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

Rise Up

Toni Morrison died a few days ago at the ripe old age of 88.  That’s a good, long life, but I am greedy and I wanted her to keep telling stories, to keep telling us what it means to be human in all its messy and bloody atrocities.  Nobel Prize winner; Pulitzer Prize winner; awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2016.  She will be missed; may her voice ever echo down the mountain from sea to shining sea.

Morrison was no stranger to tragedy and loss.  Her family home was burned to the ground by the landlord for late rent; she was two years old at the time.

It happened again when she was 62.  This time, the fire was ignited by a fireplace ember, but most of Morrison’s priceless papers and manuscripts were saved.

Her son, Slade Morrison, died of pancreatic cancer in 2010 at the age of 45, which stopped her work on her novel, Home (Vintage International, 2013), until she realized he would expect his mother to go forward with her writing.  And so she did.

Her voice became a clarion call against injustice, words of protest flowing from her pen, calling the world’s attention to the murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Walter Scott, unarmed black men killed by white police officers.

She addressed white privilege and fear in her essay published in the November 21, 2016 issue of The New Yorker after Donald Trump was elected president.  I can only imagine what she would have to say about the bloody days of murder and mayhem in California, Texas and Ohio, and the 255 incidents of mass murder that have occurred already this year.

Critic John Leonard in his office

In reading the numerous tributes and obituaries online for Morrison, one name leapt off the page at me.  He was the first white critic to trumpet Toni Morrison’s extraordinary voice and talent:  John Leonard, book and cultural critic for publications as diverse as CBS News, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Boston Globe, Esquire, and the Los Angeles Times.  John Leonard inspired me to read and write, one of many critical influences in my life.  His book, The Last Innocent White Man in America (The New Press, 1993), made me want to read and write about books and culture.  He turned criticism into poetry, and raised such writing to its own exalted place in the pantheon of belles-lettres. He, too, is gone now, eleven years ago.

Something clicked over in my head.  It was time.

I dusted off The Teacher’s View and On The Street Where I Live, my online essays about literature, culture and the life of the mind, and about living in Los Angeles.  We have a culture in crisis.  We have a country in crisis.  We face enormous, heart-breaking and dangerous challenges.  This is not the time to keep silent but to raise one’s voice, as Toni Morrison and John Leonard did.  This is the crucible where we determine what we’re made of and what we value most.  This is the time when we must, finally, institute a culture of equality, respect, and love.  There is no other way forward.

A long time ago, my first mentor-teacher told me that real teachers never fully walk away from the classroom; they will always find their way back.  Teachers, writers, philosophers, or students—human beings always find their way.  The path is not easy, and there will be tragedies and failures.  Trial and error, feeling demoralized and empty, lost and alone—this is what we are experiencing now, even as we stare at our phone screens and try to lose ourselves while carrying the overwhelming burden of anxiety and fear.  But as Socrates once said:  “The unexamined life is not worth living.”  Only through intense and relentless self-examination can we come to understand ourselves and others.  We rise to meet the challenges of brutality and racism.  We pick up the torch and carry on.  This is not the time to retreat but to reach out and find the truth and humanity in the immigrant, the neighbor, the human being living on the street.  As Toni Morrison and John Leonard taught us, in the face of aggression, oppression, and rage, we must rise up whatever way we can, and be very, very brave.

Time Unmanageable

I had to teach a workshop on time management for college freshmen and academic probation students, and this got me thinking about the whole nature of time.

Delmore Schwartz, in his poem “Calmly We Walk Through This April Day,” writes “Time is the school in which we learn.  Time is the fire in which we burn.”  It is one of my favorite poems from a poet who has amassed a lot of great lines during his career.  Of course, this one floated to the surface as I considered the way we approach time in our lives.

We do not manage time; we manage ourselves.  And in a paradoxical statement, time is both inconstant and a fixed entity.  Time is not constant because we have leap years and extra seconds tacked on to the New Year’s Eve countdown.  We know, through science, that the earth and sun, and their orbits and revolutions, are not absolute.

Outside forces can bend time.  Gravity, black holes and collisions in the darkness of space can change, alter, or even destroy a world and time.  There are strings and universes and multiverses—does earth exist in these other dimensions?  Are the units of time parallel in every iteration?

Then there are our perceptions of time.  When working through a boring task, time slows to a crawl; when we are doing something we love, or are with those we love, time is too fleeting, too quickly dissipated into the ether.

We do not manage time; we manage ourselves.  We have 365 days in a year; 8,760 hours in a year; 525,600 minutes in a year; 31,557,600 seconds in a year, accompanied by approximately 42,048,000 rhythmic beats of our own hearts.  Everything is pulsing toward oblivion.  And yet we must seize every moment and waste not a precious second while we are alive.

We do not manage time; we manage ourselves.  We have 16 weeks in a semester; four to five years of those semesters to graduate with a Bachelor’s degree; two more years of semesters for a Master’s degree; and another two to six years or more of semesters for doctoral work.

To human beings living day-to-day, time is fixed and valuable.  Lawyers charge by the billable hour; wages are often paid by the hour; we sign month-long, year-long, multi-year contracts; we make appointments and rush to be on time.

The one thing we want when we reach our final hour is more time.  We want more time to love, to laugh, to sing, to dance, to live, to learn—and all of these things are important and necessary for a rich life, and we always, always, want more when the sands run out.

In the end, time is, and we must work within its parameters.  We cannot manage time; we can only work with it and within in it, to get the most from our brief episode, our own finite chapter.

Alan Lightman’s book, Einstein’s Dreams, imagines the nocturnal meditations Einstein had when he was developing his Special Theory of Relativity.  In one chapter, time is a concentric, circular universe.  At the center, time is stopped.  Raindrops hang in the air.  Parents struggle to bring their children to the center so they will always be children, never know evil, never move far away from their parents.  Lovers like the center because every moment of love lasts an eternity.  They will never break up, never become disillusioned with one another, never realize that love has flown away.  Moving out from the center, time advances with greater and greater velocity.  Children want to go there to grow up faster and experience life more quickly.  In this world, as in all worlds, time is the arbiter, time is the dance-caller, time is the ghost that haunts us, chases us, really, in all our days.

I have become a dedicated keeper of lists.  The subject of these lists is to manage the time I have.  I have a list, limited to three entries, for what I hope to accomplish that day.  I have lists in a file on my computer for yearly goals and lifetime goals.  I take great, maybe even too much pleasure in crossing items off my lists.  Without them, the day, month and year seem directionless.  I also fight to maintain focus.  In this day and time, we are so distracted.  So much is coming at us.  I sit down to read and find myself staring off into space, considering what I must remember to do tomorrow, contemplating the actions I took yesterday and how the consequences of those actions will affect my tomorrow.  My mind is a jumble of shards that defy me when I try to glue everything back together and reorder my life and manage my time.  Sometimes, I must take a deep breath and focus on what is important in that moment and forget everything else.

There are many things we cannot change in our lives and we are destined for tragedy if we attempt to control the hands of time or fate.  As Alan Lightman writes, life can often be a vessel of sadness.  But there are moments of joy and love.  Like water through our fingers, we must appreciate each drop as it slides by, never trying to close our fist and cling too tightly, never trying to change the course of the tides.  In the shadow of time, we look for the light.  And we live.