Nature in Proust: From Immersion to Estrangement

Note: It has been my intention to return to Proust since I finished In Search of Lost Time in April. Upon completing the massive novel for the fourth time, I rushed off a couple of quick thoughts (see here and here) but that was not meant to be the end of it. Now, I return with three essays on different aspects of the novel to show, as examples, how deep the rabbit hole can go with literally dozens of possible subjects. My chosen topics are Proust and Nature, Sex, and the Self. The last topic “grew in the telling” to borrow from Tolkien and will be submitted in three parts on its own. Almost all quotes are from the 1992 Enright edition as I have it on kindle and don’t have to type so much. Plus, at least 80% of the time I prefer the Enright translation to the more recent ones (2002 – 2023) I read this latest tour through the novel. Here’s the essay on Nature in Proust...

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"Trees," I thought, "you no longer have anything to say to me. My heart has grown cold and no longer hears you. I am in the midst of nature. Well, it is with indifference, with boredom that my eyes register the line which separates your radiant foreheads from your shadowy trunks. If ever I thought of myself as a poet, I know now that I am not one. Perhaps in the new, the so desiccated part of my life which is about to begin, human beings may yet inspire in me what nature can no longer say. But the years in which I might have been able to sing her praise will never return." (page 2448)

This is where Marcel Proust's monumental In Search of Lost Time arrives in its final volume—a man standing before trees, that have gone silent, acknowledging a break so complete that he can only observe the line separating light from shadow on their trunks. Nature has become external, analytical, dead to him. But it wasn't always this way.

Trees dot the course of the novel and they make very different impressions upon the narrator depending on where we are in the course of the great work. For the most part, they are alluring and mysterious. They seem to speak to the young narrator but he does not comprehend their meaning. Often he comments on the color of their leaves and play of light in the branches, attributing to them a particular a “secret of their happiness.”

This experience reaches its height, perhaps, in a passage in Within A Budding Grove when the narrator sees three trees which form the entryway to some country home near Balbec. Their configuration triggers an earlier epiphany he experiences with three steeples at Martinville. A mysterious “pleasure” erupts in his psyche.

“I looked at the three trees; I could see them plainly, but my mind felt that they were concealing something which it could not grasp, as when an object is placed out of our reach, so that our fingers, stretched out at arm’s-length, can only touch for a moment its outer surface, without managing to take hold of anything. Then we rest for a little while before thrusting out our arm with renewed momentum, and trying to reach an inch or two further...I sat there thinking of nothing, then with my thoughts collected, compressed and strengthened I sprang further forward in the direction of the trees, or rather in that inner direction at the end of which I could see them inside myself. I felt again behind them the same object, known to me and yet vague, which I could not bring nearer. And yet all three of them, as the carriage moved on, I could see coming towards me...Like ghosts they seemed to be appealing to me to take them with me, to bring them back to life. In their simple and passionate gesticulation I could discern the helpless anguish of a beloved person who has lost the power of speech, and feels that he will never be able to say to us what he wishes to say and we can never guess. Presently, at a cross-roads, the carriage left them. It was bearing me away from what alone I believed to be true, what would have made me truly happy; it was like my life.

“I watched the trees gradually recede, waving their despairing arms, seeming to say to me: “What you fail to learn from us today, you will never know. If you allow us to drop back into the hollow of this road from which we sought to raise ourselves up to you, a whole part of yourself which we were bringing to you will vanish for ever into thin air.” And indeed if, in the course of time, I did discover the kind of pleasure and disquiet which I had just felt once again, and if one evening—too late, but then for all time—I fastened myself to it, of those trees themselves I was never to know what they had been trying to give me nor where else I had seen them. And when, the road having forked and the carriage with it, I turned my back on them and ceased to see them, while Mme de Villeparisis asked me what I was dreaming about, I was as wretched as if I had just lost a friend, had died myself, had broken faith with the dead or repudiated a god.” (pp. 616 – 618)

The episode of the three trees crystallizes the tension that will haunt Proust’s narrator throughout the novel: the sense that nature is trying to communicate something essential, yet remains just beyond comprehension. It’s a scene of almost religious longing—half revelation, half failure—where beauty gestures toward meaning but cannot deliver it. The trees’ “despairing arms” anticipate the later silence of Time Regained: already, the possibility of communion is giving way to distance, and the narrator’s yearning to translate the natural world into consciousness has begun to estrange him from it.

