To Swann And The Guermantes Poem by gershon hepner

In Combray, from the house of Marcel’s aunt,
two pathways led, to Swann and the Guermantes,
the former representing love, the latter
society accompanied by chatter
on politics. Impossible, it seemed,
to take them both, since they could not be teamed,
quite radically divided, as if spurning
the other. As nonsensical as turning
eastward when attempting to go west
would be to seek Guermantes within the nest
of love that Swann had made, or looking chez
Guermantes for Swann. Each went its separate way
alone, it seemed, and yet, when old, Marcel
discovered that the path to mademoiselle
was by a shortcut––of which he’d been un-
aware––united to the other one
that led to the estate of his old aunt.
The paths on which in youth we gallivant
to destinations for which we then yearned
lead us, when we are older and have learned
to understand topography of youth,
to very different versions of the truth.

Jonathan Rosen’s book, The Talmud and the Internet concludes with a reference to the paths leading to Proust’s reference to the paths that lead to opposite directions:

In Remembrance of Things Past the narrator, Marcel, spends his Easter vacations in his aunt’s house in Combray. There are doors on opposite sides of the house. Each door leads to a different path, a different walk, a different “way”. One is the Méséglise Way, or Swann’s Way, as it is also called. The other is the Guermantes Way. The two ways are emblematic of two different aspects of life––
the world of love that Swann represents and the world of society and politics that the noble Guermantes family represents. The thought that you might take Swann’s Way in the hope of winding up at the Guermantes estate, or vice versa, is, in Marcel’s mind, “as nonsensical as proceeding ass to turn East in order to reach the West.”

But at the end of the novel, in Time Regained, Marcel, grown old, revisits Combry and discovers a shortcut that in fact unites the two paths. The two “ways, ” it turns out, are connected after all.


8/27/08