Reading Proust: Time Regained – Lost Time and Youth
I started re-reading In Search of Lost Time on February 15 and ended July 13. Right at five months. In the beginning, after finishing a volume, I took a short break and read other books, so it didn’t start out as an obsessive reading like my first time. But, this leisurely pace did not last. I read the final four volumes almost exclusively, greedily racing through their exquisite prose. Unlike the rest of the novel, Time Regained has no defined parts or chapters. The second half of it centers around the party at the Guermantes, with a lot of memories and musings thrown in.
We continue with Marcel’s considerations involving the three “intimations” and his discovery of the magic of Lost Time. Intellect is not worth much where involuntary memory is concerned. “For the truth which the intellect apprehends directly in the world of full and unimpeded light have something less profound, less necessary than those which life communicates to us against our will in an impression which is material because it enters us through our senses but yet has a spiritual meaning that is possible for us to extract.” (page 273)
“For things…as soon as we have perceived them are transformed within us into something immaterial, something of the same nature as all our preoccupations and sensations of that particular time, with which, indissolubly, they blend.” (page 288)
Lost Time lies at the heart of aesthetic experience. “An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates, and what we call reality is a certain connection between these immediate sensations and the memories which envelop us simultaneously with them…a unique connection which the writer has to rediscover in order to link forever in his phrase the two sets of phenomena which reality joins together.” (page 289)
“…we have to make ourselves rediscover, to reapprehend, to make ourselves fully aware of that reality, remote from our daily preoccupations, from which we separate ourselves by an ever greater gulf as the conventional knowledge which we substitute for it grows thicker and more impermeable, that reality which it is very easy for us to die without ever having known and which is, quite simply, our life. Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated...is literature, and life thus defined is in a sense all the time immanent in ordinary men no less than the artist.” (page 298)
This leads to an extended musing on the unique relationship between art and Lost Time. “Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of the universe which is not the same as our own…Thanks to art…we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space…” (page 299)
“…the work of art was the sole means of discovering Lost Time…And I understood that all these materials for a work of literature were simply my past life; I understood that they had come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in indolence, in tenderness, in unhappiness, and that I had stored them up without divining the purpose for which they were destined or even their continued existence any more than a seed does when it forms within itself a reserve of all the nutritious substances from which it will feed a plant.” (page 304)
Thus the inspiration and motivation for Marcel to become a writer, to create art through literature, is to mine the depths of his being and express the experience of Lost Time in terms that the reader will be able to relate to on his or her own terms. Because the experience of Lost Time is universal but the expression of it is distinctive in each of us, the novelist’s challenge is to articulate the universal aspects of Lost Time while being authentic to the writer’s unique, intimate experiences.
Marcel has a renewed appreciation of Swann, to whom he attributes much of “the raw material of my experience.” It was through Swann that he met Gilberte. It was Swann who originally inspired him, as a teenager, to go to Balbec where he would meet Albertine. It was at Balbec, also, where he first made the acquaintance of Saint-Loup and M. de Charlus which, in turn, lead him to the Guermantes, and ultimately to this very moment where he had his epiphany outside the residence of the Prince de Guermantes. By all these associations, and others, his life developed in a manner where the Guermantes way “emanated” from Swann’s way.
At last the first piece of music ends and the butler allows him into the party, Marcel's “return to society” after so many years at the sanatorium. “For the first few seconds I did not understand why it was that I had difficulty in recognizing the master of the house and the guests and why everyone in the room appeared to have put on a disguise – in most cases a powdered wig – which changed him completely.” (page 336) But the party is not a masquerade at all. What our narrator sees, after long years absence, are his former friends and acquaintances in old age.
The Prince, the Duchess, his childhood friend Bloch, and many others have all aged to the extent that they imperfectly resemble the selves Marcel stored in his memory. After the initial disorientation, this only serves to feed his imagination for the novel he is certain of writing. “For if names had lost most of their individuality for me, words on the other hand now began to reveal their full significance. The beauty of images is situated in front of things, that of ideas behind them. So that the first sort of beauty ceases to astonish us as soon as we have reached the things themselves, but the second is something we understand only when we have passed beyond them.
