Time Regained (In Search of Lost Time #7)

by Marcel Proust

The ‘inner book of unknown signs’, as he calls it, ‘the most painful of all to decipher, is also the only one dictated to us by reality, the only one whose “impression” has been made in us by reality itself’.

All day long, in that slightly too bucolic residence, which looked like no more than a place for resting between walks or sheltering from a downpour, one of those houses where every sitting-room looks like a conservatory and where, in the bedroom wall-paper, either the garden roses or the birds in the trees are brought vividly before you and keep you company, in a rather isolated way – it being of the old-fashioned sort in which each rose was so clearly delineated that if it were alive one could have picked it, each bird so perfect that it might have been caged and tamed, without any of the exaggerated modern décor in which, against a background of silver, all the apple trees of Normandy are arrayed in profile, Japanese-style, to turn the hours you spend in bed into a hallucinatory experience; all day long I stayed in my room, which looked out over the fine greenery of the park and the lilacs by the gateway, over the green leaves of the great trees shimmering in the sunlight beside the water, and over the forest of Méséglise.

at the top end, too, those who have made for themselves an environing interior life have little regard for the importance of events. What profoundly modifies the pattern of their thoughts is much more likely to be something that seems quite unimportant in itself but which reverses their experience of the order of time by making them contemporaneous with another period of their life. One may appreciate this in practice from the beauty of the writing this inspires: the song of a bird in the park at Montboissier, or a breeze heavy with the scent of mignonette, are obviously events of less consequence than the epoch-making dates of the Revolution and the Empire. They none the less inspired Chateaubriand to write pages of infinitely greater value in his Mémoires d’outre-tombe.

He was, in fact, at this point already very ill and avoided tiring himself unless perhaps there was a prospect of pleasure to be had. But only meetings with people he did not yet know, and whom his ardent imagination probably thought of as having a chance of being different from the rest, fell into this category. So far as those he already knew were concerned, he knew too well what they were like and what they would be like, and they no longer seemed worth the bother of his becoming dangerously, perhaps even fatally tired. In short, he was a very poor friend.

if passing in the street I saw a poor soldier, home on leave, having had six days’ escape from the constant risk of death, and now ready to set off back to the trenches, allow his eyes to rest for a moment on the lighted windows, I suffered as I had in the hotel at Balbec when fishermen had watched us eating, yet this time the pain was greater because I knew that the misery of the soldier is worse than that of the poor, as it combines every variety of misery, and even more touching because it is more resigned and nobler, and because it was with a philosophical shake of the head, without hatred, that, ready to set off back to the war, he would say, as he saw the shirkers rushing to grab their tables: ‘You’d never know there was a war on here.’

I had already noticed in several other people that the affectation of laudable opinions is not the only way of cloaking bad ones, and that an alternative is the open display of these disreputable sentiments, so that at least one does not appear to be concealing them from oneself.

these social graces, whatever else they signify, are an indication of significant mental shackles. Anyone unable to cast them off will always remain merely a society man.

habit had taken hold, which takes away from things we have seen a number of times the radically profound impression and thought which gives them their real meaning),

the very people who are least capable of assessing merit are the ones who, in order to classify people, are quickest to follow the dictates of fashion. They have not exhausted, not even skimmed the surface of the men of merit in one generation, and suddenly they have to condemn them all en bloc, because now there is a new generation, with its new label, which they will not understand any better than the last.

these colossal masses of conglomerated individuals confronting one another will take on a beauty in his eyes more powerful than that of a struggle arising merely from the conflict of two characters; and he will see them in the same scale as the body of a tall man would appear to infusoria, more than ten thousand of which are required to fill one cubic millimetre. Thus for some time the great figure of France, filled to its perimeter with millions of little irregular polygons, and the figure, filled with even more polygons, of Germany, had both been engaged in such a quarrel. Seen from this point of view, the body Germany and the body France, and the other Allied and enemy bodies, were behaving to a certain extent like individuals. But the blows they were exchanging were governed by the multifarious rules of boxing, whose principles Saint-Loup had explained to me; and since, even if one thought of them as individuals, they were also giant agglomerations of individuals, the quarrel took on immense and magnificent forms, like an ocean rising up in millions of waves in an attempt to batter down an ancient line of cliffs, or like gigantic glaciers which by their slow, destructive fluctuations attempt to break down the mountain ranges that circumscribe them.

they carry on with their own affairs without giving a thought to those two worlds, the one too small, the other too big for them to perceive the cosmic dangers that hover all around us.

