This weekend I read Proust on a train. Sitting at the station I looked up at the tall annular clock, with its moss green numbers and ornate faithfully ticking hands, and my mind was flooded with thoughts of Marcel and Time and Space and Kafka and years and years of trains. As I boarded and walked past the dining car, I saw M’s grandmother sitting there, nose buried in Madame de Sévigné, eyes occasionally rising to gaze with satisfaction at the wild french countryside whipping by. As I watched the Puget Sound out my window, I felt M sitting beside me, gazing out at the coast of Balbec he had so romanticized.

It’s fascinating how the books I read inundated the world around me; I run into  characters on the streets, sitting on park benches, walking the aisles of grocery stores and libraries. This weekend in the Seattle Art Museum I was wandering the Indigenous Beauty collection when I took a wrong turn and found myself in the European art wing, eye to eye with Lucie Léon at the Piano. Oil on canvas, Berthe Morisot, France, 1890.

To my eyes, this was a young Gilberte. Poised at her piano learning to play, just as her mother did. Perhaps one day she would happen upon that little phrase by Vinteul that her father loved so much, and send him off in some reverie with her playing. And if M has seen her portrait, I imagined how he would have looked upon it, standing beside me and staring wistfully at the subject of his admiration.