A work of art is experienced as a temporal, durational phenomenon. It is also an object of physicality, something that is reacted upon and reproduced by our senses and processed, firstly, by our intellect. Therefore a work of art is an object of space-time, as it contains within itself dimension and duration, properties availing themselves of our immediate sensory perceptions and our ruminative, reflective abilities at the same instant. If an image especially strikes us as it is burned onto the memory plates of our consciousness, either because it is especially new to us, or we find it especially beautiful, or thought-inducing, or shocking, or if an image simply affects us in a profound way, recalls something ineffable in our past or lingers within us in the forefront of our consciousness long after coinciding impressions have settled and retreated into darker regions of unilluminated thought, it can be considered to have taken on the qualities of a Poetic image. Poetic images, though they burn brighter, linger longer, disturb more violently the placid surface of our being, are yet still fundamentally durational, temporal things, subject to the same dissolution as anything separated from us by a span of time. We must evoke them, re-open the book to the dog-eared page, replay the record, re-watch the scene. Even a familiar image we consider fixed in our memory (our house, a friend’s face) is indeed fugitive; from the moment of experience it becomes veiled by all of those errors that occur naturally in the processing of an impression by our intellect- the influence of our desires,our particularly trained way of thinking, our angle of observation, our intent and our own will, the peculiarities of our retentive ability. It can be said with some grain of truth that the events that have shaped us, all of the experiences from which we have gleaned our lessons, all the moments precious and essential to our being and our personality are errors, flawed, subjective reconstructions, only glimpses, not only of what we have lived through but of what we have imagined, desired, and suffered.Yet we did participate in a reality external to ourselves. That sunset, that street, that face, those voices and smiles of a distant evening occurred, they were deposited within us by some material other than us. Some objective substance was the cause and initiator of our subjective impressions. This raw material of reality exists only briefly, almost inapprehensively, for as soon as our senses and our intellect begin working on it it has become ours, we consume it, absorb it, and something of ourselves is transferred into and mingled with this initiating substance; it is corrupted by our thoughts, our intentions, and even our pasts. The collision between ourselves and reality is the beginning of all that follows: life. But what of the fact that we hold our memories and impressions in a vessel that works its own transformational alterations on them, even at the point of perception? What of everything that is corrected, corrupted, blurred, or lost in the transfer from the external to the internal? Is this not where facts, history, and in some way our reason fail to speak to us, where we ourselves, with all our prejudices, become the agent of the world, and the world only a secondary influence? Is this not where the work of art speaks to us more truly of life as it is lived than facts, history, reason? These obscure regions, lit now and then by great lightning flashes of illumination, are the places where Poetry finds its voice. It alone can speak to us of what is lost and what we retain in the transfer of the raw material of reality into the substance of ourselves, by isolating and examining, within the storehouse of our impressions, those that burn most brightly, those that resonate. An image that resonates is freed from the influence of time if it is extracted from these regions and made again into something external from ourselves; it has returned to where it originated, but it has become something else, something that counteracts the decimating effects of oblivion and age: a solidified, personalized droplet of space-time. Works of art are space-time stilled and arrested, removed from the flow of the years, set outside the ephemeral ebb and tide, worlds unto themselves within ourselves returned to the world, crystallized experiences and illuminated images that we may reflect on and enter into again and again as we dissolve in Time; they are objects freed from Time.In Search of Lost Time is one of these droplets, an ocean-size droplet, large enough to encapsulate an entire lifetime, an entire epoch (Proust lived from 1871 until 1922, his lifetime perfectly spanning, and his work the greatest document of, the Belle Époque). As a work of art, it is always and imminently concerned with this subjective processing of reality. Beyond that, it is a novel in the strictest sense. Its immense form is placed within a definite structure, it seeds, nurtures, and extrapolates its themes throughout its entire development, it is populated by a legion of characters who grow, change, are shown from countless varying viewpoints as they progress through the narrative and Time as it is defined within the novel, it contains cities both real and imagined, visible and invisible, it is rooted in the fundamental things of this Earth but also attains to the realms of myth and surreality. It touches all points and all points thread back to the center- the evocation of the past as it is recalled by Marcel the narrator, woven on the loom of Proust the artist. “Proust is a prism” Nabokov said. Time as it flows and returns to and is shot through this prism, and what he is able to reclaim from the slow eclipse of his allotted years, are the real subjects