Monday, March 5, 2012

Beneath the arch of the pink hawthorn

Our hero's love of hawthorn blossoms begins at St. Hilaire church. "It was in the 'Month of Mary' that I remember having first fallen in love with hawthorns. Not only were they in the church, where, holy ground as it was, we had all of us a right of entry, but arranged upon the altar itself, inseparable from the mysteries in whose celebration they participated..."

Later we learn that hawthorn hedges adorn the grounds of Tansonville, Swann's manor house, and where Mlle Swann is first discovered by our hero. "I lingered beside the hawthorns — breathing in their invisible and unchanging odour, trying to fix it in my mind (which did not know what to do with it), losing it, recapturing it, absorbing myself in the rhythm which disposed the flowers here and there with a youthful light-heartedness... I turned away from them for a moment... And then I returned to the hawthorns, and stood before them as one stands before...masterpieces... Thus was wafted unto my ears the name Gilberte...unfolding beneath the arch of the pink hawthorn."

2 comments:

  1. Robert Edward JohnsonNovember 11, 2014 at 5:34 PM

    Does the pink hawthorn symbolize anything for him, the same way that eating Madeleines dipped in lime-blossom tea helps him begin to remember Combray, as the first of his Remembrances of Things Past, or does he just really like pink hawthorns?

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    1. The pink hawthorns, found on Swann's way (the path assimilated with sexual and sensuous experiences) as opposed to the Guermantes way (a longer, more difficult and more cerebral path) always seem to appear in the book in connection with sensuality of some kind.

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