From the beginning, Proust maps a trajectory of consciousness through nature: from immersion, to framing, to disconnection, to estrangement. Early in Combray, the natural world wasn’t something to be observed but something to be inhabited, breathed, tasted. On childhood walks, the natural world wasn't a separate category of perception but an all-encompassing atmosphere. Consider what it sounded like when hawthorn hedges overwhelmed a boy's senses:

"I found the whole path throbbing with the fragrance of hawthorn-blossom. The hedge resembled a series of chapels, whose walls were no longer visible under the mountains of flowers that were heaped upon their altars; while beneath them the sun cast a chequered light upon the ground, as though it had just passed through a stained-glass window; and their scent swept over me, as unctuous, as circumscribed in its range, as though I had been standing before the Lady-altar, and the flowers, themselves adorned also, held out each its little bunch of glittering stamens with an absent-minded air, delicate radiating veins in the flamboyant style like those which, in the church, framed the stairway to the rood-loft or the mullions of the windows and blossomed out into the fleshy whiteness of strawberry-flowers." (page 136)

Here, nature and sacred architecture merge completely. Hedges become chapels, sunlight filters like cathedral glass, fragrance flows like liturgical incense. The boy doesn't stand apart observing these qualities—he's immersed in them, overwhelmed by them. This is what I'd call undifferentiated experience: no boundary between self and blossom, between natural beauty and religious rapture.

“And then, inspiring me with that rapture which we feel on seeing a work by our favourite painter quite different from those we already know, or, better still, when we are shown a painting of which we have hitherto seen no more than a pencilled sketch, or when a piece of music which we have heard only on the piano appears to us later clothed in all the colours of the orchestra, my grandfather called me to him, and, pointing to the Tansonville hedge, said to me: ‘You’re fond of hawthorns; just look at this pink one—isn’t it lovely?’ And it was indeed a hawthorn, but one whose blossom was pink, and lovelier even than the white. […] And indeed I had felt at once, as I had felt with the white blossom, but with even greater wonderment, that it was in no artificial manner, by no device of human fabrication, that the festal intention of these flowers was revealed, but that it was Nature herself who had spontaneously expressed it…” (page 138)

The pink hawthorn takes this even further. When the narrator discovers it embedded among the white blossoms, Proust's prose becomes almost dizzy with celebration, using the word "festal" three times in a single passage to create a liturgical rhythm. The flower appears "like a young girl in festal attire among a crowd of dowdy women in everyday clothes who are staying at home, all ready for the 'Month of Mary' of which it seemed already to form a part, it glowed there, smiling in its fresh pink garments, deliciously demure and Catholic."

Nature here is festivity, sensuality, sacred pageantry all at once. The boy sees not botanical specimens but young girls, feast days, parish processions. Everything flows together in synesthetic delight—colors have tastes, flowers have personalities, spring has the quality of crushed strawberries mixed with cream cheese. The young narrator does not simply look at nature, he consumes it, digests it, and translates it into personal myth.

Even within Combray's immersive world, Proust carefully differentiates between two distinct relationships to nature through his famous "two ways"—the Méséglise way (Swann's way) and the Guermantes way. These aren't simply different walking routes but entirely different modes of experiencing the natural world, each creating its own social context and emotional territory through the specific character of its landscapes.

The Méséglise way was "the shorter of the two that we used to take on our walks round Combray, and for that reason was reserved for days of uncertain weather." Its compressed, dramatic nature seems to encourage solitary encounters with landscape. Here the weather itself becomes theatrical: "Often the sun would disappear behind a cloud, which impinged on its roundness and whose edge it gilded in return. The brightness though not the luminosity would be expunged from a landscape in which all life appeared to be suspended, while the little village of Roussainville carved its white gables in relief upon the sky with an overpowering precision and finish."

