Reading Proust: Time Regained – Involuntary Memories and Lost Time
Time Regained, the final volume of In Search for Lost Time, is different from the rest of the novel in some ways. It has no chapters or parts. It contains comparatively little sexuality or humor. The narrative shifts around in time, the future mingling with the present and past similarly to the beginning of the novel. Playing with Time as a concept and as an experience, it presents the problem of “lost time” directly and, as the narrator comes to relate to that more, it becomes perhaps the most philosophical part of the novel, overall.
Like the two immediately preceding volumes, it is unfinished. Overlapping a little with the end of The Fugitive, Marcel continues to enjoy a renewed, genuine friendship with Gilberte at Tansonville. They take leisurely walks near Combray along their childhood paths, the Méséglise (Swann’s) way and the Guermantes way. The two acknowledge that they both were in love with each other when they first met as children. Her marriage to Saint-Loup continues to be strained by infidelities on his part. She attempts to accommodate him by dressing to his tastes, which strikes Marcel as being nothing at all like Gilberte.
After this, the passage of time becomes somewhat nebulous. Marcel’s desire to become a writer is “entirely absent” from his mind while he spends “long years…receiving treatment in a sanatorium” for some undisclosed illness (he has always mentioned being “sickly” throughout the novel, just as Proust was in real life). Then, in 1916, since medical staff has become scarce due to the demands of the war, he decides to return to Paris for a visit.
Francoise is tormented by her fear of the war. She is hardly eating or sleeping, thinking the Germans will be in Paris any day now. Marcel discusses the war with Saint-Loup while the officer is on leave. Robert feels that the war won’t last much longer and there is a lengthy discussion of military history and strategy. Tansonville itself has been occupied by the Germans while the battle of Méséglise rages for eight months. The battle costs the Germans 600,000 men but the town remains in French control. This is all explained in a letter he receives from Gilberte.
Marcel decides to take a walk through Paris with the ultimate intent of paying a visit on Mme Verdurin. In announcing this with the reader, Proust phrases it: “The day after I received this letter, that is to say two days before the evening on which…I made my way through the dark streets…” (page 96) This is a rather awkward way of expressing time and it is indicative of how Proust plays with time as if it were all jumbled up in this section of the narrative. Here’s another example: “…on the day after the evening on which I had seen him, and two days after the Baron had said to Morel…” (page 235) These somewhat convoluted ways of expressing the context of present moment match Marcel’s meandering mind, jumping around in time, almost disoriented.
Proust uses the walk as an interesting narrative technique by which Marcel experiences all sorts of thoughts and recollections. Initially, he shares with the reader what Paris is like at night during this part of the war. Subject to sporadic bombing from German airplanes and Zeppelins, most of the city is dark in the evenings, the lights extinguished to make targeting more difficult. Then he happens upon the now elderly M. de Charlus, who has recovered from his cardiac maladies.
We are treated to an essay on how the Baron has become a loner, having fallen out of favor with society. He has lost interest in keeping up with the times and most Parisians find him “pre-war” and “old-fashioned.” He is also pro-German, which obviously doesn’t set well with Frenchmen as the bloodiest war in history (up to that time) churns through incomparable human lives. His homosexuality (Proust calls him an “invert” and his preferences an “inversion”) is also widely known now and, no longer under the cloak of being a womanizer, he is ostracized for that. With all the able-bodied men fighting at the front, M. de Charlus has “acquired first the habit of and then the taste for little boys,” which further alienates him.
As for Mme Verdurin, the social gatherings at her salon continue, where the war naturally dominates all conversation. She has always suffered from headaches but they are worse now. Her normal “treatment” for these is a croissant dipped in coffee. But, with the war dragging on, croissants are difficult to obtain. Dr. Cottard writes a prescription for her to receive them from a special bakery (the medical profession was still quite primitive at this time). Proust uses this to contrast “proper society” with the war itself.
