A Literary Holiday
I have often said that I am incomparably nerdy.
I do not play computer or video games. I do not collect comic books. I'm not a computer programmer, I don't collect anime, I don't study physics or theater or mathematics.
Nevertheless.
My sister dangerdourk and I are reading Proust together. She's in the middle of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, (Volume II of Remembrance of Things Past) and I'm working on Swann's Way (Volume I of the same).
During a break from detangling Proust's paragraph-long sentences, which one reaches the end of and then has to trace backwards through seven nested clauses to find the original subject, my sister and I found ourselves doing some Christmas shopping in a kitchenware store.
There I saw it.
The madeleine pan.
For the unenlightened, there is an almost ludicrously famous passage near the beginning of Proust's seven-volume enormity describing the minute sensation of eating a madeleine soaked in tea (a madeleine is a deeply pleasing French cake, just barely sweet, golden brown on the outside, delicately spongy on the inside, the size of a cookie and the shape of a scalloped shell).
Madeleines are available in snooty bakeries, and also from Starbucks, where you can buy a prepackaged-in-plastic three-pack of them for the low low price of $5.99, a number that I just made up, but which is probably within $.75 of the truth.
This is unacceptable.
I bought the pan.
After a great deal of girlish squee-ing, my sister and I went directly home, baked a large batch of madeleines from scratch (the New York Times Cookbook supplied the recipe), and lounged around the kitchen dipping them in tea and eating them. The vast amount of what my sister refers to as 'metaphorical pleasure' that we derived from this experience was really rather foolish.
Meanwhile, I had arranged to meet Rob in New Hampshire for some hiking in the White Mountains. A few days later that is where I found myself. The plan was to hike up Mount Williard and then sled down, but in an all-too-typical fit of ditziness, I'd neglected to bring a sled for the purpose.
Whoops.
No matter! We hiked to the top and then both piled into Rob's sled for the trip down. I sat in his lap. For a couple with a running joke involving a red pickle dish (a device that belongs to a special segment of American Literature [next to the green light from The Great Gatsby] used in essay questions by exhausted high school teachers everywhere), it's amazing that the significance of this didn't occur to us sooner. Halfway down the mountain the thought sprang into my mind.
"Darling, this is so Ethan Frome!" I exclaimed, approximately .5 seconds before our sled careered off the path and sent us tumbling down the mountain.
In the famous 1911 novel by Edith Wharton, bane of miserable high school students everywhere, the ill-fated (and deeply repressed) not-quite-lovers Ethan and Mattie attempt to put a period to their existence by sledding down a mountain into a large tree.
Luckily, neither Rob nor I encountered anything but snow up our pant legs.
Life is Good.
I do not play computer or video games. I do not collect comic books. I'm not a computer programmer, I don't collect anime, I don't study physics or theater or mathematics.
Nevertheless.
My sister dangerdourk and I are reading Proust together. She's in the middle of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, (Volume II of Remembrance of Things Past) and I'm working on Swann's Way (Volume I of the same).
During a break from detangling Proust's paragraph-long sentences, which one reaches the end of and then has to trace backwards through seven nested clauses to find the original subject, my sister and I found ourselves doing some Christmas shopping in a kitchenware store.
There I saw it.
The madeleine pan.
For the unenlightened, there is an almost ludicrously famous passage near the beginning of Proust's seven-volume enormity describing the minute sensation of eating a madeleine soaked in tea (a madeleine is a deeply pleasing French cake, just barely sweet, golden brown on the outside, delicately spongy on the inside, the size of a cookie and the shape of a scalloped shell).
Madeleines are available in snooty bakeries, and also from Starbucks, where you can buy a prepackaged-in-plastic three-pack of them for the low low price of $5.99, a number that I just made up, but which is probably within $.75 of the truth.
This is unacceptable.
I bought the pan.
After a great deal of girlish squee-ing, my sister and I went directly home, baked a large batch of madeleines from scratch (the New York Times Cookbook supplied the recipe), and lounged around the kitchen dipping them in tea and eating them. The vast amount of what my sister refers to as 'metaphorical pleasure' that we derived from this experience was really rather foolish.
Meanwhile, I had arranged to meet Rob in New Hampshire for some hiking in the White Mountains. A few days later that is where I found myself. The plan was to hike up Mount Williard and then sled down, but in an all-too-typical fit of ditziness, I'd neglected to bring a sled for the purpose.
Whoops.
No matter! We hiked to the top and then both piled into Rob's sled for the trip down. I sat in his lap. For a couple with a running joke involving a red pickle dish (a device that belongs to a special segment of American Literature [next to the green light from The Great Gatsby] used in essay questions by exhausted high school teachers everywhere), it's amazing that the significance of this didn't occur to us sooner. Halfway down the mountain the thought sprang into my mind.
"Darling, this is so Ethan Frome!" I exclaimed, approximately .5 seconds before our sled careered off the path and sent us tumbling down the mountain.
In the famous 1911 novel by Edith Wharton, bane of miserable high school students everywhere, the ill-fated (and deeply repressed) not-quite-lovers Ethan and Mattie attempt to put a period to their existence by sledding down a mountain into a large tree.
Luckily, neither Rob nor I encountered anything but snow up our pant legs.
Life is Good.