In Search of Lost Time

This is going to take me a while! The entire 7 volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu in one volume, in French. I'm planning on reading a page or two each evening as it's MUCH too big and heavy to take as my on bus reading or even to read in bed. So far the first page and a half have been lovely and surprisingly easy to read.

Eu li a Recherche há alguns anos. Desde então reli os livros, mas não de uma vez. Eu me lembro de ter ficado maravilhada com o modo como Proust escreve, da história, dos personagens, mesmo de alguns trechos, mas isso me parece pouco. Eu preciso dedicar um tempo a Proust novamente e reler toda a obra, ter novamente a sensação única de ler esse livro. ( )

I did not systematicly comment on this book while I was reading it in 1955, but did do some comments;. On March 28, 1955, I said: "Began Remembrance of Things Past! Has snatches of greatness already, though I've read only a few pages. Lots of acute observations, reaching into my dimmest childhood impressions. May be an enjoyable book." On March 29: "Read a little in Remembrance. Over a page was spent telling of the sensation connected with tasting some cake soaked in tea." On April 2 I said: "Finished the chapter 'Swann in Love' in Swann's Way, the first book in Remembrance. Proust's analytical description, profuse and long-winded, sometimes strike one with their accuracy. The laborious description of the decline of Swann's love affair with Odette is like a reflection of reality--and then, all at once, it is over, even as I am sure love affairs do, at the end, end. But to create this effect, Proust includes long pages of material which hold my attention very poorly. On Apr 5: "Finished Swann's Way. Swann did marry Odtte--despite the cooling of his ardor. On May 1: "The boy has finally gotten over Gilberte. Albertine is next, but he hasn't met her yet. It is torture reading this thing--but I'll finish both books someday. On May 2: ""i" and his grandmother are at Balbec on vacation. .On May 5: Reading in Remembrance. He is still at Balbec, cries himself to sleep becaquse can't kiss his grandmother good night. On May 14: Finished Within a Budding Grove, volume II of Remembrance. "I" was well acquainted with Albertine at the end. But when he tried to kiss her she repulsed him. And the stay at Balbec came to an end. The book is quite impossible, but I have started The Guermantes Way. On May 15: Read muchly in Remembrance. "I" spent considerable time at Robert St. Loup's barracks town, and grew to like it very well, contriving to get St. Loup to get the Duchess de Guermantes to invite him to her place,. But she would not. "I" and St. Loup spend time with St. Loup's mistress, who proves to be a whore "I" knows as "Rachel when from the Lord." St. Loup spends 100,000 francs a year on her--"I" might have had her for 20. Then "I" goes to Mme. de Villeparious, the aunt of Duchess de Guermantes--who turns up there too. But the latter has not said anything to "I" yet. May 22: Finished Guermantes Way. Thereby finishing the first volume of Remembraance "I" tells in minute detail of the conversation at a dinner party given by the Duchess de Guermantes, how he is lionized there, the absurdities uttered,. He then goes to visit M. de Charlus, who shouts at him and orders him from the house, though riding back to his home with him. Well, now I am starting on the second of the two volumes. In the first part he takes up M. de Charlus and his friends, so it looks like we are in for a long distasteful study of that type. June 12: I finished the fourth book, "Cities of the Plain" , and said:: "This part was largely taken up by an account of the narrator's second stay at Balbec. He spent much of his time with Albertine, with ever recurring suspicions that she was a lesbian. In the next book, "The Captive", he has taken her into his home at Paris and made her his mistress. His mother has gone to see her aunt, but nevertheless has not forbidden the arrangement. He is not really in love, but is very jealous of Albertine's time and is always seeking to prevent her f rom partaking in lesbian activity. I am bored to death by the book and can scarcely keep reading. It is a terrible ordeal." On June 13, 1955, my sole comment on the book: "Albertine is still at his house." On June 28, 1955 I said: "The Verdurins have gotten Charlie Morel, the violinist, to break with de Charlus because Charlus arranged a party at Verurins and then never had his high-powered guesta so much as greet the Verdurins. So Mme. Verdurin got mad, and told Charlie Charlus had told people his wife was a flkunkey and that Charlus was bankrupt and under observation by the police." On June 26. 1055 I said: "Finished "The Captive." Book V of Remembrance of Things Past. It is the account of the time Albertine is living with the narrator, a time consumed in keeping her from her vice." On June 28, 1955, I said: "Albertine is dead! Just after she wrote the narrator telling him she would return to him if he would that she should, she was killed when thrown from her horse. .Now begins the long process of grief and forgetting. Let me quote a passage which has good thoughts and to show the style : "I had now only one hope left for the future--a hope far more heartrending than any dread--which was that I should one day forget her. And it is our most fitting and most cruel punishment, for that so complete oblivion as tranquil as the oblivion of the graveyard, by which we have detached ourself from those whom we no longer love, that we can see this same oblivon to be inevitable in the case of those whom we love still. To tell the truth, we know it to be a state not painful, a state of indifference." Tennyson said a part of this much better in far fewer words: "O last regret, regret can die." On July 1, 1955, I said: " I am wasting my time with Proust. Obviously I am getting nothing out of him, and just as obviously he is a very significant writer. Read a review in an old Commonweal tonight of a study of Proust as a Christian writer. From it i learn that Proust made his first Communion at 12, and always considered himself a Catholic. Yet superficially there is no indication of this in Remembrance. I am missing much in the book and I do not care about what is there. But I hope to finish it this month and then do some interesting reading. On July 10, 1955, I said: "Finished Book 6 of Remembrance. "The Sweet Cheat Gone" The first of the four chapters thereof is devoted to detailing the process of grief and oblivion in relation to the narraqtor's love of Albertine. In the second chapter he meets and does not recognize Gilberte, who has been adopted by Odette (formerly Mrs. Swann)'s new husband, de Pocheville. Gilberte never refers to her father, who is dead. In the third chapter he goes to Venice, f inally, and tells of his time there. In the fourth chapter he hears that Robert de Loup, his old friend, is going to marry Gilberte and also that Robert now is queer as a deer, having taken up with Charlie Morel." now is queer as a deer, having taken up with Charlie Morel." On July 24, 1955, said: "Reading in Remembrance. The part telling of wartime France had interesting touches, but now I am at a part where Proust is explaining the psychological novel, and its superiority to the so-called realistic novel, and I really don't care. Will sure be glad when I am done with this book, but don't know if I will finish it by August 1." On July 25 I said: "Am nearing end of Remembrance, Mme Verdurin has become Duchess Guermantes!" On August 7, 1955, I said: "Finished Remebrance of Things Past. This ordeal, which began last March 28, is finally ended. While there were times when I mildly enjoyed the novel, it was generally a drudge and a bore, and I am most happy to be done with it. The last words: "If, at least, there were granted me time enough to complete my work, I'd not fail to stamp it with the seal of that time the understanding of which was this day so forcibly impressing itself upon me, and I would therein describe men--even should that give them the semblance of monstrous creatures--as occupying in Time a place far more considerable than the so restricted one allotted them in space, a place, on the contrary, extending boundlessly since, giant-like, reaching far back into the years, they touch simultaneously epochs of their lives--with countless intervening days between--so widely separated from one another in time." A quick check reveals that only U.S.A., and War and peace were longer than this volume of Remebrance among the books I've read, and of course nothing has come close to being as long as the two combined volumes of Remembrance. No wonder it took me over five months to finally finish them. May i never be bored for so long a time again. ( )

