In Search of a Timeless Masterpiece

Marcel Proust. He and I have been meeting secretly in my bedroom almost every night since November of 2012.  We spend maybe an hour or two together and then I go to sleep.  

Our relationship is not always the same.  Some nights I am fascinated by him, hypnotized, almost in love.  Other nights, I think he is a complete jerk and only stay with him because I know things will get better.

His rich and arrogant friends are ridiculous and so not worth his time.  He needs to stop torturing himself over his mistress whom he can't face is a closeted lesbian.  Every night that we meet, I hope to hear that he has taken charge of his life, but sadly, he seems content to waste it on silly people and a woman who won't or can't love him.

Still, I relish the moment I lay upon my bed each night and switch on the light. Lately a new sadness has crept into my evenings; a recognition that soon these quiet nights of beauty will end in a mere five hundred pages.  I have been in this Proustian universe for twenty-eight hundred pages and fifteen months, and in a mystical sort of way, wish I could remain in this universe forever.

Marcel Proust

And so it is with the best literature that a relationship develops between author and reader where the laws of physics do not apply and two minds can meld just outside the limits of space and time.

Proust himself knew this about the relationship between reader and writer and included these words among the more than one million in his life's work.  “Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.”

Without doubt, this work is bursting with truth and has stood the test of time for this reason.  It is one of those multi-layered classics filled with sad irony that you have to read once so you can experience the whole cloth of it and then again to pick up each individually woven thread and maybe again, and yet again as you age and can read anew from different perspectives.

There is much to enjoy here, some of it quite salacious:  obsession, self-delusion, deluding others, class distinctions, snobbery, aristocracy, arrogance, titles, parties, sex, lies, growing up, growing old, the value of art, music, literature, friends, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, servants, bordellos, male prostitutes, courtesans, the beach, lesbianism, homosexuality, arrogance, laziness, death, churches, sunlight, the sea, grief, cookies, memories, sleep, humor, absurdity, hawthorns, fashion.  Seriously, the list would be much shorter if I listed what is not somewhere in these pages.  

Yet, that's not to say every word is riveting.  Sometimes it does seem to lapse in focus, or at least my focus lapsed in reading.  Sometime, I found I was just not able to connect with the text.  For instance, having no musical intelligence at all, I find the descriptions of music tedious but others with musical sense say they can almost hear the musical notes rising from the text.  

What I admire most about Proust's work are the brilliant aphorisms which bring to light very subtle observations about the human condition. These truths may be known to us, but lie submerged in our consciousness and may never emerge into awareness without Proust.  A great example is, "It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying," 

My goodness, isn't that true?  Haven't we all always known that at some level but have never been aware of it with enough clarity and form to put it into words?  This is the magic of Proust, at least for me. 

Here is another that might resonate,  “Once we have reached a certain degree of enfeeblement, whether caused by age or by ill health, all pleasure taken at the expense of sleep, every disturbance of routine, becomes a nuisance.” 

There you have it folks.  Our secret is out.  And while I never thought of it in terms of enfeeblement, per se, maybe that word hits the mark, after all. 

Have you ever had a memory or a dream of someone or something from your past that was so vivid, and so real, that when you awaken you carry it with you for hours into the day, to the point you feel disoriented and a bit lost in your normal waking life?  It is a strange and uncommon sensation which makes me believe that my self or my soul or whatever it is that defines and identifies me, lives almost outside time; that those memories and those dreams cared not that thousands of days and nights had intervened and swept me away from those people and those moments that still whisper to me in the deepest night as if from only yesterday, not ten or twenty or thirty or more years in the past. 

The desire to experience what an artist could do with these themes of time and memory is what led me to take up In Search of Lost Time. Like most people, the only fragment of In Search of Lost Time I had been familiar with was Proust's famous madeline moment when, upon dipping a madeline in tea, he experiences a flood of memories and emotions tied to his childhood.  I hoped for more and was not disappointed.  Here are two exquisite passages related to the experience of memory and time to give you an idea of the whole:

 Days in the past cover up little by little those that preceded them and are themselves buried beneath those that follow them. But each past day has remained deposited in us, as in a vast library where, even of the the oldest books, there is a copy which doubtless nobody will ever ask to see. And yet should this day from the past, traversing the translucency of the intervening epochs, rise to the surface and spread itself inside us until it covers us entirely, then for a moment names resume their former meaning, people their former aspect, we ourselves our state of mind at the time, and we feel, with a vague suffering which however is endurable and will not last for long, the problems which have long ago become insoluble and which caused us such anguish at the time.

For man is that ageless creature who has the faculty of becoming many years younger in a few seconds, and who, surrounded by the walls of the time through which he has lived, floats within them as in a pool the surface-level of which is constantly changing so as to bring him within range now of one epoch, now of another.

It just doesn't get any better than this anywhere in literature. Everything I encounter in my reading life from now on will lie in the shadow of this masterpiece.  To the list of languages I wish I could read, I now add French so that I could experience In Search of Lost Time directly, without translation, as I have wished I could read Russian for Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Italian for Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy. 

Though the overarching themes of In Search of Lost Time tend towards the sad and ironic; that time passes, that we often forget and sometimes remember; that nothing stays the same, especially not people as we age and ultimately, enter into the oblivion of death.  And yet the message is not hopeless for Proust believed immortality could be reached through art and that only through art does one transcend the feeble limitations of a lifetime. 

No one would disagree that Marcel Proust, through In Search of Lost Time, has achieved the immortality he believed possible and with this masterpiece, has transcended the feeble limitations of his lifetime. 

A joy indeed, to read this, and something I could not have done at any earlier stage of my life.  Thanks for allowing me to share this joy with you.