of this novel; and in the end it presents a way out, a trapdoor in the false bottom of the prison of time, a solution to another quandary of Nabokov’s, “the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence.”A book imminently concerned with Time is of course imminently concerned with duration, and the density of In Search of Lost Time is a necessary component of its attempt to recapture life not as it was lived, but as it is recalled:”Each individual therefore- and I was myself one of these individuals- was a measure of duration for me, in virtue of the revolutions which like some heavenly body he had accomplished not only on his own axis but also around other bodies, in virtue, above all, of the successive positions which he had occupied in relation to myself... since memory by itself, when it introduces the past, unmodified, into the present- the past just as it was at the moment when it was itself the present- suppresses the mighty dimension of Time which is the dimension in which life is lived.”Time is elastic; it is not the mind subject to the measured hands of the clock that recalls to us significant memories, rather it is an emotional, impressionistic act. Therefore, a single evening in the novel may occupy 300 pages while twenty years in a sanatorium are done away with in a single sentence. A walk along the banks of the Vivonne may haunt the better part of the entire 4,000 pages, while a statement such as “I fought several duels in relation to the Dreyfus case” can be made with no further elaboration. The latter incident may be more felicitous to a tale of adventure, but to a work of memory such as this the trickling waters along the Méséglise Way are infinitely more fecund ground for the nurturing of personal revelations. Poetic duration of experience expands or deflates in response to our emotional attachment to an event; that is a life not bound by the tyranny of the hours, though we go searching for it among the rubble of those very hours we have lived. Among hours and among places, because memories attach themselves to places, settle into a certain corner of a certain street or the nooks of a house we inhabited in our childhood, stow themselves in a flourish of hawthorn blossoms, a steeple at Roussainville or within the chiming of a bell at the gate of a house in Combray; they enter into a kind of hibernation once we have moved on and left them behind, they await our return, either in body or thought, to awaken and leap forth to pursue us again:”... for if our life is vagabond our memory is sedentary and though we ourselves rush ceaselessly forward our recollections, indissolubly bound to the sites which we have left behind us, continue to lead a placid and sequestered existence among them, like those friends whom a traveller makes for a brief while in some town where he is staying and whom, leaving the town, he is obliged to leave behind him, because it is there that they, who stand on the steps of their house to bid him goodbye, will end their day and their life, regardless of whether he is still with them or not, there beside the church, looking out over the harbor, beneath the trees of the promenade.”The key concept in Proust is the idea of memoire involuntaire, that is, memory evoked not by our conscious conjuring or by an act of will, but memory brought to the surface by a chance encounter in the course of our lives with a sensation that instantly bridges the years that have passed between the original impression and the present, a sensation that allows us to essentially exist within two frames of time in the same moment, and in that way, we exist as beings outside of Time. It is emphasized that it is a matter of luck whether or not we encounter these portentous vessels before we are either dead or unable to decipher them, but the thrust of the idea is that our sensations carry the weight of our past more than our intellect, that our intellect disguises and reshapes our memories, and that it is only by a multi-dimensional act of synesthesia and memory combined that we can arrive at some idea of our essential selves in relation to the years we have lived. It is an idea relatable to Baudelaire’s Correspondances, in which an intermingling of the senses is a revelatory act:Correspondences (translated by Richard Howard)The pillars of Nature’s temple are aliveand sometimes yield perplexing messages;forests of symbols between us and the shrineremark our passage with accustomed eyes.Like long-held echoes, blending somewhere elseinto one deep and shadowy unisonas limitless as darkness and as day,the sounds, the scents, the colors correspond.There are odors succulent as young flesh,sweet as flutes, and green as any grass,while others- rich, corrupt, masterful-possess the power of such infinite thingsas incense, amber, benjamin and musk,to praise the senses’ raptures and the mind’s.Fortunately Marcel came upon the vessel of his memory, the madeleine dipped in tea unfolded like a Japanese paper flower the essence of his past, the ringing of the bell on the garden gate at Combray resonated strongly enough to unify all the multifarious sounds, sights, and tastes of a lifetime. In Search of Lost Time is a massive, essential, inescapable work. It is flawed, it is laborious, it is overwhelming and at the same time gentle and profound and pierced by a Seraphic light, and for all the time and effort one must put into reading it to completion, the reward is hundredfold or greater. My memories of the book are recalled to me in a similar fashion to those memories of my life; when one has spent over half a year with a single text it in some way begins to live with him, beside him; beyond that, the depth to which the places and characters are examined, drawn and redrawn, shown in profile