“The cruel discovery I had just made could not fail to be of service to me so far as the actual material of my book was concerned. For I decided that this could not consist uniquely of the full and plenary impressions that were outside time, and amongst those other truths in which I intended to set, like jewels, those of the first order, the ones related to Time, to Time in which, as some transforming fluid, men and societies and nations are immersed, would play an important part.” (page 355)
In addition to changes in appearance, others now possess various maladies – a limp, poor hearing or sight. But time has not ravaged everyone. Odette is there, surprisingly not as an old woman, but in “defiance of the laws of chronology, more miraculous even than the defiance of the laws of nature by the conservation of radium.” She was, in fact, “so like the Odette of the old days.” (page 377)
Other changes surprise Marcel. After the death of her husband, Mme Verdurin married a Duke who, in turn, died “after two years of marriage.” This served as the transition for her to marry the Prince de Guermantes, which astonished everyone In Combray, where she had hosted salons for so many years and detested royalty in favor of the growing wealth of the business class.
This party episode lasts about 170 pages as is filled with the usual conversations and gossip, only this time accented by the multitude of changes to everyone’s personal lives with the passage of so much time. Marcel’s mind is present and engaged with those in attendance but he also wanders in thought, recollecting what he can of the past in relation to those present. The war is naturally a topic that comes up. Robert is fondly remembered in this regard, having discussed military strategy many times with Marcel before being killed in battle. Gilberte has now become best friends with Andrée. Like Gilberte, Andrée has married a man who used to be involved with Rachel. That connection serves to remind Gilberte of her youthful love for Robert.
For her part, Gilberte is thrilled to see Marcel after so many years. Knowing his preference for solitude, she asks if he would rather go with her and have dinner at a restaurant. To which he replies: “As long as you don’t mind dining with a young man.” This brings laughter all around. Gilberte, concerned about the size of the party, presses him: “’But really, since you sometimes emerge from your ivory tower, wouldn’t you prefer little intimate gatherings which I could arrange, with just a few intelligent and sympathetic people? These great formal affairs are not made for you at all.” (page 435)
But Marcel is lost in answering her. He cannot possibly relate to her all the things that have just happened to him and all the thoughts he is experiencing at the party. He considers the different loves of his life. Gilberte as a girl, his grandmother, and, of course, Albertine. “I looked at Gilberte, and I did not think: ‘I should like to see her again,’ I said merely, in answer to her offer, that I should always enjoy being invited to meet young girls, to whom I could give pleasure by quite small gifts, without expecting anything of them in return except that they should serve to renew within me the dreams and the sadnesses of my youth and perhaps, one improbable day, a single chaste kiss. Gilberte smiled and then looked as though she were seriously giving her mind to the problem.” (page 439)
This conversation is interrupted by a poetry reading by an actress attending the party. Marcel finds her “old and ugly” but the poem’s recitation is nevertheless “admirable.” When it is finished Marcel realizes that “she was somebody I ought to have known.” Accepting appreciation as she filters through the crowd afterwards, she approaches Marcel. “I responded with a smile and a gesture. ‘I am sure he does not recognize me,' said the reciter to the Duchess. ‘Of course I do,’ I said confidently, ‘I recognize you perfectly.’ ‘Well who ami I then?’ I had not the slightest idea and my position as becoming awkward…throughout the same beautiful poem Bloch had been wondering only how to maneuver himself so as to be ready, the moment the poem ended, to leap from his seat like a beleaguered army making a sally and, trampling if not upon the bodies at least upon the feet of his neighbors, arrive and congratulate the reciter…’How curious it is to see Rachel here!’ he whispered in my ear. At once the magic name broke the enchantment which had given to the mistress of Saint-Loup the unknown form of this horrible old woman. And once I knew who she was, I did indeed recognize her perfectly.” (page 460) Rachel’s long-time aspirations of becoming an actress have apparently succeeded. Not everything Time has wrought is a fading away, for some it is a Becoming.
There is more to the story of Odette. She has entered into an affair with the Duke de Guermantes. This, too, is suddenly seen holistically by Marcel. “In any case, the Duke’s liaison with Mme de Forcheville had assumed such proportions that the old man, imitating in this final love the pattern of those he had had in the past, watched jealousy over his mistress in a manner which, if my love for Albertine had, with important variations, repeated the love for Odette, made that of M. de Guermantes for this same Odette recall my own for Albertine.” (page 481)
Proust continues to play with time. At one point during the party Marcel is no longer thinking of the past, the overaching narrator is always a future self in the novel. “On several occasions after the Guermantes party” he tries see Odette again. But she is now a captive of the Prince as Albertine had once been Marcel’s captive. Her world has become impenetrable.