This is nature as sudden revelation—dramatic lighting effects, landscapes that pause and reorganize themselves under shifting skies. The compressed intensity of the Méséglise way, with its uncertain weather and shorter duration, creates conditions where Marcel often finds himself detached from family conversation, absorbed in private encounters with atmospheric effects. The changeable light, the way villages suddenly emerge with "overpowering precision," these moments seem to pull him into solitary contemplation even when walking with others. Here nature is not background but stage lighting for mystical encounter.

The Guermantes way offers an entirely different geography of experience. Longer, more stable, opening onto broader vistas, it's here that we encounter "the course of the Vivonne" flowing for miles, the buttercups "past numbering," and those expansive water-lily passages that allow for extended family conversations alongside the stream. The narrator describes how "we would follow the tow-path, which ran along the top of a steep bank several feet above the stream," suggesting a more leisurely, social pace that accommodates group walking and shared observation.

This is nature as continuity rather than drama, offering the longer, more meditative encounters that naturally accommodate family togetherness. Where the Méséglise way's volatile weather and compressed drama seem to isolate Marcel in moments of private aesthetic absorption, the Guermantes way's flowing river and expansive meadows create a natural setting for the extended family walks where conversation and shared experience become possible.

Proust uses these different natural environments to create different modes of consciousness and social being. The intense, changeable weather of Swann's way generates the solitary, almost mystical encounters with hawthorn hedges and dramatic skies. The broader, more stable landscapes of the Guermantes way accommodate the flowing family walks along the Vivonne, where the narrator's absorption in nature becomes compatible with, rather than exclusive of, social presence.

“...the river flowing past, sky-blue already between banks still black and bare, its only companions a clump of premature daffodils and early primroses, while here and there burned the blue flame of a violet, its stem drooping beneath the weight of the drop of perfume stored in its tiny horn.”

Even in childhood's peak period of natural immersion, then, Proust is already mapping how different landscapes shape different relationships—both to nature itself and to the social world that accompanies us when we encounter it. These passages anticipate the later estrangement: the seeds of division are already sown in the topography of Combray.

The same immersive quality infuses Proust's captivating Vivonne passages. And here, translation matters. Enright (1991) renders the river as simply 'flowing past, sky-blue already between banks still black and bare,' while Lydia Davis (2003) gives us a river that 'was already sky-blue, promenading between banks still black and bare.' Where Enright emphasizes movement, a natural flow; Davis anthropomorphizes. The river promenades like a character on display. For me, Davis captures the sense of animation, of nature not just moving but performing. It heightens the sense that the boy lives inside a living scene, where violets bow and even perfume has weight. The river doesn't simply flow; it promenades "dressed in sky blue between lands still black and bare, accompanied only by a clump of premature daffodils and early primroses, while here and there burned the blue flame of a violet, its stem drooping beneath the weight of the drop of perfume stored in its tiny horn." (page 170)

Back to Enright: “Presently the course of the Vivonne became choked with water-plants. At first they appeared singly—a lily, for instance, which the current, across whose path it was unhappily placed, would never leave at rest for a moment, so that, like a ferry-boat mechanically propelled, it would drift over to one bank only to return to the other, eternally repeating its double journey. Thrust towards the bank, its stalk would uncoil, lengthen, reach out, strain almost to breaking-point until the current again caught it, its green moorings swung back over their anchorage and brought the unhappy plant to what might fitly be called its starting-point, since it was fated not to rest there a moment before moving off once again. [...]

