Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time: A Reader's Guide to The Remembrance of Things Past

by Patrick Alexander

We are all subject to time and the changes it works upon us from when we were young to when we are old. The “self” is transient and ever-changing; this is true of our own selves and also the “selves” of the people we know. And not just people but things and places are also subject to time. “Houses, avenues, roads are, alas, as fugitive as the years.” We have all experienced the disappointment of returning to a place from our youth and finding the magic gone. Those places we remember are located not in space, but in time, and unless we can once more become the child that first experienced the joy and the love with which they are associated, then they are forever lost.

Those two walks around Combray as a child form the core of the narrator’s memory and the essence of his concept of reality. Everything and everyone that he encounters in later life is, in some way, judged and compared with the real world he first discovered walking around the countryside of Combray.

We can sometimes find a person again, but we cannot abolish time.