“The first of these special croissants arrived on the morning on which the newspapers reported the sinking of the Lusitania. As she dipped it in her coffee and gave a series of little flicks to her newspaper with one hand so as to make it stay open without her having to remove her other hand from the cup, ‘How horrible!’ she said. ‘This is something more horrible than the most terrible stage tragedy.’ But the death of all these drowned people must have been reduced a thousand million times before it impinged upon her, for even as, with her mouth full, she made these distressful observations, the expression which spread over her face, brought there (one must suppose) by the savor of that precious remedy against headaches, the croissant, was in fact one of satisfaction and pleasure.” (pp. 120 – 121)
But the narrative revolves mostly around M. de Charlus as the two walk together. The Baron bemoans the fact that Morel has fallen in love with a woman and is absolutely loyal to her. Marcel, thinking to himself, does not believe that Morel’s tastes have changed that radically. Then he makes the curious observation: “I certainly did not believe a word of it, I who had seen, what M. de Charlus still did not know, that for fifty francs Morel had once given himself to the Prince de Guermantes for a night.” (page 131)
The “I who had seen” phrase is highly suspect to the reader. Marcel is referring to an episode I previously discussed from Sodom and Gomorrah. The only problem is that, if the reader rereads that section, it is obvious that the narrator was not present for any of it. He could not have “seen” it. In fact, at the time, the overarching narrator states that this incident is contained by “my memories of what I was told about all this…” (SG, page 656). So this is a curious change or mistake made by Proust, perhaps indicative of this part of the novel remaining unfinished. But that is rather nit-picky.
After a continuing discussion of the diverse paths that the lives of Mme Verdurin and M. de Charlus have taken since the war started, Marcel returns to the present evening and his walk with the Baron, who makes “a vague attempt to use me as an intermediary for overtures of peace between himself and Morel.” (It will be recalled that Morel was the source of the Baron’s downfall and subsequent illness after he was banished by Morel from his life, supported by lies told by the Verdurins.) It turns out that Marcel meets Morel, we are told, “…two or three years after the evening on which I walked…” So the reader is now propelled into the future as the walk continues.
Marcel meets Morel on this future date. Morel is a changed man and, when asked about patching up the differences between the Baron and himself, he simply replies: “I am afraid!” At which point, the narrative skips even further into the future, past M. de Charlus’ death. Marcel happens to read the Baron’s final letter, basically a diatribe against Morel, which in part says: “I was resolved, had he come, that he should not leave my house alive. One of the two of us had to disappear. I decided to kill him.” (page 168) Hence, Morel’s fear of M. de Charlus.
“But I must return to my narrative.” Marcel says this several times as the story weaves in out of the past, present, and future – playing with time. The Baron takes his leave and the narrator walks alone for a bit. He becomes thirsty. The war has made petrol scarce so there are few taxis to take him back to his place. So, he realizes he will have to find a hotel, if he wants to drink something and rest before he finishes his walk. Unfortunately, he has happened upon a quarter of Paris that is consumed by “poverty, dereliction, fear.” The prospects of finding a hotel seem bleak.
Then he comes upon a “hotel” where the lights are on, though shuttered from the outside. He sees officers and soldiers coming and going. He enters a bar-like atmosphere, loud and lively. He has a drink, a cassis. Eventually, he finds someone with the hotel to rent him a room. He considers ordering another drink when he hears what he thinks are “stifled groans” coming from a nearby room. Of course, Marcel has no problem with walking right up and putting his ear to the door.
“…I heard the noise of the crack of a whip, which I guessed was reinforced with nails, for it was followed by cries of pain.” There is a small window into the room with the curtain partly open. He peeks in and observes M. de Charlus being beaten by a young man. The Baron is pleading for mercy before things break down and he asks to speak to the establishment’s owner with the boy outside the room. The owner turns out to be Jupien, to whom the Baron complains that the young man is not being “sufficiently brutal.” Another whip boy is brought into service.