Then Marcel is back at the party, talking to Gilberte again. “’Let me fetch my daughter for you,’ she said, ‘I should like to introduce her to you. She is over there, talking to young Mortemart and other babes in arms who can be of no possible interest. I am sure she will be a charming little friend for you.’ I asked whether Robert had been pleased to have a daughter. ‘Oh! Yes,’ she replied, ‘he was very proud of her. But naturally,’ she went on, with a certain naivety, ‘I think that nevertheless, his tastes being what they were, he would have preferred a son.’” Then Proust switches to overarching narrator mode again. “Years later, this daughter, whose name and fortune gave her mother the right to hope that she would crown the whole work of social ascent of Swann and his wife by marrying a royal prince, happening to be entirely without snobbery chose for her husband an obscure man of letters.” (page 501)
Marcel’s mind never strays far from his epiphany. “My surprise at Gilberte’s words and pleasure that they caused me were soon replaced…but the idea of Time past which was brought home to me once again, in yet another fashion and without my even having seen her, by Mlle de Saint-Loup. Was she not – are not, indeed, the majority of human beings? – like one of those star-shaped crossroads in a forest where roads converge that have come, in the forest as in our lives, from the most diverse quarters? Numerous for me were the roads which led to Mlle de Saint-Loup and which radiated around her. Firstly the two great ‘ways’ themselves, where on my many walks I had dreamed so many dreams, both led to her: through her father Robert de Saint-Loup the Guermantes way; through Gilberte, her mother, the Mégéglise way which was also ‘Swann’s way.’” (page 502)
“And Mlle de Saint-Loup led to many other points in my life, to the lady in pink, for instance, who was her grandmother...And was it not Swann, the grandfather of Mlle de Saint-Loup, who had first spoken to me of the music of Vinteuil, just as it was Gilberte who had first spoken to me of Albertine?” (page 503)
“I saw Gilberte coming across the room towards me…I was astonished to see at her side a girl of about sixteen, whose tall figure was a measure of that distance which I had been reluctant to see. Time, colorless and inapprehensible Time, so that I was almost able to see it and touch it, had materialized itself in this girl, molding her into a masterpiece…standing in front of me. She had deep-set piercing eyes, and a charming nose thrust slightly forward…perhaps not the least like that of Swann but like Saint-Loup’s. The soul of that particular Guermantes had fluttered away, but his charming eyes, had settled momentarily upon the shoulders of Mlle de Saint-Loup and the sight of it there aroused a train of memories and dreams in those who had known her father.” (page 506)
“…it seemed to me wonderful that at the critical moment nature should have returned, like a great and original sculptor, to give to the granddaughter, that significant and decisive touch of a chisel. I thought her very beautiful: still rich in hopes, full of laughter, formed from those very years which I myself had lost, she was like my own youth.” (page 507) It is a curious fact that the young girl’s first name is never mentioned, solidifying her more as a symbol than a person in terms of the narrative.
Proust closes the novel by discussing how some aspects of novels are more detailed than others. He goes so far as to consider who his readers might be once he finishes it. “…they would not be ‘my’ readers but the readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass…it would be my book, but with its help I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves.” (page 508)
Good old dependable Francoise is there to help him keep his papers in order and to care for him as he begins writing. Before he gets very far into the novel, however, Marcel is stricken with an illness (just like Proust himself.) He considers death but has no fear of it except insofar as his writing is concerned. He has a new sense of Time that inspires his life, even while dying.
“Moreover, that we occupy a place, always growing in Time is something everybody is conscious of, and this universality could only make me rejoice, it being the truth, the truth separated by each of us that I had to seek to elucidate. Not only does everybody feel that we occupy a place in Time, but the simplest of us measures this place approximately, as he would measure the one we occupy in space…This notion of Time embodied, of years past but not separated from us, it was now my intention to emphasize as strongly as possible in my work.” (page 529)
Proust ends the novel with sickly Marcel living only to write his novel. We do not know if Marcel ever completes his book, unless we accept that Proust’s work is Marcel’s novel. Even in that case, it remains unfinished. Sadly, yet perhaps appropriately, Proust ran out of time before Marcel’s literary effort is completed.
So I made it a third time through; 4,340 pages - sort of like hiking the Appalachian Trail, only farther in some respects. Proust’s distances are more mental than physical with a depth and breadth in the range of aesthetic awareness, often sensual and sexy, filled with emotion, frequently conflicted, yet nevertheless intellectual and deeply connected to the essence of our humanity through Time.