The logic of passion, even if it is in the service of the right, is never irrefutable for somebody who is not passionately committed to it.

Rather interesting,’ he added, as if to say: ‘You see that you have not had a wasted evening, meeting me.’ I thanked him, and he assumed the modest expression of someone requiring no payment.

For all his intelligence, he had in this area fashioned a narrow little philosophy for himself (at the bottom of which there was perhaps a touch of that sense of curiosity which ‘life’ aroused in Swann), explaining everything in terms of these special causes, and in which, as when anybody lapses into their characteristic weakness, he was not only unworthy of himself but also exceptionally self-satisfied.

‘The astonishing thing, he said, is that the public that thus judges the men and the events of the war solely on the basis of newspaper reports is convinced that it is forming its own judgments.’

M. de Charlus made constant admiring comments about the brilliant uniforms which passed about us, turning Paris into a town as cosmopolitan as a port and as unreal as the scenery in a painter’s studio, where a few bits of architecture have been assembled simply as a pretext for him to gather together the most varied and glittering costumes.

In this Paris, whose almost defenceless beauty, in 1914, I had seen awaiting the threat of the approaching enemy, there was, certainly, now as then, the ancient, unchanged splendour of a moon cruelly and mysteriously serene which poured over the still intact monuments the useless beauty of its light, but as in 1914, and to a greater extent than in 1914, there was also something else, different lights, intermittent beams which, whether they came from aeroplanes or from the searchlights on the Eiffel Tower, one knew to be directed by an intelligent will, by a friendly vigilance which gave one the same kind of feeling, inspired the same sort of thankfulness and calm as I had experienced in Saint-Loup’s room, in the cell of that military cloister where so many eager-hearted and disciplined young men were in training for the day when, unhesitatingly and in the prime of their youth, they would consummate their sacrifice.

having developed the habit, out of idleness, of each day putting off my work until the day after, I thought that death could be dealt with in the same way. How can one be afraid of cannon fire when one is convinced that it is not going to hit one that day? Anyway, isolated thoughts about bombs being thrown, or about the possibility of death, added nothing tragic to the image I had formed of the passing German airships, until, from one of them, buffeted by winds and partly hidden from my gaze by the billowing mists of a troubled sky, from an aeroplane which, even though I knew it was murderous, I still imagined only to be stellar and heavenly, I had seen, one evening, the gesture of a bomb dropped down towards us. For the true reality of a danger is perceived only in that new thing, irreducible to what one already knows, which we call an impression and which is often, as in this instance, summed up in a line, a line describing an intention, a line which contains the latent potentiality of its distorting fulfilment, while on the Pont de la Concorde, all around the menacing, hunted aeroplane, as if they were reflections in the clouds of the fountains of the Champs-Élysées, the place de la Concorde and the Tuileries, the luminous water-jets of the searchlights curved across the sky, in lines equally full of intention, of the far-sighted and protective intentions of wise and powerful men to whom I was grateful, as I had been one night in the army quarters in Doncières, that the...

the odd thing was that both of them possessed something which, although I had never consciously noticed it, I now recognized as being typical of Morel’s appearance; they bore a resemblance, if not to Morel as I had seen him, at least to a face which somebody seeing Morel with eyes other than mine might have put together out of his features.