Afterwards, M. de Charlus walks gingerly out of the building. Jupien, who has hidden Marcel so the Baron will not see him, justifies this place to the narrator. “The actual thing that is done here is something I like, it is what I have a taste for myself. Well, is it forbidden to receive payment for things that one does not regard as wickedness?” (page 205) Then Jupien insists that Marcel remain with him a moment. There is an explosion nearby.
“In an instant the streets became totally black. At moments only, an enemy airplane flying very low lit up the spot upon which it wished to drop a bomb. I set off, but very soon I was lost. I thought of that day when…I met an airplane and my horse had reared as at the apparition of a god. Now, I thought, it would be a different meeting – with the god of evil, who would kill me.…At last the flames of a blazing building showed me where I was and I got back on the right road, while all the time shells burst noisily above my head. But my thoughts had turned to another subject. I was thinking of Jupien’s house, perhaps now reduced to ashes, for a bomb had fallen very near me just after I had left it…” (pp. 207 – 208)
Marcel’s mind wanders all over the place even under these circumstances. Considering the sadomasochism he just witnessed on someone he was having casual conversation with only a short time before, he feels gloomy: “In the people whom we love, there is, a certain dream which we cannot always clearly discern but which we pursue. It was my belief in Bergotte and in Swann which made me love Gilberte, my belief in Gilberte the Bad which had made me love Mme de Guermantes. And what a vast expanse of sea had been hidden away in my love for Albertine! In any case, just because we are furiously pursuing a dream in a succession of individuals, our loves for people cannot fail to be more or less of an aberration.” (page 216)
Marcel finally makes it back to his house and prepares to leave Paris, finding little to keep him there, when he receives news that Robert de Saint-Loup was killed at the front “while covering the retreat of his men.” This devastates Marcel and “for several days I remained shut up in my room, thinking of him.” Then he goes to a “new sanatorium” and “many long years pass” before he returns to Paris, long after the war ended. It is uncertain what his age is at this time. He is much older, probably in his 40’s.
The purpose of his return is that he has chosen to accept an invitation to a party at the Guermantes. While on the return train ride to Paris, Marcel sees the scenery he has noticed all his life. But, now the trees, flowers and the play of sunlight leave him unmoved. He finds himself trapped in “the most languorous boredom” with life. He takes a cab part way to the party then decides to walk the rest of the way and take in the views (and so as to arrive fashionably late). Thus he happens upon M. de Charlus, now in a wheelchair, attended by Jupien. Marcel sees the decrepit Baron and thinks about all the other versions of him he has known through the years. While Marcel and Jupien converse M. de Charlus manages to get into a flirtatious chat with “a gardener’s boy” which cuts their conversation short.
He finally arrives at the Guermantes, consumed with dismal thoughts, when “I tripped against the uneven paving-stones in front of the coach house. And at the moment when, recovering my balance, I put my foot on a stone which was slightly lower than its neighbor, all my discouragement vanished and in its place was that same happiness which at various epochs of my life had been given to me by the sight of trees which I had thought that I recognized in the course of a drive near Balbec, by the sight of the twin steeples of Martinsville, by the flavor of a madeleine dipped in tea, and by all those other sensations of which I have spoken and of which the last works of Vinteuil had seemed to me to combine the quintessential character.
