Back to reality, back to the United States, and school…  Back to Proust.  I have been telling the story of my amazing adventures in Australia, and feel like I had some very magical experiences while I was there.  I think about the way that Proust puts his memories on the pages of In Search of Lost Time, and wonder if I will be able to some day put my experiences down on paper and keep the attention of people with the somewhat insignificant stories of my past.  Can I do justice to the people that I met there?  Can I bring their spirit and their energy to life, so that other people can have the true experience of what it was really like?  Can anyone do that or is it always a matter of everyone seeing things through their own lens, no matter if it’s an experience they are having in real time or if it’s a book and a story that they are reading over one hundred years later.

I’m not sure if it is more helpful for me, being a visual person, or not, by there being no images in the book.  I took 468 photos on my trip to Australia, and I will use those images to tell my story and to help map out the progression of my journey.  Is that necessary?  Or is it better to just describe things in very delicate details and let the person on the receiving end of the story created their own images in their mind?  I guess that answer would depend on the individual.  I suppose that both ways can be both beneficial and detrimental in their own ways.

I had a hard time putting faces to the names of the people in Prousts novel.  It wasn’t easy to keep everyone straight.  For me, it would have been helpful to have an image to attach to the name.  But, like I mentioned, I am a visual person.  I will remember someone’s face after meeting them once, but I will not necessarily remember their name.

Seeing the picture of Marcel Proust was helpful for me to see in the beginning.  It gave me a frame of reference while reading the story.  That is my query for the day.  To use photos or not to use photos…that is the question.