In the third part of “Swann's Way”, the main character 👦🏻, the author’s alter ego and future…

In the third part of “Swann's Way”, the main character 👦🏻 – the author’s alter ego and future narrator of his vocation 🤵🏻‍♂️, is fascinated by the beauty and the sound of names: that of Guermantes, in particular, but also those of the places he frequents near Combray 🏠. Names with which he associates, for example, colours and personality traits, in a form of synaesthesia that may bring to mind Rimbaud’s ‘Vowels’. ✨

I find this subtle resonance of sounds and meaning in the beautiful piece entitled “Dérives grecques”, written by Béatrice Commengé and published by @editionsverdier 📘 in the collection “Voyager vers des noms magnifiques”:

🖋️ “Half past midnight. Minos Guesthouse. The room is on the ground floor and overlooks a small garden. Isichia... (peace and quiet... already? Yet we’re not in Kastellorizo). Isichia is a big hit. Perhaps better than the sea view. Two beds. Two chairs. “No table?” Strange question. Here, tables are meant for the sky, for pavements, courtyards, restaurants, outdoors – dozens, hundreds of tables, with chairs, hundreds, thousands of chairs. Year after year, the wooden chairs are replaced by white, red or purple plastic armchairs. We rather like purple, I notice. And when the pavements, courtyards, terraces and restaurant dining areas are submerged under a sea of plastic armchairs (the very same armchairs as in Paris, Rome, Istanbul, Rio, Singapore... ), no one will understand any more why this café, right there on the village square, under the plane tree, is called Karekles – the chairs – hard, uncomfortable chairs with backs that are too straight, cane-seated chairs, straw-seated chairs, beloved chairs… But I’m back at my table. Trapeza. Trapeza: it’s a table and a bench. No, I’m not asking for a bench. Just a table, ‘to write’. “Write?… In Greece?” It’s just that I haven’t understood a thing. Lawrence Durrell is quite right: in Greece, one doesn’t write; “one sits for hours, listening to the figs bursting”. Outside.”

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