“…the difficulties which had seemed insoluble a moment ago had lost all importance…I continued, ignoring the evident amusement of the great crowd of chauffeurs, to stagger as I had staggered a few minutes ago, with one foot on the higher paving-stone and the other on the lower. Every time that I merely repeated this physical movement, I achieved nothing.” (pp. 255 – 256)
When he enters the Guermantes mansion a piece of music is being performed for the guests, who are behind closed doors. The butler requests that he wait in the library sitting room where Marcel has “a second intimation.” A servant accidentally knocks a spoon against a plate and that sound triggers the “species of happiness” once more. As he waits, Marcel enjoys “a selection of petits fours and a glass of orangeade. I wiped my mouth with the napkin which he had given me; instantly…a new vision of azure passed before my eyes, but an azure that this time was pure and saline and swelled into blue and bosomy undulations, and so strong was this impression that the moment to which I was transported seemed to me to be the present moment…for the napkin which I had used to wipe my mouth had precisely the same degree of stiffness and starchedness as the towel with which I had found it so awkward to dry my face as I stood in front of the window on the first day of my arrival at Balbec, and this napkin now, in the library of the Prince de Guermantes’s house, unfolded for me – concealed within it smooth surfaces and its folds – the plumage of an ocean green and blue like the tail of a peacock.” (pp. 258 – 259)
Marcel strives desperately to understand how and why these marvelous sensations of happiness involuntarily arise in his awareness, which is incapable of recreating them at will. He happens upon a nebulous idea: “…the slightest word that we have said, the most insignificant that we have performed at any one epoch of our life was surrounded by, and colored by the reflection of things which logically had no connection with it and which later have been separated from it by our intellect which could make nothing of them for its own rational purposes, things, however, in the midst of which…the simplest act or gesture remains immured as within a thousand sealed vessels, each one of them filled with things of color, a scent, a temperature that are absolutely different one from another, vessels, moreover, which being disposed over the whole range of our years, during which we have never ceased to change if only in our dreams and our thoughts, are situated at the most various moral altitudes and give us the sensation of extraordinarily diverse atmospheres.” (pp. 260 – 261)
According to Proust, this is the essence of how memory works upon human experience. “…the returning memory can throw no bridge, form no connecting link between itself and the present minute, if it remains in the context of its own place and date, if it keeps its distance, its isolation in the hollow of a valley or upon the highest peaks of a mountain summit, for this very reason it causes us suddenly to breathe a new air, an air which is new precisely because we have breathed it in the past.” (page 261)
These extraordinary involuntary memories bring focus to Marcel’s life like lightning striking him from the sky. He will now undertake “a work of art” himself and “felt myself ready to undertake” the creation of that art as a writer. The basis of his art will be “embodied memory.” “I began to divine as I compared these diverse happy moments, diverse yet with this in common, that I experienced them at the present moment and at the same time in the context of a distant moment, so that the past was made to encroach upon the present and I was made to doubt whether I was in the one or the other. The truth surely was that being within me which had enjoyed these impressions had enjoyed them because they had in them something that was common to a day long past and to the present, because in some way they were extra-temporal, and this being made its appearance only when, through one of these identifications of the present with the past, it was likely to find itself in the one and only medium in which it could exist and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say, outside time.” (page 262)
Marcel suddenly understands that: “This being had only come to me, only manifested itself outside of activity and immediate enjoyment, on those rare occasions when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. And only this being had the power to perform that task which had always defeated the efforts of my memory and my intellect, the power to make me rediscover days that were long past, the Time that was Lost.” (pp. 262 – 263)
Involuntary memories are intimate and distinctive for each of us, if we pay any attention to them at all. I suspect most people don’t really acknowledge an involuntary memory. It just happens without residual effect. Those who appreciate art or are more in touch with their personal awareness are most likely to relish an involuntary memory instead of experiencing it as just a passing phase, something confusing that is best ignored.
While Lost Time is something everyone can experience, it isn’t about revisiting a place in physical space. You do not experience Lost Time by simply standing at someone’s grave side thinking about them. That is the intellect at work and feelings, though strong, are not as vivid as the sudden rush, as Proust just described.
We cannot replicate Lost Time through rational analysis or purposefully contemplating what we can recall of the past. Rather, according to Proust, we find Lost Time in a state of mind most readily induced by connecting with art and literature or in some accidental juxtaposition triggering the memory of a moment we experienced in Time past, reconnecting us with something gone and largely forgotten. It is mostly an emotional experience. As we shall see, that is ultimately the key to Marcel finding his inner creativity and his artistic path.
