In Search of Lost Time

Marcel Proust

Evocation:  the act of bringing or recalling a feeling, memory or image to the conscious mind; the action of invoking a spirit or a deity.

This is the summer I decided to read Proust.  Any reader worth his or her salt must face down this classic multi-volume behemoth.  Marcel Proust is one of the greatest novelists in all of literature, and In Search of Lost Time is his grand masterpiece.

Why now?  Why this summer?  Because I am aware that time is passing, that places I have come to know and love are gone, and no one lives forever.  In Proust, I hoped to find the way memory shadows us and enriches us and our experiences.  I wanted to find a way to provoke, and invoke, my own memories of what has gone or been lost to the years.  I read the first two volumes and was not disappointed:  the Madeleines, the sepia-colored scenes of 19^th century Paris, the memories, dreams and reflections—all there.

Proust was a 38 year-old man when he began writing the novel.  He had been a sickly child who grew up to be a fragile adult, and much of his work was done in bed at night while all of France slept.  Ultimately, the novel was published after his death in 1922, and he did not get to do the extensive revisions that he performed on the early volumes even when they were typeset and in printer’s proofs.  Long sentences abound throughout, but it is quite simply exquisite writing.  I will probably not finish the 4,300 pages for a while, so this is really a discussion in progress and on-going.

At heart, Proust is a mystical atheist with loose ties to the Catholic Church, a faith he did not practice.  It is in his writing about memory and what triggers us to fall into the past that he excels.  His writing is beautiful, haunting, moving, and at times flowery and serpentine.  The characters and plot running through all the volumes is boilerplate Victorian drawing room drama with a touch of humor and a hint of sex.  The evocative nature of his work is what casts the golden beams of autumnal reflection on the past.  With close to 2000 characters, it is sometimes difficult to keep track of one when he or she may appear in the first volume and may not come back again until the fourth or fifth.  But these are minor complaints and not relevant to the longer journey of the books.  Reading Proust is its own reward for any reader with the gumption to see it through to the end.

Proust’s gift is to show us that memories, as we age, are our prized possessions.  They console us and make the present more bearable.  Through memory, we keep those who have passed on alive.  We remember holidays and food and the way things used to be, often a romanticized notion of how we wish they were.  In shaping our memories, we comfort ourselves; these seemingly innocuous moments in our lives—the smell of fresh bread baking, the perfume of our mothers, the scent of evergreen in December—remind us of the days we’ve lived and the strands of experience we embody.

Memory, though, often comes with a twin, the yin and yang of us:  regret.  Can we remember the past without regret?  Why is it that human beings always see the past as better than it was?  If only we could do things over again.  Yet, when asked, no one wants to go back to their teenage years, or feel the shame and embarrassment over saying the wrong thing or acting foolishly in youth.

Memories are the things we carry.  They give us a sense of linear time, even though time may not be constant or linear.  In present moments are the moments of the past and the future, like mirrors reflecting each other through eternal prisms that go, back and forth, to infinity.  Proust in his cork-lined bedroom, scribbling away, knew the persistence of memory.  He wrote against the day he would be gone and only his novel would remain.  In this way, his memory is incandescent and always with us.  He inspires us to catch the scent, the touch, the warmth of a voice, and remember.

Proust's notebook pages