It

may be that the lover, made over-impatient by the extremity of his love, cannot wait with a sufficient pretence of indifference for the moment when he will obtain his desire. He constantly returns to the attack, writes incessantly to the woman he loves, tries all the time to see her, she refuses, he is in despair. At that point she understands: if she grants him her company and her friendship, these will seem such substantial blessings to him who thought he would never attain them, that she can refrain from giving him anything else, and take advantage of a moment when he can no longer bear not to see her, when he wants to end the war at any price, to impose upon him a peace whose prime condition will be the platonic nature of their relationship. Furthermore, for the whole of the time leading up to this treaty, the lover, always anxious, constantly waiting for a letter, or a look, has ceased to think about physical possession, the desire for which had tormented him to begin with, but which has become worn out with waiting and been replaced by needs of a different sort which, if not satisfied, are even more painful. Then the pleasure, which at the outset one had hoped to obtain from caresses, one receives later recast in the form of friendly words, promises of her presence, which, after the pangs of uncertainty, sometimes simply after a look from eyes clouded with coldness, making her seem so distant that one thinks one will never see her again, bring with them a delicious e...

When I heard about her grief, I was touched by it. It meant that the whole of society could say, and I can attest, that there was a great friendship between them. But then, when I remember how much malicious gossip and reluctance to help were wrapped up in this friendship, I cannot help thinking how little a great friendship means in society.

The train, I remember, had come to a halt in open countryside. The sun’s rays illuminated the upper half of the trunks of a line of trees that followed the railway. ‘Trees, I thought, you have nothing to say to me any longer, my heart has grown cold and no longer responds to you. Here I am, after all, in the middle of nature, my eyes noting the line which separates your glowing foliage from your shaded trunks, and I feel only coolness and boredom. If ever I could have thought of myself as a poet, I now know that I am not. Perhaps in this new era of my life which, however desiccated, is now opening, human beings may be able to inspire in me what nature no longer says to me. But the days when I might perhaps have been capable of singing its song will never come back.’

If I truly had the soul of an artist, what pleasure should I not experience at the sight of this screen of trees lit by the setting sun, these little flowers on the embankment that reached almost up to the carriage step, whose petals I could count, and whose colours I was careful not to describe, as so many good men of letters would, for could one hope to transmit to the reader a pleasure one has not felt oneself?

A little later I had seen with the same indifference the flecks of orange and gold with which it splashed the windows of a house; and finally, later still, I had seen another house, which looked as though it were built of some strange pink material. But I made these observations with the same absolute indifference as if, walking in a garden with a lady, I had seen a piece of glass and a little further on an object made of some alabaster-like substance, the unusual colour of which would not normally have been enough to rouse me from my languorous boredom but none the less, out of politeness to the lady, in order to say something and also to show that I had noticed the colour, I had pointed out in passing the coloured glass and the fragment of stucco. In the same way, to put my mind at rest, I pointed out to myself, as to somebody who might have accompanied me and might have been more capable than I of taking pleasure from it, the fiery reflections in the windows and the translucent pink of the house. But the companion to whom I had pointed out these curious effects was of a nature no doubt less enthusiastic than plenty of good-natured people who would be ravished by such a view, for he had registered the colours without a trace of pleasure.

The real reason I decided to go was the Guermantes name, for so long out of my mind that when I read it on the invitation card it re-awakened a ray of my attention which was to lift from the depths of my memory a section of their past, accompanied by all the images of seigneurial forest and tall flowers which had then accompanied it, and took on again for me all the magic and significance which I used to find at Combray when, as I passed by on my way home, in the rue de l’Oiseau, I would see from outside, like dark lacquer, the stained-glass window dedicated to Gilbert the Bad, ancestor of the Guermantes.

It is one of the mistakes of society people not to realize that if they want us to believe in them they have to believe in themselves, or at least respect the essential elements of our belief. At the time when I believed, even though I knew that the contrary was true, that the Guermantes inhabited such a palace by an hereditary right, to penetrate into the palace of the wizard or the fairy, for the gates which open only when one utters the magic word to open before me, seemed to me as difficult a task as to obtain an interview with the wizard and the fairy themselves.

But the spell of a place cannot be simply decanted or transferred, memories cannot be divided up, and of the Prince de Guermantes, now that he had himself destroyed the illusions of my belief by going to live in the Avenue du Bois, little of any note remained. The ceilings which I had been afraid would fall in on me when my name was announced, and beneath which much of the magic and fear of long ago might still for me have hovered, now looked down on parties given by an American lady in whom I had no interest.

unless he had previously dyed his hair and had now been forbidden to continue doing anything so tiring, seemed rather, as if by a kind of chemical precipitation, to have rendered gleamingly visible all the metal with which the locks, now pure silver, of his head and his beard were saturated and which sprang out from them like so many geysers, so that the old, decayed prince now wore the Shakespearian majesty of a King Lear.