“I knew that Lost Time was not to be found again on the piazza of St. Mark’s any more that I had found it again on my second visit to Balbec or my return to Tansonville to see Gilberte…the task before me was to discover at long last whether or not it was possible to attain what…I had…come to think was unrealizable…The only way to savor them more fully was to try to get to know them more completely in the medium in which they existed, that is to say within myself...” (pp. 270 – 271)
To be continued
Like the two immediately preceding volumes, it is unfinished. Overlapping a little with the end of The Fugitive, Marcel continues to enjoy a renewed, genuine friendship with Gilberte at Tansonville. They take leisurely walks near Combray along their childhood paths, the Méséglise (Swann’s) way and the Guermantes way. The two acknowledge that they both were in love with each other when they first met as children. Her marriage to Saint-Loup continues to be strained by infidelities on his part. She attempts to accommodate him by dressing to his tastes, which strikes Marcel as being nothing at all like Gilberte.
After this, the passage of time becomes somewhat nebulous. Marcel’s desire to become a writer is “entirely absent” from his mind while he spends “long years…receiving treatment in a sanatorium” for some undisclosed illness (he has always mentioned being “sickly” throughout the novel, just as Proust was in real life). Then, in 1916, since medical staff has become scarce due to the demands of the war, he decides to return to Paris for a visit.
Francoise is tormented by her fear of the war. She is hardly eating or sleeping, thinking the Germans will be in Paris any day now. Marcel discusses the war with Saint-Loup while the officer is on leave. Robert feels that the war won’t last much longer and there is a lengthy discussion of military history and strategy. Tansonville itself has been occupied by the Germans while the battle of Méséglise rages for eight months. The battle costs the Germans 600,000 men but the town remains in French control. This is all explained in a letter he receives from Gilberte.
Marcel decides to take a walk through Paris with the ultimate intent of paying a visit on Mme Verdurin. In announcing this with the reader, Proust phrases it: “The day after I received this letter, that is to say two days before the evening on which…I made my way through the dark streets…” (page 96) This is a rather awkward way of expressing time and it is indicative of how Proust plays with time as if it were all jumbled up in this section of the narrative. Here’s another example: “…on the day after the evening on which I had seen him, and two days after the Baron had said to Morel…” (page 235) These somewhat convoluted ways of expressing the context of present moment match Marcel’s meandering mind, jumping around in time, almost disoriented.
Proust uses the walk as an interesting narrative technique by which Marcel experiences all sorts of thoughts and recollections. Initially, he shares with the reader what Paris is like at night during this part of the war. Subject to sporadic bombing from German airplanes and Zeppelins, most of the city is dark in the evenings, the lights extinguished to make targeting more difficult. Then he happens upon the now elderly M. de Charlus, who has recovered from his cardiac maladies.
We are treated to an essay on how the Baron has become a loner, having fallen out of favor with society. He has lost interest in keeping up with the times and most Parisians find him “pre-war” and “old-fashioned.” He is also pro-German, which obviously doesn’t set well with Frenchmen as the bloodiest war in history (up to that time) churns through incomparable human lives. His homosexuality (Proust calls him an “invert” and his preferences an “inversion”) is also widely known now and, no longer under the cloak of being a womanizer, he is ostracized for that. With all the able-bodied men fighting at the front, M. de Charlus has “acquired first the habit of and then the taste for little boys,” which further alienates him.
As for Mme Verdurin, the social gatherings at her salon continue, where the war naturally dominates all conversation. She has always suffered from headaches but they are worse now. Her normal “treatment” for these is a croissant dipped in coffee. But, with the war dragging on, croissants are difficult to obtain. Dr. Cottard writes a prescription for her to receive them from a special bakery (the medical profession was still quite primitive at this time). Proust uses this to contrast “proper society” with the war itself.
