Initiations

This image is part of what made me go to back to school in order to study Proust. I learned as I proceeded that this image had absolutely nothing to do with the passage of Proust in which Botticelli is mentioned. But I got started because I thought it did.

Last week, I was reading the text again and laughed at the following passage. "And yet I should so much like to learn, to know things, to be initiated. What fun it would be to become a regular bookworm, to bury my nose in a lot of old papers," says Odette de Crecy in "Swann in Love" within Swann's Way by Proust. Of course, she has no desire to study because it is frightfully dull and the irony was too exquisite for me not to make a note of it. I started graduate school full of enthusiasm to study Proust and have found in the years since that I shall not study Proust (nor always be full of enthusiasm). But I started school because I thought I would.

Initiations point towards an end that they very often to do not succeed in attaining, not from failure but rather from an interest spawned by it. Today, I had a meeting with a woman I admire absolutely, completely, utterly, for her intelligence, her humor, her warmth...I do indeed find it impossible to understand that she is anything less than perfect, though knowing that she has children I can imagine that there must be some who conceive of her as less than I do. Responding to my questions and hopes, she suggested that I not try to focus or produce limitations yet. Perhaps for now, I might create a list of readings more loosely defined than I had been considering to date.

Her willingness to work with me initiates me into a field of study suggested by the Botticelli painting and then Proust but different in some very important ways. Her encouragement to avoid the cages of categories is the most important guidance she could offer at the beginning. Like the painting that started this process for me, I am only just rising from the waters, only just being born into this new land and I should walk forward with all the innocence available to love.