He greeted her with the politeness of a child coming timidly forward, at his mother’s request, to say how do you do to some important people. And indeed a child, without a child’s pride, was what he had become.

It was with an almost triumphal severity that he repeated monotonously, with his slight stammer and a faintly sepulchral resonance: ‘Hannibal de Bréauté, dead! Antoine de Mouchy, dead! Charles Swann, dead! Adalbert de Montmorency, dead! Boson de Talleyrand, dead! Sosthène de Doudeauville, dead!’ and, every time, the word ‘dead’ seemed to fall on the deceased man like a spadeful of earth, each one heavier than the last, thrown down by a gravedigger trying to pin them more securely in their graves.

When the Baron made yet another error of pronunciation, the Duchesse’s annoyance and indignation both became too much to bear, and she said to the Baron: ‘Palamède!’ in the exasperated interrogative tone of those nervous people who cannot bear to wait a few minutes, and who, if one invites them to come in straight away, apologizing for not being quite ready, will ask in a tart tone of voice, more accusatory than apologetic: ‘I’m not disturbing you, am I?’ as if the person being disturbed was to blame.

I got out of the cab again shortly before arriving at the Princesse de Guermantes’s house and began to think once more about the lassitude and boredom with which, the previous evening, I had tried to note the line, in one of the most reputedly beautiful parts of the French countryside, that separated shadow from light on the trees.

I had not experienced, when I attempted that description, anything of the enthusiasm which, if not the only one, is one of the main criteria of talent. I tried now to extract from my memory other ‘snapshots’, particularly the snapshots it had taken in Venice, but the very word made it as boring as a photograph exhibition, and I felt that I had no more taste, or talent, for describing now what I had seen earlier, than yesterday for describing what I was observing, at that very moment, with a doleful and meticulous eye.

at the moment when, regaining my balance, I set my foot down on a stone which was slightly lower than the one next to it, all my discouragement vanished in the face of the same happiness that, at different points in my life, had given me the sight of trees I had thought I recognized when I was taking a drive round Balbec, the sight of the steeples of Martinville, the taste of a madeleine dipped in herb tea, and all the other sensations I have spoken about, and which the last works of Vinteuil had seemed to me to synthesize. Just as at the moment when I tasted the madeleine, all uneasiness about the future and all intellectual doubt were gone. Those that had assailed me a moment earlier about the reality of my intellectual talent, even the reality of literature, were lifted as if by enchantment.

a deep azure intoxicated my eyes, impressions of coolness and dazzling light swirled around me and, in my desire to grasp them, without daring to move any more than when I had tasted the madeleine and I was trying to bring back to my memory what it reminded me of, I continued, even at the risk of making myself the laughing-stock of the huge crowd of chauffeurs, to stagger, as I had done a moment before, one foot on the raised paving-stone, the other foot on the lower one. Each time I simply repeated the outward form of this movement, nothing helpful occurred; but if I succeeded, forgetting about the Guermantes’ party, in recapturing the feeling I had experienced when I put my feet down in that way, then the dazzling and indistinct vision brushed against my consciousness, as if it were saying: ‘Seize hold of me as I pass, if you are strong-minded enough, and try to solve the riddle of happiness I am offering you.’

why had the images of Combray and Venice given me at these two separate moments a joy akin to certainty and sufficient, without any other proofs, to make death a matter of indifference to me?