“The first of these special croissants arrived on the morning on which the newspapers reported the sinking of the Lusitania. As she dipped it in her coffee and gave a series of little flicks to her newspaper with one hand so as to make it stay open without her having to remove her other hand from the cup, ‘How horrible!’ she said. ‘This is something more horrible than the most terrible stage tragedy.’ But the death of all these drowned people must have been reduced a thousand million times before it impinged upon her, for even as, with her mouth full, she made these distressful observations, the expression which spread over her face, brought there (one must suppose) by the savor of that precious remedy against headaches, the croissant, was in fact one of satisfaction and pleasure.” (pp. 120 – 121)
But the narrative revolves mostly around M. de Charlus as the two walk together. The Baron bemoans the fact that Morel has fallen in love with a woman and is absolutely loyal to her. Marcel, thinking to himself, does not believe that Morel’s tastes have changed that radically. Then he makes the curious observation: “I certainly did not believe a word of it, I who had seen, what M. de Charlus still did not know, that for fifty francs Morel had once given himself to the Prince de Guermantes for a night.” (page 131)
The “I who had seen” phrase is highly suspect to the reader. Marcel is referring to an episode I previously discussed from Sodom and Gomorrah. The only problem is that, if the reader rereads that section, it is obvious that the narrator was not present for any of it. He could not have “seen” it. In fact, at the time, the overarching narrator states that this incident is contained by “my memories of what I was told about all this…” (SG, page 656). So this is a curious change or mistake made by Proust, perhaps indicative of this part of the novel remaining unfinished. But that is rather nit-picky.
After a continuing discussion of the diverse paths that the lives of Mme Verdurin and M. de Charlus have taken since the war started, Marcel returns to the present evening and his walk with the Baron, who makes “a vague attempt to use me as an intermediary for overtures of peace between himself and Morel.” (It will be recalled that Morel was the source of the Baron’s downfall and subsequent illness after he was banished by Morel from his life, supported by lies told by the Verdurins.) It turns out that Marcel meets Morel, we are told, “…two or three years after the evening on which I walked…” So the reader is now propelled into the future as the walk continues.
Marcel meets Morel on this future date. Morel is a changed man and, when asked about patching up the differences between the Baron and himself, he simply replies: “I am afraid!” At which point, the narrative skips even further into the future, past M. de Charlus’ death. Marcel happens to read the Baron’s final letter, basically a diatribe against Morel, which in part says: “I was resolved, had he come, that he should not leave my house alive. One of the two of us had to disappear. I decided to kill him.” (page 168) Hence, Morel’s fear of M. de Charlus.
“But I must return to my narrative.” Marcel says this several times as the story weaves in out of the past, present, and future – playing with time. The Baron takes his leave and the narrator walks alone for a bit. He becomes thirsty. The war has made petrol scarce so there are few taxis to take him back to his place. So, he realizes he will have to find a hotel, if he wants to drink something and rest before he finishes his walk. Unfortunately, he has happened upon a quarter of Paris that is consumed by “poverty, dereliction, fear.” The prospects of finding a hotel seem bleak.
Then he comes upon a “hotel” where the lights are on, though shuttered from the outside. He sees officers and soldiers coming and going. He enters a bar-like atmosphere, loud and lively. He has a drink, a cassis. Eventually, he finds someone with the hotel to rent him a room. He considers ordering another drink when he hears what he thinks are “stifled groans” coming from a nearby room. Of course, Marcel has no problem with walking right up and putting his ear to the door.
“…I heard the noise of the crack of a whip, which I guessed was reinforced with nails, for it was followed by cries of pain.” There is a small window into the room with the curtain partly open. He peeks in and observes M. de Charlus being beaten by a young man. The Baron is pleading for mercy before things break down and he asks to speak to the establishment’s owner with the boy outside the room. The owner turns out to be Jupien, to whom the Baron complains that the young man is not being “sufficiently brutal.” Another whip boy is brought into service.
Afterwards, M. de Charlus walks gingerly out of the building. Jupien, who has hidden Marcel so the Baron will not see him, justifies this place to the narrator. “The actual thing that is done here is something I like, it is what I have a taste for myself. Well, is it forbidden to receive payment for things that one does not regard as wickedness?” (page 205) Then Jupien insists that Marcel remain with him a moment. There is an explosion nearby.