It is a moving work that affects me more profoundly with each reading. Turning 60, I found this reading more relatable than my first one when I was 47. I know what Lost Time is. I know the wonder and nostalgia that Proust expresses. He captures human life in words with which the reader can often only marvel. In that regard the novel is far too short. Its magnificent prose coupled with its impressive length give it a life of its own and, like every life, the end comes too soon.
We continue with Marcel’s considerations involving the three “intimations” and his discovery of the magic of Lost Time. Intellect is not worth much where involuntary memory is concerned. “For the truth which the intellect apprehends directly in the world of full and unimpeded light have something less profound, less necessary than those which life communicates to us against our will in an impression which is material because it enters us through our senses but yet has a spiritual meaning that is possible for us to extract.” (page 273)
“For things…as soon as we have perceived them are transformed within us into something immaterial, something of the same nature as all our preoccupations and sensations of that particular time, with which, indissolubly, they blend.” (page 288)
Lost Time lies at the heart of aesthetic experience. “An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates, and what we call reality is a certain connection between these immediate sensations and the memories which envelop us simultaneously with them…a unique connection which the writer has to rediscover in order to link forever in his phrase the two sets of phenomena which reality joins together.” (page 289)
“…we have to make ourselves rediscover, to reapprehend, to make ourselves fully aware of that reality, remote from our daily preoccupations, from which we separate ourselves by an ever greater gulf as the conventional knowledge which we substitute for it grows thicker and more impermeable, that reality which it is very easy for us to die without ever having known and which is, quite simply, our life. Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated...is literature, and life thus defined is in a sense all the time immanent in ordinary men no less than the artist.” (page 298)
This leads to an extended musing on the unique relationship between art and Lost Time. “Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of the universe which is not the same as our own…Thanks to art…we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space…” (page 299)
“…the work of art was the sole means of discovering Lost Time…And I understood that all these materials for a work of literature were simply my past life; I understood that they had come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in indolence, in tenderness, in unhappiness, and that I had stored them up without divining the purpose for which they were destined or even their continued existence any more than a seed does when it forms within itself a reserve of all the nutritious substances from which it will feed a plant.” (page 304)
Thus the inspiration and motivation for Marcel to become a writer, to create art through literature, is to mine the depths of his being and express the experience of Lost Time in terms that the reader will be able to relate to on his or her own terms. Because the experience of Lost Time is universal but the expression of it is distinctive in each of us, the novelist’s challenge is to articulate the universal aspects of Lost Time while being authentic to the writer’s unique, intimate experiences.
Marcel has a renewed appreciation of Swann, to whom he attributes much of “the raw material of my experience.” It was through Swann that he met Gilberte. It was Swann who originally inspired him, as a teenager, to go to Balbec where he would meet Albertine. It was at Balbec, also, where he first made the acquaintance of Saint-Loup and M. de Charlus which, in turn, lead him to the Guermantes, and ultimately to this very moment where he had his epiphany outside the residence of the Prince de Guermantes. By all these associations, and others, his life developed in a manner where the Guermantes way “emanated” from Swann’s way.
At last the first piece of music ends and the butler allows him into the party, Marcel's “return to society” after so many years at the sanatorium. “For the first few seconds I did not understand why it was that I had difficulty in recognizing the master of the house and the guests and why everyone in the room appeared to have put on a disguise – in most cases a powdered wig – which changed him completely.” (page 336) But the party is not a masquerade at all. What our narrator sees, after long years absence, are his former friends and acquaintances in old age.
The Prince, the Duchess, his childhood friend Bloch, and many others have all aged to the extent that they imperfectly resemble the selves Marcel stored in his memory. After the initial disorientation, this only serves to feed his imagination for the novel he is certain of writing. “For if names had lost most of their individuality for me, words on the other hand now began to reveal their full significance. The beauty of images is situated in front of things, that of ideas behind them. So that the first sort of beauty ceases to astonish us as soon as we have reached the things themselves, but the second is something we understand only when we have passed beyond them.
“The cruel discovery I had just made could not fail to be of service to me so far as the actual material of my book was concerned. For I decided that this could not consist uniquely of the full and plenary impressions that were outside time, and amongst those other truths in which I intended to set, like jewels, those of the first order, the ones related to Time, to Time in which, as some transforming fluid, men and societies and nations are immersed, would play an important part.” (page 355)
In addition to changes in appearance, others now possess various maladies – a limp, poor hearing or sight. But time has not ravaged everyone. Odette is there, surprisingly not as an old woman, but in “defiance of the laws of chronology, more miraculous even than the defiance of the laws of nature by the conservation of radium.” She was, in fact, “so like the Odette of the old days.” (page 377)
Other changes surprise Marcel. After the death of her husband, Mme Verdurin married a Duke who, in turn, died “after two years of marriage.” This served as the transition for her to marry the Prince de Guermantes, which astonished everyone In Combray, where she had hosted salons for so many years and detested royalty in favor of the growing wealth of the business class.