A servant, trying fruitlessly not to make any noise, had just knocked a spoon against a plate. The same kind of happiness I had felt from the uneven flagstones flooded over me; the feeling was again one of great heat, but quite different: mingled with the smell of smoke, alleviated by the cool fragrance of a forest setting; and I recognized that what I was enjoying so much was the same row of trees that I had found tedious to observe and to describe, and beside which, opening the bottle of beer I had had with me in the carriage, I had just for a moment, in a sort of dizziness, believed myself to be, so powerfully did the sound of the spoon against the plate give me, before I had time to pull myself together, the illusion of the sound of a workman’s hammer doing something to one of the wheels of the train while we were halted beside the little wood.

a new vision of azure passed in front of my eyes; but it was pure and saline, and billowed into a bluish, bosomy swell; the impression was so strong that the moment I was reliving seemed actually to be the present; more stupefied than the day when I wondered whether I was really going to be welcomed by the Princesse de Guermantes or whether the whole prospect was about to dissolve, I thought that the servant had just opened the window on to the beach and that everything was inviting me to go down and stroll along the sea-front at high tide; the napkin which I had taken to wipe my mouth had exactly the same stiffness and the same degree of starch as the one with which I had had so much trouble drying myself in front of the window, the first day after my arrival in Balbec, and, now in this library in the Guermantes’ hôtel, it displayed, spread across its folds and creases, the plumage of an ocean green and blue as a peacock’s tail.

And it was not just these colours which filled me with joy, but a whole moment of my life which aroused them, which had probably been an aspiration towards them, which some sense of fatigue or of sadness had perhaps prevented me from enjoying at Balbec, and which now, freed of whatever was imperfect in the external perception, pure and disembodied, filled me with delight.

remembering too clearly with what relative indifference Swann had once been able to speak of the days when he had been loved, because beneath his words he saw something different, and the sudden pain that the little phrase of Vinteuil had caused him by bringing back those very days, just as he had felt them at the time, I understood only too well that what the sensation of the uneven flagstones, the stiffness of the napkin, the taste of the madeleine, had awoken within me bore no relation to what I was trying to remember about Venice, about Balbec and about Combray, with the help of a uniform memory; and I understood that life might be deemed dreary, even though at certain moments it may seem so beautiful, because for the most part it is on the basis of something quite different from it, on the basis of images which retain nothing of life itself, that we judge it and that we disparage it.

the slightest word we have spoken at any point in our lives, the most insignificant action, was surrounded by, and was a reflection of, things which logically were not connected to it, were separated from it by the intelligence which had no need of them for its rational purposes, but in the middle of which – here, the pink reflection of the evening on the flower-covered wall of a country restaurant, a feeling of hunger, the desire for women, the pleasure of luxury – there, the blue scrolls of the morning sea enveloping the musical phrases which partially emerge from them like the shoulders of mermaids – the gesture, the simplest action remains enclosed as if within a thousand sealed vessels each one of which would be filled with things of a completely different colour, odour and temperature; quite apart from the fact that these vessels, arranged across the full length of our years, during which we have never ceased to change, even if only our thoughts or our dreams, are placed at quite different heights and give us the sensation of extraordinarily varied atmospheres.

if the memory, thanks to forgetfulness, has not been able to make a single connection, to throw up a single link between it and the present moment, if it has stayed in its place, at its date, if it has kept its distance, its isolation in the depths of a valley or at the very peak of a summit, it suddenly makes us breathe a new air, new precisely because it is an air we have breathed before, this purer air which the poets have tried in vain to make reign in paradise and which could not provide this profound feeling of renewal if it had not already been breathed, for the only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost.

I would have to execute its successive parts in slightly different materials, and would need to find one very different from that suited to memories of mornings beside the sea, or afternoons in Venice, if I wanted to depict the evenings at Rivebelle at the moment when, in the dining-room that opened on to the garden, the heat was beginning to break up, to subside and settle, when a last glimmer was still illuminating the roses on the walls of the restaurant, while the last water-colours of the day were still visible in the sky – in a different way, new, with a particular transparency and sonority, compact, cooling and pink.

I began to divine this cause as I compared these varied impressions of well-being with each other, all of which, the sound of the spoon on the plate, the uneven flagstones, the taste of the madeleine, had something in common, which I was experiencing in the present moment and at the same time in a moment far away, so that the past was made to encroach upon the present and make me uncertain about which of the two I was in; the truth was that the being within me who was enjoying this impression was enjoying it because of something shared between a day in the past and the present moment, something extra-temporal, and this being appeared only when, through one of these moments of identity between the present and the past, it was able to find itself in the only milieu in which it could live and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say outside of time. This explained why my anxieties on the subject of my death had ceased the moment when I unconsciously recognized the taste of the little madeleine, since at that very moment the being that I had been was an extra-temporal being, and consequently unconcerned with the vicissitudes of the future.