“In an instant the streets became totally black. At moments only, an enemy airplane flying very low lit up the spot upon which it wished to drop a bomb. I set off, but very soon I was lost. I thought of that day when…I met an airplane and my horse had reared as at the apparition of a god. Now, I thought, it would be a different meeting – with the god of evil, who would kill me.…At last the flames of a blazing building showed me where I was and I got back on the right road, while all the time shells burst noisily above my head. But my thoughts had turned to another subject. I was thinking of Jupien’s house, perhaps now reduced to ashes, for a bomb had fallen very near me just after I had left it…” (pp. 207 – 208)
Marcel’s mind wanders all over the place even under these circumstances. Considering the sadomasochism he just witnessed on someone he was having casual conversation with only a short time before, he feels gloomy: “In the people whom we love, there is, a certain dream which we cannot always clearly discern but which we pursue. It was my belief in Bergotte and in Swann which made me love Gilberte, my belief in Gilberte the Bad which had made me love Mme de Guermantes. And what a vast expanse of sea had been hidden away in my love for Albertine! In any case, just because we are furiously pursuing a dream in a succession of individuals, our loves for people cannot fail to be more or less of an aberration.” (page 216)
Marcel finally makes it back to his house and prepares to leave Paris, finding little to keep him there, when he receives news that Robert de Saint-Loup was killed at the front “while covering the retreat of his men.” This devastates Marcel and “for several days I remained shut up in my room, thinking of him.” Then he goes to a “new sanatorium” and “many long years pass” before he returns to Paris, long after the war ended. It is uncertain what his age is at this time. He is much older, probably in his 40’s.
The purpose of his return is that he has chosen to accept an invitation to a party at the Guermantes. While on the return train ride to Paris, Marcel sees the scenery he has noticed all his life. But, now the trees, flowers and the play of sunlight leave him unmoved. He finds himself trapped in “the most languorous boredom” with life. He takes a cab part way to the party then decides to walk the rest of the way and take in the views (and so as to arrive fashionably late). Thus he happens upon M. de Charlus, now in a wheelchair, attended by Jupien. Marcel sees the decrepit Baron and thinks about all the other versions of him he has known through the years. While Marcel and Jupien converse M. de Charlus manages to get into a flirtatious chat with “a gardener’s boy” which cuts their conversation short.
He finally arrives at the Guermantes, consumed with dismal thoughts, when “I tripped against the uneven paving-stones in front of the coach house. And at the moment when, recovering my balance, I put my foot on a stone which was slightly lower than its neighbor, all my discouragement vanished and in its place was that same happiness which at various epochs of my life had been given to me by the sight of trees which I had thought that I recognized in the course of a drive near Balbec, by the sight of the twin steeples of Martinsville, by the flavor of a madeleine dipped in tea, and by all those other sensations of which I have spoken and of which the last works of Vinteuil had seemed to me to combine the quintessential character.
