Finished The Prisoner and waiting for The Fugitive to arrive. It should be here in time for some travel I have planned for next week - Seattle, this time. St. Louis is also on-deck, probably for the week after. Augustine is also going well, though I’ve only just started it. It’s doing a good job of fleshing out his world and circumstances in ways that his writings don’t. The Bishop of Hippo will make an oblique appearance in my homily this weekend, hot on the heels of his and his mother’s feasts. Not an accident.
Reflection: Albertine seems more real to me than the Narrator, which is weird, because to read these books is to inhabit his head nearly completely. This, I believe, is precisely because we don’t know her interior life any more than the Narrator does. I don’t know what’s going on in anyone else’s head unless they either tell me, and I trust their words, or I attempt an educated guess based on their circumstances. The guess has to be educated with some prior knowledge, though, and I have to hope that I’m not reading it wrong. Mr. Narrator doesn’t trust, probably reads it wrong a lot of the time, and by the end of things has gone nearly completely bananas. And what else is supposed to do, after all, given her background and situation? This is about as good as it gets, until it’s not and what happens happens.
I can’t say I was surprised by the end. I sort of knew it was coming anyway, but I am surprised that it took as long as it did. Yes, I’m generally aware of what comes next. For now I can be hopeful that she finds peace, solitude, or both.
Not Proust: I’m doing some electronics tinkering again, which for me means: poking at a lot of stuff and getting frustrated, finding a new path forward, but then waiting for parts to arrive. The end goal is to have a clock sync’ed to GPS for accuracy, and possibly serving as a stratum 1 time source here at home. If that didn’t make any sense to you, no worries. The good news is that the parts are mostly plug-and-play, if you happen to have them, and half this process is discovering that I don’t.