This being had only ever come to me, only ever manifested itself to me on the occasions, outside of action and immediate pleasure, when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. It alone had the power to make me find the old days again, the lost time, in the face of which the efforts of my memory and my intellect always failed.

if just now I thought that Bergotte was wrong when he talked about the joys of the life of the mind, it was because at that moment what I meant by ‘life of the mind’ was the sort of logical reasoning which had no connection with it, or with what existed in me at that moment – exactly as I had been able to find life and society boring because I was judging them according to untruthful memories, whereas I had a considerable appetite for living now that a real moment of the past had just, on three separate occasions, been recreated within me.

So many times in the course of my life reality had disappointed me because at the moment when I perceived it, my imagination, which was my only organ for the enjoyment of beauty, could not be applied to it, by virtue of the inevitable law which means that one can imagine only what is absent. But now all the consequences of that iron law had suddenly been neutralized, suspended, by a wonderful natural expedient, which had held out the prospect of a sensation – sound of a fork and a hammer, same book title, etc. – both in the past, which enabled my imagination to enjoy it, and in the present, where the actual shock to my senses of experiencing the sound, the touch of linen, etc., had added to the dreams of the imagination the thing which they were habitually deprived of, the idea of existence – and, thanks to this subterfuge, had allowed my being to obtain, to isolate, to immobilize – for the duration of a flash of lightning – the one thing it never apprehends: a little bit of time in its pure state. The being which had been reborn in me when, with such a tremor of happiness, I had heard the sound common at once both to the spoon touching the plate and the hammer hitting the wheel, or felt the unevenness beneath my feet common to the stones of the Guermantes’ courtyard and St Mark’s baptistery, etc., this spirit draws its nourishment only from the essence of things, and only in them does it find its sustenance and its delight.

Yet a single sound, a single scent, already heard or breathed long ago, may once again, both in the present and the past, be real without being present, ideal without being abstract, as soon as the permanent and habitually hidden essence of things is liberated, and our true self, which may sometimes have seemed to be long dead, but never was entirely, is re-awoken and re-animated when it receives the heavenly food that is brought to it. One minute freed from the order of time has recreated in us, in order to feel it, the man freed from the order of time. And because of that we can understand why he trusts his joy, and even if the simple taste of a madeleine does not seem logically to contain reasons for this joy, we can understand how the word ‘death’ has no meaning for him; situated outside time, what should he fear from the future? But this optical illusion which brought back to me a moment of the past incompatible with the present could not last. The scenes played out by our voluntary memory, of course, can be prolonged, as they require no more effort on our part than leafing through a picture-book.

instead of giving me a more flattering idea of my self, I had on the contrary almost doubted that self’s current reality. Just as on the day when I had dipped the madeleine in the warm herb tea, in the place where I happened to be, wherever that were, then in my bedroom in Paris, or today, at this moment, in the library of the Prince de Guermantes, or a little earlier in the courtyard of his hôtel, there had been within me, irradiating a small area around me, a sensation (taste of the soaked madeleine, the sound of metal, a feeling underfoot) which was common to the place where I was and also to another place (my aunt Octave’s bedroom, the railway carriage, St Mark’s baptistery). And at the moment I was working this out, the piercing noise of a water-pipe, just like those long cries that in summer the pleasure boats sometimes made in the evening off the coast at Balbec, made me feel (as I had already once at Paris, in a grand restaurant, at the sight of a luxurious dining-room half empty, summery and hot) much more than a sensation simply analogous to the one I had had at the end of the afternoon at Balbec when all the tables were covered with their cloths and their silverware, the vast bay-windows wide open to the beach, in one long space, a single wall of glass or stone, while the sun slowly descended over the sea where the ships were starting their cries, and all I had to do, to join Albertine and her friends who were walking on the sea-front, was to step over the woode...