“…the difficulties which had seemed insoluble a moment ago had lost all importance…I continued, ignoring the evident amusement of the great crowd of chauffeurs, to stagger as I had staggered a few minutes ago, with one foot on the higher paving-stone and the other on the lower. Every time that I merely repeated this physical movement, I achieved nothing.” (pp. 255 – 256)
When he enters the Guermantes mansion a piece of music is being performed for the guests, who are behind closed doors. The butler requests that he wait in the library sitting room where Marcel has “a second intimation.” A servant accidentally knocks a spoon against a plate and that sound triggers the “species of happiness” once more. As he waits, Marcel enjoys “a selection of petits fours and a glass of orangeade. I wiped my mouth with the napkin which he had given me; instantly…a new vision of azure passed before my eyes, but an azure that this time was pure and saline and swelled into blue and bosomy undulations, and so strong was this impression that the moment to which I was transported seemed to me to be the present moment…for the napkin which I had used to wipe my mouth had precisely the same degree of stiffness and starchedness as the towel with which I had found it so awkward to dry my face as I stood in front of the window on the first day of my arrival at Balbec, and this napkin now, in the library of the Prince de Guermantes’s house, unfolded for me – concealed within it smooth surfaces and its folds – the plumage of an ocean green and blue like the tail of a peacock.” (pp. 258 – 259)
Marcel strives desperately to understand how and why these marvelous sensations of happiness involuntarily arise in his awareness, which is incapable of recreating them at will. He happens upon a nebulous idea: “…the slightest word that we have said, the most insignificant that we have performed at any one epoch of our life was surrounded by, and colored by the reflection of things which logically had no connection with it and which later have been separated from it by our intellect which could make nothing of them for its own rational purposes, things, however, in the midst of which…the simplest act or gesture remains immured as within a thousand sealed vessels, each one of them filled with things of color, a scent, a temperature that are absolutely different one from another, vessels, moreover, which being disposed over the whole range of our years, during which we have never ceased to change if only in our dreams and our thoughts, are situated at the most various moral altitudes and give us the sensation of extraordinarily diverse atmospheres.” (pp. 260 – 261)
According to Proust, this is the essence of how memory works upon human experience. “…the returning memory can throw no bridge, form no connecting link between itself and the present minute, if it remains in the context of its own place and date, if it keeps its distance, its isolation in the hollow of a valley or upon the highest peaks of a mountain summit, for this very reason it causes us suddenly to breathe a new air, an air which is new precisely because we have breathed it in the past.” (page 261)
These extraordinary involuntary memories bring focus to Marcel’s life like lightning striking him from the sky. He will now undertake “a work of art” himself and “felt myself ready to undertake” the creation of that art as a writer. The basis of his art will be “embodied memory.” “I began to divine as I compared these diverse happy moments, diverse yet with this in common, that I experienced them at the present moment and at the same time in the context of a distant moment, so that the past was made to encroach upon the present and I was made to doubt whether I was in the one or the other. The truth surely was that being within me which had enjoyed these impressions had enjoyed them because they had in them something that was common to a day long past and to the present, because in some way they were extra-temporal, and this being made its appearance only when, through one of these identifications of the present with the past, it was likely to find itself in the one and only medium in which it could exist and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say, outside time.” (page 262)
Marcel suddenly understands that: “This being had only come to me, only manifested itself outside of activity and immediate enjoyment, on those rare occasions when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. And only this being had the power to perform that task which had always defeated the efforts of my memory and my intellect, the power to make me rediscover days that were long past, the Time that was Lost.” (pp. 262 – 263)
Involuntary memories are intimate and distinctive for each of us, if we pay any attention to them at all. I suspect most people don’t really acknowledge an involuntary memory. It just happens without residual effect. Those who appreciate art or are more in touch with their personal awareness are most likely to relish an involuntary memory instead of experiencing it as just a passing phase, something confusing that is best ignored.
While Lost Time is something everyone can experience, it isn’t about revisiting a place in physical space. You do not experience Lost Time by simply standing at someone’s grave side thinking about them. That is the intellect at work and feelings, though strong, are not as vivid as the sudden rush, as Proust just described.
We cannot replicate Lost Time through rational analysis or purposefully contemplating what we can recall of the past. Rather, according to Proust, we find Lost Time in a state of mind most readily induced by connecting with art and literature or in some accidental juxtaposition triggering the memory of a moment we experienced in Time past, reconnecting us with something gone and largely forgotten. It is mostly an emotional experience. As we shall see, that is ultimately the key to Marcel finding his inner creativity and his artistic path.
“I knew that Lost Time was not to be found again on the piazza of St. Mark’s any more that I had found it again on my second visit to Balbec or my return to Tansonville to see Gilberte…the task before me was to discover at long last whether or not it was possible to attain what…I had…come to think was unrealizable…The only way to savor them more fully was to try to get to know them more completely in the medium in which they existed, that is to say within myself...” (pp. 270 – 271)
To be continued
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