then head-on, in light and in dusk, in the stride of life or on the precipice of death, in times of fraternity and in times of war, as objects of love, jealousy, wrath or pleasure, gives this work, more than any other I have encountered, the breadth of a life lived. Parting images: the waters of the Vivonne flowing among lily pads reflecting the pale blue sky; Gilberte beneath an arch of hawthorns; Swann sorrowfully listening to that phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata, his head bent; Odette’s last stroll on the Champs-Élysée; Albertine against the backdrop of the sea; Elstir’s seascapes; Saint-Loup’s monocle dancing before his bird-like face; his balancing act on a bench as he brought Marcel a shawl; Mme De Guermantes’ grey eyes; M. de Charlus bound and begging to be whipped by a strap with nails in it in a sadomasochistic orgy; the long shadow of death cast on a red wall from a carriage as Marcel accompanied his ailing grandmother home; a Parisian restaurant glowing in a deep fog; lovers in the Bois de Boulogne at the end of summer; a dream-like hidden plaza in the twilit narrow streets of Venice; Marcel lost in the darkened streets of Paris during a German air-raid, only finding his way by the light of a burning building; the aged Duc de Guermantes portrayed as a rock lashed by a tempest; Marcel hobbling along an uneven cobblestone, seeing above him in his mind’s eye the cathedral of St. Mark’s; a last image of Swann exiting the garden gate at Combray, this time in memory.[image error]
My thoughts on In Search of Lost Time as a whole are below! First, my thoughts on Time Regained:Well, Proust definitely knew how to write a satisfying ending. The last 100 pages of the novel are a glorious culmination of the themes and ideas that have filled the previous 2900 pages. I did find things ever so slightly repetitive after a while, but not because Proust was literally repeating himself. This was more because he was coming at his major themes (time, memory, literature, art, change, identity) from an endless variety of closely-associated angles and teasing out every little nuance. For me, someone who is terrible at writing conclusions and summaries, this process was absolutely fascinating. Every step of Proust’s novel seemed to come into account here in the final volume and I was amazed and impressed.My takeaways:It’s not the wittiest or best-educated person who is a true artist, it’s the person who “can become a mirror and thereby reflect his life.”We as individuals are many different people – each person who describes and judges us sees us as a different person and as we change over the course of our lives we become new people all the time.“But it would be absurd to sacrifice to the symbol the reality which it symbolizes.”Life seems dreary, even though so many moments are wonderful, because we base our assessment on memories, which are very different from actual life moments in that they no longer contain life itself, which is what is beautiful.Experiencing a Proustian moment is basically being in two times at once – experiencing in a flash a little bit of time in its pure state.“The book whose characters are forged within us, rather than sketched by us, is the only book we have.”Happiness is good for the body, sorrow strengthens the mind.Life continues to weave new connections and ideas around old memories, even when you aren’t thinking about them. Then, revisiting them years later, you can find them much changed.Some of the effects of time: “forgiveness, forgetting, and indifference”“I was thinking of my book in more modest terms, and it would be a mistake to say that I was thinking of those who would read it as my readers. For they were not, as I saw it, my readers, so much as readers of their own selves, my book being merely one of those magnifying glasses.. I would be providing them with the means of reading within themselves.” (A means but not an end – a starting point.)It is a universal feeling that we occupy an ever larger place in time as we age. “It was this notion of embodied time, of past years not being separated from us, that it was now my intention to make such a prominent feature in my work."One niggling complaint –about the Penguin translation, not Proust. All throughout I’ve really been impressed with the group of translators who worked on this edition – the endnotes and introductory notes have been excellent, and the translation has read smoothly and fluidly. This final volume is, comparatively, quite subpar. Sentences are confusing – as though Ian Patterson, the translator, didn’t put enough time into ensuring their grammatical flow once translated – and there are actually quite a few missing words and other mistakes that aren’t original to Proust’s manuscript. Additionally, the introduction was very rushed and I got the impression Patterson’s heart wasn’t in the project. I definitely feel disappointed in his effort – especially since he chose to work on the novel’s very important culmination.A distillation of my thoughts on In Search of Lost Time as a whole:I’ve always said that I’d rather a book be short on plot and long on thought than fast-paced and full of clever plot devices but lacking realistic characters and something thought-provoking to sink my teeth into. The fact that I truly loved reading this 3000-page novel, from beginning to end, puts my money where my mouth is. After all, the first volume (Swann’s Way) opens with 30-ish pages describing that weird feeling of waking up and not knowing for a split where, who, or when you are.In Search of Lost Time is impossible to summarize, but here I go: The novel is about Marcel (the narrator, not the author) discovering, after a long life of distractions and failures, that he can reach the goal of writing