“But further on the current slackened, at a point where the stream ran through a property thrown open to the public by its owner, who had made a hobby of aquatic gardening, so that the little ponds into which the Vivonne was here diverted were aflower with water-lilies. As the banks hereabouts were thickly wooded, the heavy shade of the trees gave the water a background which was ordinarily dark green, although sometimes, when we were coming home on a calm evening after a stormy afternoon, I have seen in its depths a clear, crude blue verging on violet, suggesting a floor of Japanese cloisonné. Here and there on the surface, blushing like a strawberry, floated a water-lily flower with a scarlet centre and white edges. Further on, the flowers were more numerous, paler, less glossy, more thickly seeded, more tightly folded, and disposed, by accident, in festoons so graceful that I would fancy I saw floating upon the stream, as after the sad dismantling of some fête galante, moss-roses in loosened garlands. Elsewhere a corner seemed to be reserved for the commoner kinds of lily, of a neat pink or white like rocket-flowers, washed clean like porcelain with housewifely care while, a little further again, others, pressed close together in a veritable floating flower-bed, suggested garden pansies that had settled here like butterflies and were fluttering their blue and burnished wings over the transparent depths of this watery garden—this celestial garden, too, for it gave the flowers a soil of a colour more precious, more moving than their own, and, whether sparkling beneath the water-lilies in the afternoon in a kaleidoscope of silent, watchful and mobile contentment, or glowing, towards evening, like some distant haven, with the roseate dreaminess of the setting sun, ceaselessly changing yet remaining always in harmony, around the less mutable colours of the flowers themselves, with all that is most profound, most evanescent, most mysterious—all that is infinite—in the passing hour, it seemed to have made them blossom in the sky itself.” (page 161-162)

This is nature as impressionist canvas, but the crucial difference from later volumes is that the child lives inside the painting rather than viewing it from a distance. The violets aren't described—they're animated, bowing under drops of fragrance as if perfume had actual weight. The river doesn't merely reflect the sky; it's "dressed" in its color like a person choosing clothes for a spring stroll.

These Combray passages completely resist the analytical distance that will characterize the narrator's later relationship with nature. There's no line separating "radiant foreheads from shadowy trunks"—everything flows together in what can only be called communion.

But something shifts as we move into the Balbec sections of Within a Budding Grove. Nature becomes spectacular rather than immersive, mutable rather than eternal. The narrator (no longer a boy but an adolescent) begins to observe rather than inhabit.

At the seaside resort of Balbec, he experiences "different seas"—the ocean and coastal terrain never exactly repeat themselves. One day brings violet clouds described as bouquets, another day scatters "innumerable petals, sulphur or rose-pink" across the sky. Legrandin describes the Bay of Opal where "these celestial bouquets, pink and blue, will blossom all at once of an evening, incomparably lovely, and often lasting for hours before they fade. Others shed their flowers at once, and then it is lovelier still to see the sky strewn with their innumerable petals, sulphur or rose-pink." (page 130)

This mutable seascape is tied to the ancient and accursed geological shore, the 'true Ar-mor' with its wrecks and eternal fogs. But, these shifting visions are increasingly seen through windows, framed by hotel architecture, reflected in the mahogany surfaces of bookcases. This marks a fundamental change in the narrator's relationship to nature. Where the Combray hawthorns surrounded and penetrated him, the Balbec seas are viewed from a position—he looks out at them from his hotel room, contemplates them from the promenade. Nature becomes external spectacle rather than lived presence.

The shift is subtle. Nature suddenly becomes something one views through windows of various kinds. The narrator is now looking out rather than dissolved into the natural world itself. He's becoming a conscious observer of what he once unconsciously inhabited. This is no longer communion but contemplation, with architecture and framing devices mediating the experience.

Another transitional moment between Balbec's framed seas and Time Regained’s silent trees comes during Marcel's visit to Saint-Loup at the military garrison of Doncières in The Guermantes Way. Here, nature appears through a different kind of frame—not just the hotel window but morning mist that both reveals and conceals the landscape beyond.