This party episode lasts about 170 pages as is filled with the usual conversations and gossip, only this time accented by the multitude of changes to everyone’s personal lives with the passage of so much time. Marcel’s mind is present and engaged with those in attendance but he also wanders in thought, recollecting what he can of the past in relation to those present. The war is naturally a topic that comes up. Robert is fondly remembered in this regard, having discussed military strategy many times with Marcel before being killed in battle. Gilberte has now become best friends with Andrée. Like Gilberte, Andrée has married a man who used to be involved with Rachel. That connection serves to remind Gilberte of her youthful love for Robert.
For her part, Gilberte is thrilled to see Marcel after so many years. Knowing his preference for solitude, she asks if he would rather go with her and have dinner at a restaurant. To which he replies: “As long as you don’t mind dining with a young man.” This brings laughter all around. Gilberte, concerned about the size of the party, presses him: “’But really, since you sometimes emerge from your ivory tower, wouldn’t you prefer little intimate gatherings which I could arrange, with just a few intelligent and sympathetic people? These great formal affairs are not made for you at all.” (page 435)
But Marcel is lost in answering her. He cannot possibly relate to her all the things that have just happened to him and all the thoughts he is experiencing at the party. He considers the different loves of his life. Gilberte as a girl, his grandmother, and, of course, Albertine. “I looked at Gilberte, and I did not think: ‘I should like to see her again,’ I said merely, in answer to her offer, that I should always enjoy being invited to meet young girls, to whom I could give pleasure by quite small gifts, without expecting anything of them in return except that they should serve to renew within me the dreams and the sadnesses of my youth and perhaps, one improbable day, a single chaste kiss. Gilberte smiled and then looked as though she were seriously giving her mind to the problem.” (page 439)
This conversation is interrupted by a poetry reading by an actress attending the party. Marcel finds her “old and ugly” but the poem’s recitation is nevertheless “admirable.” When it is finished Marcel realizes that “she was somebody I ought to have known.” Accepting appreciation as she filters through the crowd afterwards, she approaches Marcel. “I responded with a smile and a gesture. ‘I am sure he does not recognize me,' said the reciter to the Duchess. ‘Of course I do,’ I said confidently, ‘I recognize you perfectly.’ ‘Well who ami I then?’ I had not the slightest idea and my position as becoming awkward…throughout the same beautiful poem Bloch had been wondering only how to maneuver himself so as to be ready, the moment the poem ended, to leap from his seat like a beleaguered army making a sally and, trampling if not upon the bodies at least upon the feet of his neighbors, arrive and congratulate the reciter…’How curious it is to see Rachel here!’ he whispered in my ear. At once the magic name broke the enchantment which had given to the mistress of Saint-Loup the unknown form of this horrible old woman. And once I knew who she was, I did indeed recognize her perfectly.” (page 460) Rachel’s long-time aspirations of becoming an actress have apparently succeeded. Not everything Time has wrought is a fading away, for some it is a Becoming.
There is more to the story of Odette. She has entered into an affair with the Duke de Guermantes. This, too, is suddenly seen holistically by Marcel. “In any case, the Duke’s liaison with Mme de Forcheville had assumed such proportions that the old man, imitating in this final love the pattern of those he had had in the past, watched jealousy over his mistress in a manner which, if my love for Albertine had, with important variations, repeated the love for Odette, made that of M. de Guermantes for this same Odette recall my own for Albertine.” (page 481)
Proust continues to play with time. At one point during the party Marcel is no longer thinking of the past, the overaching narrator is always a future self in the novel. “On several occasions after the Guermantes party” he tries see Odette again. But she is now a captive of the Prince as Albertine had once been Marcel’s captive. Her world has become impenetrable.
