Proust, names, and baseball cards

There are many reasons to read Proust's In Search of Lost Time, including to name a few depiction of a society, observations about human consciousness and perceptions, trenchant wit, examination of love in all its facets, some beautiful passages (could anything be more so than the description of apple blossoms in early spring, end of part 1 of Sodom and Gomorrah, Spurrock translation?), psychological depth, ( a psychiatrist I know tells of beginning his residency and asking his advisor what books he should read and rather than a list of medical treatises his advisor said: Proust), philosophical examinations (comparable to Wittgenstein - above all, I think Proust was a philosopher) and most of all consciousness of the consciousness of another. Proust's consciousness is about as strange as that of any novelist I've ever encountered not only perceived things others didn't (until they'd read him) but he perceives everyday things in his own way. One of the strangest aspects of Proust's consciousness is his endless fascination with proper nouns - almost an obsession, something that today would most likely put him "on the spectrum." Not only is there a whole section on place names (in Swann's Way, I think) but this obsession continues throughout: in S&G, which I'm reading now, there is a long section on the "nicknames" for the little railroad along the Normandy cost (railroads are another obsession), the names of all the stations on the line, and very long passages filled w/ names of the blue-blood guests at many of the soirees, many of the names so long as to be comical. Apparently Proust drew some of the names from old social registers - and each to him resonated in some odd way, I'm sure. Don't you have similar experiences, though? I think of my boyhood looking at baseball and football cards, and I became a "fan" of certain players based entirely on their name and on their image on the card (or even on the background color of the card) - most of them, I'd never seen play, not even on TV. The name and the image alone settled into my consciousness and created a set of moods, and memories. It's not by chance that a book I have on card collecting has called baseball cards our "cardboard madeleins."