Sick with longing

The name Swann had for me become almost mythological, and when I talked with my family I would grow sick with longing to hear them utter it; I dared not pronounce it myself, but I would draw them into the discussion of matters which led naturally to Gilberte and her family, in which she was involved, in speaking of which I would feel myself not too remotely exiled from her; and I would suddenly force my father (by pretending, for instance, to believe that my grandfather's appointment had been in our family before his day, or that the hedge with the pink hawthorn which my aunt Leonie wished to visit was on common land) to correct my assertions, to say, as though in opposition to me and of his own accord: "No, no, that appointment belonged to Swann's father, that hedge is part of Swann's park." And then I would be obliged to catch my breath, so suffocating was the pressure, upon that part of me where it was for ever inscribed, of that name which, at the moment I heard it, seemed to me fuller, more portentous than any other, because it was heavy with the weight of all the occasions on which I had secretly uttered it in my mind.


One thing that's tricky with Proust is how, in the first books, he describes childhood feelings and emotions with excessively grown-up words and phrases and sentences. It can create a kind of disconnect or strangeness for the reader until you get used to it. Surely the child that he was did not think in these precise terms, and yet at the same time, so potently does he describe his obsessions that it is only, clearly, a childhood state he is describing. I think, for instance, many of us can relate to that sort of "charged" feeling around a certain person, or even a fictional character, that we might have had as a kid in one instance or another. For most of us, it's easy to forget the nature of that half-embarrassed half-enthralled state of mind, and the extent of the obsession. Proust here connects it to one of his archetypal emotions--longing--and does an effective job at describing the literally altered state to which it brought him, for better or worse.