats and steals from itself in the hope of this feeling it has heard so much about, or of family, those first traits and trademarks sculpting the fragile nostalgia that will forever set the tone for reminiscence. Also words on a page for the readers, whirling you away into lands unknown that you still see behind your eyelids upon realizing that yes the light is dying soon on the last page of this latest author who defines your world in ways you can only dream of doing. Also notes on the staffs for the listeners, that motif spanning years and miles on end in repetition, so delicate and small and yet can breach horizons beyond space and time. Also nature, and architecture, and society, aspects of life breathtaking in the sheer existence that are threaded through with the constants of color and light.
Do you see them? Those moments, so ephemeral, so deceptive, so futile, forever lost in the mists of some faint promise that you did indeed exist at that point in time, based on a single sliver of remembrance or worse, external evidence that provokes not the slightest responding recollection. How beautiful they can be, and how heartrending, and oftentimes it is hard to distinguish the pleasure from the pain, sprung from both the remembrance and the forgetting. But how wondrous a structure they form, how they run to and fro and back again along the endless walls and arches of the grandest of cathedrals, with nary a pause for the places that have fallen into disrepair and emptiness, for time heals all wounds and what is left must have some kind of importance. For why else would they exist? Why else would we remember?