“The roads were not lit”

Traveling through the dark to Mme Verdurin’s rented retreat, La Raspelière. The travelers are in carriages, after a train ride. What’s out there?

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2005).

The hours are “nocturnal, pastoral, and marine” because it’s night, away from cities, on the coast. Why a “double sash” and “double journey”? That’s traveling through the dark and back again. The “double sash” of darkness alters the character of the social world of light. “The darkness sur- / rounds us,” as Robert Creeley wrote, and I think of every soirée in the Proust world as an unconscious attempt to stave off the darkness. There’s great poignance in the image of these salonistes again and again assembling at railway stations to board a train, travel to a station, and climb into the waiting carriages. And then they cimb back into the waiting carriages, travel back to the same station, and board the train to go home, in darkness once more.

Even without trains and carriages, anyone who’s driven to visit a friend who lives in a remote rural spot should have an idea of what it’s like to step into a bright household after an at least semi-mysterious darkness. What’s out there?

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[Sash? It’s écharpe, scarf. Nothing to do with double sash windows, nothing to do with (my first guess) heraldry.]