a novel that he gave up long ago. The novel has two “I’s” - both young Marcel and old Marcel (writing the novel we’re reading) wax and wane throughout. This provides the reader with two different looks at characters and events that combine to give us a more rounded perspective. As Roger Shattuck, literary critic and Proust scholar says, this is just like the way that our two eyes with their slightly different locations on our face work together to give what we see depth.There are dozens of central characters and plot points and hundreds of pages of philosophical musings and digressions, but the last 100 pages are a glorious culmination. Proust comes at his major themes from an endless variety of closely-associated angles, teasing out every nuance. Ultimately, I feel comfortable distilling In Search of Lost Time down to the following themes, in order of increasing importance, that will continue to haunt my thoughts for a long time:Art and Literature – Proust is very clear that both literature and art are tools for human growth and reflection. This does not, however, mean that reading a good book or watching an acclaimed play will automatically change the reader/viewer and help her grow. Rather, literature and art are means to an end, starting points. As Marcel (our narrator) describes the readers of his novel: “For they were not, as I saw it, my readers, so much as readers of their own selves, my book being merely one those magnifying glasses… I would be providing them with the means of reading within themselves.” Merely having and experiencing the tool isn’t enough, the reader must then do his or her own internal work to gain from the experience. Identity – We are, each of us, an endless number of people. As we change over time, we become new people. Additionally, we are a different person in the eyes of each person who knows us. As Marcel describes himself: “I was not one single man, but the march-past of a composite army manned, depending on the time of day, by passionate, indifferent or jealous men.” Memory and Time – I’m discussing these two themes together because they are so interwoven. Proust very thoroughly show how our memories aren’t static, but are shaped and filtered by how our identity changes and what happens to us over time. Life weaves new connections and ideas around old memories, changing them. Proust also argues that the more we consciously focus on creating or thinking about a memory, the less real and visual it will be because we wring all the strength out of it. Involuntary memories – what readers of In Search of Lost Time would call “Proustian moments” – are the most potent. The most famous Proustian moment in the novel is when the narrator takes a bit of a madeleine cake he has dipped in tea and very suddenly recalls his childhood in an extremely sensual way. This moments allows the narrator to occupy two time periods at once, the one he is in and the one he recalls – he “experience[s] in a flash a little bit of time in its pure state.” The novel closes with a rapid succession of five such moments, which ultimately lead the narrator to write his novel.It took me six months to work my way through In Search of Lost Time and I would not be exaggerating to say that the experienced has changed me. My perspective has deepened, my self-visualization has been refined. And, to end on a lighter note, I’ve found another reason to read literature to add to my growing mental list:“To read genuine literature is to accumulate within oneself a fund of possible experiences against which to achieve an occasionally intensified sense of what one is doing, to recognize that one is alive in a particular way.” Through literature, the young look forward to life, and the old look back at it.
What do You think about Time Regained (2003)?
Finally. Reaching the distant conclusion of Proust's very long book – which is in fact the beginning – was a relief, a little disappointing, and ultimately satisfying. I've been reading Proust over the past 30 years, starting it again and again, with the advantage that I have certain passages from Swann's Way interwoven with my own memories, in fact it is part of my memory, or more honestly, my imagination. When I wake up to a bright June morning, part of me is "remembering" Proust's mornings in Combray, Balbec or Paris (and happily confused with the moods of other books, like James Schuyler's The Morning of the Poem). Like those other favored novels, we don't so much read it as live inside it. Nothing would have made Marcel happier. As he writes in the final pages of this final volume:For they were not, as I saw it, my readers, so much as readers of their own selves, my book being merely one of those magnifying glasses of the sort the optician at Combray used to offer his customers; my book ... would be providing them with the means of reading within themselves. With the result that I would not ask them to praise me or to denigrate me, only to tell me if it was right.I'm taking my sweet time too through William Gass's new book. Here's his summary, which I'll steal for my own: "The real world is full of pointless purpose, inattentiveness, confusion, pain, and perplexity, as well as the hazards of its satisfactions. Yet in Proust's pages it is perceived, it is felt, it is contemplated, in a manner so utterly statisfying that those pains, in the depiction, become pleasures; confusions are given an order only we are permitted to understand; defeats are now worth every word of their accounts; failures victories if only in their voicing."I dream, irrationally, of reading this all again in French. That will probably never happen, but if I do, I'm sure all the magic will still be there. (Except for the longueurs of Albertine – those I'll be happy to never read again.)