Then Marcel is back at the party, talking to Gilberte again. “’Let me fetch my daughter for you,’ she said, ‘I should like to introduce her to you. She is over there, talking to young Mortemart and other babes in arms who can be of no possible interest. I am sure she will be a charming little friend for you.’ I asked whether Robert had been pleased to have a daughter. ‘Oh! Yes,’ she replied, ‘he was very proud of her. But naturally,’ she went on, with a certain naivety, ‘I think that nevertheless, his tastes being what they were, he would have preferred a son.’” Then Proust switches to overarching narrator mode again. “Years later, this daughter, whose name and fortune gave her mother the right to hope that she would crown the whole work of social ascent of Swann and his wife by marrying a royal prince, happening to be entirely without snobbery chose for her husband an obscure man of letters.” (page 501)
Marcel’s mind never strays far from his epiphany. “My surprise at Gilberte’s words and pleasure that they caused me were soon replaced…but the idea of Time past which was brought home to me once again, in yet another fashion and without my even having seen her, by Mlle de Saint-Loup. Was she not – are not, indeed, the majority of human beings? – like one of those star-shaped crossroads in a forest where roads converge that have come, in the forest as in our lives, from the most diverse quarters? Numerous for me were the roads which led to Mlle de Saint-Loup and which radiated around her. Firstly the two great ‘ways’ themselves, where on my many walks I had dreamed so many dreams, both led to her: through her father Robert de Saint-Loup the Guermantes way; through Gilberte, her mother, the Mégéglise way which was also ‘Swann’s way.’” (page 502)
“And Mlle de Saint-Loup led to many other points in my life, to the lady in pink, for instance, who was her grandmother...And was it not Swann, the grandfather of Mlle de Saint-Loup, who had first spoken to me of the music of Vinteuil, just as it was Gilberte who had first spoken to me of Albertine?” (page 503)
“I saw Gilberte coming across the room towards me…I was astonished to see at her side a girl of about sixteen, whose tall figure was a measure of that distance which I had been reluctant to see. Time, colorless and inapprehensible Time, so that I was almost able to see it and touch it, had materialized itself in this girl, molding her into a masterpiece…standing in front of me. She had deep-set piercing eyes, and a charming nose thrust slightly forward…perhaps not the least like that of Swann but like Saint-Loup’s. The soul of that particular Guermantes had fluttered away, but his charming eyes, had settled momentarily upon the shoulders of Mlle de Saint-Loup and the sight of it there aroused a train of memories and dreams in those who had known her father.” (page 506)
“…it seemed to me wonderful that at the critical moment nature should have returned, like a great and original sculptor, to give to the granddaughter, that significant and decisive touch of a chisel. I thought her very beautiful: still rich in hopes, full of laughter, formed from those very years which I myself had lost, she was like my own youth.” (page 507) It is a curious fact that the young girl’s first name is never mentioned, solidifying her more as a symbol than a person in terms of the narrative.
Proust closes the novel by discussing how some aspects of novels are more detailed than others. He goes so far as to consider who his readers might be once he finishes it. “…they would not be ‘my’ readers but the readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass…it would be my book, but with its help I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves.” (page 508)
Good old dependable Francoise is there to help him keep his papers in order and to care for him as he begins writing. Before he gets very far into the novel, however, Marcel is stricken with an illness (just like Proust himself.) He considers death but has no fear of it except insofar as his writing is concerned. He has a new sense of Time that inspires his life, even while dying.
“Moreover, that we occupy a place, always growing in Time is something everybody is conscious of, and this universality could only make me rejoice, it being the truth, the truth separated by each of us that I had to seek to elucidate. Not only does everybody feel that we occupy a place in Time, but the simplest of us measures this place approximately, as he would measure the one we occupy in space…This notion of Time embodied, of years past but not separated from us, it was now my intention to emphasize as strongly as possible in my work.” (page 529)
Proust ends the novel with sickly Marcel living only to write his novel. We do not know if Marcel ever completes his book, unless we accept that Proust’s work is Marcel’s novel. Even in that case, it remains unfinished. Sadly, yet perhaps appropriately, Proust ran out of time before Marcel’s literary effort is completed.
So I made it a third time through; 4,340 pages - sort of like hiking the Appalachian Trail, only farther in some respects. Proust’s distances are more mental than physical with a depth and breadth in the range of aesthetic awareness, often sensual and sexy, filled with emotion, frequently conflicted, yet nevertheless intellectual and deeply connected to the essence of our humanity through Time.
It is a moving work that affects me more profoundly with each reading. Turning 60, I found this reading more relatable than my first one when I was 47. I know what Lost Time is. I know the wonder and nostalgia that Proust expresses. He captures human life in words with which the reader can often only marvel. In that regard the novel is far too short. Its magnificent prose coupled with its impressive length give it a life of its own and, like every life, the end comes too soon.
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