"And next morning, when I awoke, I went over to Saint-Loup's window, which being at a great height overlooked the whole countryside, curious to make the acquaintance of my new neighbour, the landscape which I had not been able to see the day before... And yet, early as it had awoken, I could see it, when I opened the window and looked out, only as though from the window of a country house overlooking the lake, shrouded still in its soft white morning gown of mist which scarcely allowed me to make out anything at all." (page 877)

The language here marks a fundamental shift. Nature has become a "neighbour"—separate, external, something to "make the acquaintance of" rather than merge with. The mist that shrouds the landscape functions like a veil, creating distance even as it creates beauty. Marcel observes from inside, looking out through glass at a world wrapped in fog.

This mist becomes associated not with direct natural experience but with interior comfort: "Imbued with the shape of the hill, associated with the taste of hot chocolate and with the whole web of my fancies at that particular time, this mist, without my having given it the least thought, came to infuse all my thoughts of that time." The fog no longer surrounds him as the hawthorn scent once did—instead, it becomes linked to hot chocolate, to the warmth of the room, to the comfort of being inside looking out.

When the mist finally clears, revealing "the hill... raising its lean and rugged flanks, already swept clear of darkness," Marcel experiences joy, but it's the joy of spectacle rather than communion. The landscape has become something to be viewed, appreciated, but no longer inhabited. This is nature definitively externalized—sublime, moving, but permanently outside the window, permanently beyond the glass that now mediates all natural encounter.

Perhaps the most poignant illustration of this evolution comes in Proust's apple-blossom passages, which span multiple volumes and show us the same natural phenomenon filtered through different stages of the narrator's development.

In Within a Budding Grove, walking with his grandmother, the young narrator encounters apple orchards in full bloom: "At regular intervals, amid the inimitable ornamentation of their leaves, which can be mistaken for those of no other fruit-tree, the apple-trees opened their broad petals of white satin, or dangled the shy bunches of their blushing buds." (page 143)

Years later, in Sodom and Gomorrah, apple blossoms return, but now Albertine is present instead of his grandmother, and the narrator is older, more complicated by experience: "But on reaching the road I found a dazzling spectacle. Where I had seen with my grandmother in the month of August only the green leaves and, so to speak, the disposition of the apple-trees, as far as the eye could reach they were in full bloom, unbelievably luxuriant, their feet in the mire beneath their ball-dresses, heedless of spoiling the most marvellous pink satin that was ever seen, which glittered in the sunlight. the distant horizon of the sea gave the trees the background of a Japanese print; if I raised my head to gaze at the sky through the flowers, which made its serene blue appear almost violent, they seemed to draw apart to reveal the immensity of their paradise. Beneath that azure a faint but cold breeze set the blushing bouquets gently trembling. Blue-tits came and perched upon the branches and fluttered among the indulgent flowers, as though it had been an amateur of exotic art and colours who had artificially created this living beauty. But it moved one to tears because, to whatever lengths it went in its effects of refined artifice, one felt that it was natural, that these apple-trees were there in the heart of the country, like peasants on one of the high roads of France. Then the rays of the sun gave place suddenly to those of the rain; they streaked the whole horizon, enclosing the line of apple-trees in their grey net. But these continued to hold aloft their pink and blossoming beauty, in the wind that had turned icy beneath the drenching rain: it was a day in spring." (page 1447)

Same trees but everything has changed. The grandmother is dead, Albertine will soon (in several hundred more pages) be lost, and the narrator's capacity for innocent rapture has been complicated by desire, loss, and time. Nature persists in its cycles, but the self that receives it has been fundamentally altered. The apple blossoms become a bridge between relationships, between past and present, rather than an immediate communion with the natural world. This immersive moment in nature is not just in the space to the apple-blossom trees but through time itself.

By the time we arrive at The Captive and The Fugitive nature almost entirely vanishes from the novel. The story contracts inward to Paris apartments, jealousies, social parties and intrigue. When Albertine dominates the narrator's consciousness, the natural world that once nourished him retreats almost completely from view.

Proust is showing us how erotic possessiveness, neurotic obsession and social entanglement can eclipse our connection to nature. Where childhood walks seamlessly wove together hawthorns and memory, desire and spring, now the claustrophobic intensity of romantic possession crowds out everything else. The narrator who once breathed blossom-scented air now breathes only the atmosphere of suspicion and longing.