More than a commentary on Swann’s jealousy or M. Charlus’s homosexuality or the frivolity of the Guermantes’ sorties, Marcel Proust’s monumental work In Search of Lost Time paints the unsuccessful reconstruction of a forgone world and a lost existence from fickle memories, which like morning mists would fade with the rising sun. The narrator Marcel, longing for a past that didn’t exist but must be created, sought to experience Bergson’s continuous time rather than the fragmented and still-framed instantaneous moments by attempting to blur the boundaries between Cambray and Paris, childhood and adolescence, and Swann and himself and integrate here and there, before and after, and him and me through memory fragments of previous objects, people and sensations. As in a neural network or a mind-map, the madeleine linked his aunt to his mother, who in turn was linked to Albertine through jealousy, which also connected Marcel with Saint Loop and Swann, who, as with his (Marcel’s) grandmother, linked his childhood and adolescence. And through recollection, Marcel would try to relive the buried years and resurrect his grandmother and Albertine.

But even during the narrative, Marcel realized memory’s willfulness and the variation in hues, shapes, pitch and timbre between the actual object and its mental reconstruction. When he encountered an old friend, the facial features were so different from his recollection and reconstruction, for better or for worse pregnant with all the emotions, preoccupation, biases, that he could not match face with voice.

Because recollected sensation can never equate with the actual experience and time, like a patient thief, steals memories a morsel at a time until one day the owner would realize he was ruined, Marcel ultimately would fail to recapture and assemble stolen sensations and decayed seconds and in the end, must create new moments, new sensations and ultimately a new biography, through the synergy between past experiences and creative imagination. From those deceased hours and decayed memories sprouted In Search of Lost Time, not only Proust’s novel but also that of the narrator.

Whether we savor Marcel’s frailness, Swann’s infatuation, Charlus’s pompousness, Franscoise’s independent-mindedness, the sorties’ frivolousness or the social revelation of the Dreyfuss Affair, we can enjoy Proust’s classic without resorting to Marxist or Freudian or Feminist critique. And the sentences, like the serpentine Amazon, seemed to flow unceasingly into the distant horizon carrying with it the sparkling sunlight. Although ascending the novel’s three thousand pages appears precipitous, the effort will be well worth the while and, at the end of the adventure, the reader can rest on the crisp apex and savor time’s transience and memory’s playfulness as if they were alpine zephyrs. ( )

Reading this was one of the most wonderful experiences in my life, like diving into another, euphoric world. ( )