—Jim Coughenour
Longtemps I asked myself if, instead of reading Marcel Proust on my Kindle, I shouldn’t have bought physical books to read in my bed to perhaps be an inch closer to his conditions while he was writing his masterpiece, as having a cork-lined bedroom proved to be impossible this year. Each time I started and finished a volume, I would again ask myself if I should get a paperback edition instead. However, as I had already all seven volumes digitally, and I knew such a big commitment of reading weekly sections for the entire year would eventually clash with other obligations, I never got to switch and kept on reading on my Kindle for it was easier and more convenient than carrying tree books from one place to another and it also allowed me to read in the dark.While I was reading tonight - just moments ago, actually - and I looked down at my Kindle screen (something that I do constantly and also happens to be a reason for this desire to stop reading digitally, as I feel it rushes my reading when I know that I’m near the end of a chapter or to finishing the book, and I keep calculating if the estimation is right or if it'll take me more or less time instead), I noticed the “Time remaining” information telling me that Time Regained would be over in 28 minutes.Like quick flashes of lightning, memories of all the previous six moments of when I was this close to finishing each volume - along with the place I was reading them, the season of the year, the weather, my mood - jumped in front of me (perhaps it would be more accurate to say “out of me"), initially blurring my vision, and then completely blinding me, as if they were trying to stop me, because finishing this last volume would also end my first read of À la recherche du temps perdu, in which they were included and, because of that, still alive, but fearing their afterlife was bound to be over in mere 28 minutes. Wouldn’t you do all that you could to stop Time - or just to extend it a bit somehow - if you knew you’d be gone in a matter of minutes?As quickly as these memories surrounded me - it’s amazing how many things can happen so fast in a second inside of our heads - I figured that they weren't trying to stop me from finishing the seventh volume, they were actually standing over my shoulder to watch the birth of their little sibling, the new special moment I would hold dear forever in myself, to welcome it and, of course, to watch over me as I finished reading the novel that would be forever considered my favorite and the best thing I have ever read in my life. Had I switched to physical books, these sensations wouldn’t have been triggered this way, or perhaps different ones would have appeared. Who knows? I’m just glad it all happened the way it did. I know this isn’t a proper review as it only accounts for my reading experience instead of actually addressing the book. I made the conscious decision of not reviewing any of the volumes as I felt unprepared - for I believe I still have so much to extract from these beloved pages - and I want to wait until I do at least one more read - how could I stop now? Even so, I decided to acknowledge what just happened, for I think this was an experience that I couldn't let go without writing at least a few - as silly as they might be - words, specially after taking such a fondness for involuntary memories because of Proust.Do yourself a favor: pick up Swann's Way and meet him, in case you haven’t yet.You’re most welcome.
—Renato Magalhães Rocha
I'm moving, so I'm packing, which is making me very nostalgic and contributing to some pretty embarrassing online procrastination. It's also making me think a lot about Proust because you know, moving and reminiscing about all the places I've lived over the years and going through all this old shit, well, it's obviously getting pretty Proustian pretty quick around here. Well, except it is and it's not, because when Proust moved he didn't have to beg for boxes at the supermarket or pack things or rent a U-Haul or beg his friends for help lugging all his crap all around the boroughs, because he had tons of servants to do this all for him. This is sort of the crux of Proust, I've decided: his descriptions of consciousness and memory and love and desire and nostalgia and all that feel so personal and universally relevant, but then there's so much about him that's ridiculously foreign and spoiled and removed that it's jarring and strange. Like usually reading about some really rich guy wouldn't make me feel personally offended like that, but because I feel so close to him in some ways, it does feel like a weird affront. It's an unusual response to a book, for me anyway. I don't normally think about characters like this at all, and in fact I know that a lot of the reason I love reading Proust so much is precisely because he's so rich and old-timey and crazy and weird. But there's something very unique and powerful about the sensation that one's having a Proustian moment, then getting all pissed off when you realize that Proust's Proustian moments were a lot more glamorous than yours. I don't know.... there's really not point to all this, I'm just procrastinating because I'm trying to delay the moment of reckoning that is confronting the two huge boxes of cassette tapes that, as of AD 2009, I have moved with fifteen times. Shall we make it sixteen? What if I someday am cloistered in a cork-lined room, trying to evoke a spring day smoking pot out of a Coke can on Albany Hill in 1993? Won't I need these mixtapes to elicit those memories? Won't western literature potentially suffer a great loss if these disintegrating cassette tapes don't come along?What would Proust do??Anyway, it's a good thing Proust is not here helping me pack up my CDs, because they're really gross and dusty and with his terrible asthma, it'd probably have killed him dead.Okay. Enough of that. Back to Facebook, I mean packing.....
—Jessica