There are brief exceptions—magnificent views from La Raspelière, an escape through the forest where birds sing invisibly from the trees. The expansive views there open toward the sea, and in the forests "a gust of wind put up a solitary crow, which flapped away and settled in the distance, while against a greying sky the woods on the horizon assumed a deeper tone of blue, as though painted in one of those monochromes that still decorate the overmantels of old houses." These interludes feel like glimpses of a world that is already receding, nature experienced through the mediation of social relationships rather than directly encountered.

Which brings us back to that gray, lifeless passage from Time Regained where we began. By the novel's end, the narrator has become fully conscious of his estrangement from the natural world that once spoke to him so eloquently. The trees that address him now meet only analytical observation—he notes the line separating light from shadow on their trunks, but feels nothing.

This isn't simply about aging or loss of innocence. It's about the development of consciousness itself. The capacity that allowed a child to merge with hawthorn hedges, to hear violets speak, to taste the colors of spring—that very capacity seems to require a kind of unconscious unity that mature awareness inevitably breaks.

The narrator recognizes what he's lost: "the years in which I might have been able to sing her praise will never return." There's no going back to Combray's synesthetic rapture, no recovering the undifferentiated absorption that made nature a lived presence rather than an external object.

What Proust shows us across the vast arc of In Search of Lost Time is how consciousness develops by creating distance from what it once merged with. But the full devastation of this evolution only becomes clear when we recognize what's actually been lost.

As someone who has always treasured good nature writing—Thoreau's intimate observations, Frost's seasonal wisdom, the entire tradition of writers who find meaning in landscape—I'm struck by how Proust captures something that goes beyond even the finest nature literature. Like everything else in his monumental novel, nature becomes pure aesthetic experience. Proust proves Nietzsche's insight from The Birth of Tragedy: “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified,” and In Search of Lost Time demonstrates this truth through every encounter, whether with hawthorn hedges, lovers, artworks, or social relationships.

But specifically with regard to nature, Proust reveals something more withering than the simple loss of childhood wonder. Those beautiful Combray passages show us what basic human connectivity with the natural world looks like at its most fundamental level. The boy who could taste the colors of hawthorns, who breathed incense from flower-scented air, who lived inside impressionist canvases rather than observing them—that boy was experiencing something essential to human flourishing.

The evolution from immersive communion to analytical separation may be inevitable, but Proust forces us to count the cost. Upon reaching Time Regained, there's a clear void where nature's overflowing presence once lived. The narrator standing before silent trees, registering only "the line which separates your radiant foreheads from your shadowy trunks," isn't just describing personal loss—he's mapping a fundamental disconnection that may be tragically common in modern experience.

Proust’s power is that he is always beautiful (often exquisitely so) but never sentimental. He shows us exactly what communion with nature looked like, through prose that captures not just the visual beauty but the synesthetic, religious, erotic charge of direct encounter with landscape. Then he traces, with clinical precision, how that capacity erodes through the inevitable development of consciousness, social complexity, and time.

The brutality lies not in the beautiful passages but in their absence. The novel that begins with rivers promenading in sky-blue garments ends with trees that no longer speak. The overflowing sensuous connection of Swann's Way has contracted to analytical separation by Time Regained. In showing us this trajectory, Proust reveals just how much we stand to lose when our connection to nature becomes purely external, purely observational, purely dead.

This is precisely what makes the achievement so remarkable. Not just with nature but with countless things that fill any life. Through this monumental act of remembrance and reconstruction, he preserves what consciousness inevitably loses. Those hawthorn hedges, that violet-scented Vivonne, the apple blossoms connecting grandmother to spring—all of this lives on in language, rescued from the silence that eventually falls between the mature mind and the natural world. The trees may have gone silent for the narrator, but in his writing, they sing forever—reminding us of what we too may have lost, and what might still be recoverable through the kind of attention Proust teaches us to pay.