Topical Guide 709
Mark Dorset
Places, Real and Fictional: Rarotonga
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 30:
They wanted to go to Rarotonga, one of the Cook Islands, in the South Pacific, west of New Zealand.
Reality: Making It Endurable
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 30:
[…] as Grandmother grew weaker and the trip to Rarotonga became less and less likely in fact, it seemed to become more and more likely in their conversation, and by the time all hope for her recovery was gone, when both of them knew that they would never make that trip, their false hopes were stronger than ever and talk of the voyage to Rarotonga filled most of every day, a happy fiction that made reality endurable.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Within a Budding Grove
I knew very well that this hope was chimerical. I was like a pauper who mingles fewer tears with his dry bread if he tells himself that at any moment a stranger will bequeath to him his fortune. We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.”
Sailboats: Types: Yawl
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 30:
Together, my grandparents would dispel the melancholy of their Sunday evenings by discussing the possible boats. […]
After they had read the ads, they would take one or another of the boats on a mental shakedown cruise and fall asleep happy, but when they woke up on Monday morning the fiction would seem awfully thin, and the week ahead terribly hollow.
On one of those Monday mornings, though, my grandmother said, “Jack?”
“Mm?” said my grandfather.
“That yawl that we were talking about last night. […] Would you go and see it? And come back and tell me all about it?”
See also:
Places, Real and Fictional TG 64; New Hampshire TG 465; Rarotonga; Arcadia; Shangri-La; Fantasy Land TG 46
Reality, Real and Fictional TG 27, TG 62, TG 64, TG 76, TG 78, TG 85, TG 127, TG 147, TG 155, TG 488, TG 603; Real Objects in Fiction TG 132; Reality: Perception of TG 426
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