Time Regained (In Search of Lost Time #7)

by Marcel Proust

Yet it was not just an echo, the duplicate of a past sensation, that the sound of the water-pipe had just made me experience, it was that sensation itself. In this instance, as in all the preceding ones, the shared sensation had sought to recreate the old location around it, while the actual location which now occupied the place used all the resistance of its substantiality to oppose this intrusion

They force our nostrils to breathe the air of places that are actually far away, our will to choose between the different plans they suggest to us, our whole person to believe itself surrounded by them, or at least to stumble between them and the present locations, in a dizzying uncertainty akin to that which one sometimes experiences through some ineffable vision at the moment of falling asleep.

So it began to seem that what the being which had now been resuscitated in me three or four times had just enjoyed might well have been fragments of existence which had escaped from time, but that the contemplation of them, while a contemplation of eternity, was itself fugitive.

friendship, which is a fiction because the artist who, for whatever reason, gives up an hour of work to spend an hour chatting with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist (friends being friends only within the ambit of that mild eccentricity which accompanies our lives, and which we acquiesce in, but which in our heart of hearts we know is like the wanderings of a madman who believes the furniture is alive and talks to it),

I had therefore decided to cling on to this contemplation of the essence of things, to stabilize it, but how, by what means?

For the truths that the intellect grasps directly as giving access to the world of full enlightenment have something less profound, less necessary about them than those that life has, despite ourselves, communicated in an impression, a material impression because it enters us through our senses, but one from which it is also possible to extract something spiritual.

I had to try to interpret the sensations as the signs of so many laws and ideas, at the same time as trying to think, that is to draw out from the penumbra what I had felt, and convert it into a spiritual equivalent. And what was this method, which seemed to me to be the only one, but the making of a work of art?

they composed a complicated and elaborate book of spells, their primary character was that I was not free to choose them, that they were given to me just as they were. And I sensed that this was the mark of their authenticity. I had not been looking for the two uneven paving-stones in the courtyard where I stumbled. But the very fortuity, the inevitability of the manner in which the sensation was encountered, controlled the authenticity of the past that it resuscitated, the images it let loose, since we feel it striving towards the light, we feel the joy of the real, found again.

That book, 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. Whatever the ideas that may have been left in us by our life, their material outline, the trace of the impression they originally made on us, is always the indispensable warrant of their truth.

Only the impression, however slight its material may seem, however elusive its trace, can be a criterion of truth, and on that account is the only thing worthy of being apprehended by the mind; it alone, if the mind can elucidate its truth, can bring the mind to a more perfected state, and give it pure happiness.

Anything we have not had to decipher, to bring to light by our own effort, anything which was already clearly visible, is not our own. The only things that come from ourselves are those we draw out of the obscurity within us, which can never be known by other people.

So I had already come to the conclusion that we have no freedom at all in the face of the work of art, that we cannot shape it according to our wishes, but that as it pre-exists us, and both because it is necessary and hidden, and because it is, as it were, a law of nature, we have to discover it.

But is not this discovery, which art can cause us to make, the discovery, fundamentally, of the thing that ought to be most precious to us, and of which we normally remain unaware for ever, our true life, our reality as we have experienced it, which is often so different from what we believe it to be that we are filled with happiness when some chance event brings the real memory back to us?

Some even wanted the novel to be a sort of cinematographic stream of things. This was an absurd idea. Nothing sets us further apart from what we have really perceived than that sort of cinematographic approach.

This was an impression from long ago, in which my memories of childhood and family were affectionately mingled and which I had not immediately recognized. For a moment I had angrily wondered who the stranger was who had just upset me. But the stranger was myself, it was the child I was then, whom the book had just brought back to life within me because, knowing nothing of me except this child, it was this child that the book had immediately summoned, wanting to be looked at only by his eyes, loved only by his heart, and wanting to speak only to him. So this book which my mother had read aloud to me in Combray until it was almost morning had retained for me all the wonder of that night.

it was a pen which, without meaning to, I had charged with electricity, as schoolboys often do for fun,

and now a thousand insignificant details from Combray, unglimpsed for a very long time, came tumbling helter-skelter of their own accord to hang from the magnetized nib in an endless, flickering line of memories.

a thing which we saw at a certain time in our lives, a book which we read, does not remain for ever a part solely of what there was around us; it remains just as faithfully part of what we then were, and can be re-experienced, rethought, only by the sensibility, the thought processes, the person that we then were;

my character today is nothing but an abandoned quarry, thinking everything it contains to be monotonous and identical, but out of which each memory, like a sculptor of genius, makes countless statues.

I would prefer to derive its value from my own life, rather than mere curiosity; and it would often not be the physical copy itself that I would associate with it, but the work itself, as in the case of François le Champi, revealed to me for the first time in my little room at Combray, during perhaps the loveliest and saddest night of my life, when I had, alas! (at a time when the mysterious Guermantes appeared completely inaccessible to me) obtained from my parents their first surrendering of authority, from which I would later come to date the decline of my health and my will, and my withdrawal, each day more complete, from a difficult task – and rediscovered today, appropriately, in the Guermantes’ library, on this most glorious day, by which were illuminated suddenly not only the old

fumblings of my thought, but even the purpose of my life and perhaps of art.

I know all too well how easily these images left by the mind are effaced by the mind. For the old ones they substitute new ones which do not have the same power of resurrection. And if I still had the François le Champi which Mama took one evening out of the parcel of books my grandmother must have given me for my birthday, I would never look at it: I would be too frightened of gradually inserting into it my current impressions until they had completely covered up the old ones, I would be too frightened of seeing it become at this point a thing of the present which, when I asked it to raise up once again the child who spelled out its title in the little bedroom at Combray, the child, not recognizing its accent, would no longer respond to its call, and would remain for ever buried in oblivion.

the artist (in that instance, Titian) had a duty above all else to serve the glory of his country. But he can serve it only by being an artist, that is, on condition, while he is studying these laws, instituting his experiences and making his discoveries, which are as delicate as those of science, that he does not think about anything else – even his country – except the truth which is before his eyes.

An image presented to us by life brings us in reality, in that moment, multiple and different sensations. The sight, for example, of the cover of a book already read has, woven into the letters of its title, the moonbeams of a distant summer night. The taste of our morning café au lait brings with it the vague hope of good weather which so often, long ago, while we were drinking it out of a creamy-white, rippled porcelain bowl which might almost have been made out of hardened milk, when the day was still intact and full, made us smile at the sheer uncertainty of the early light. An hour is not just an hour, it is a vessel full of perfumes, sounds, plans and atmospheres. What we call reality is a certain relationship between these sensations and the memories which surround us simultaneously – a relationship which is suppressed in a simple cinematographic vision, which actually moves further away from truth the more it professes to be confined to it – a unique relationship which the writer has to rediscover in order to bring its two different terms together permanently in his sentence.

the truth will begin only when the writer takes two different objects, establishes their relationship, the analogue in the world of art of the unique relation created in the world of science by the laws of causality, and encloses them within the necessary armature of a beautiful style.

wasn’t she herself the beginning of art, she who made it possible for me, often after a long interval, to recognize the beauty of one thing only in another, noon at Combray only in the sound of its bells, mornings at Doncières only in the hiccuping of our water-heater? The relationship may not be very interesting, the objects ordinary, the style bad, but if no relationship has been established, there is nothing.

I slowly became aware that the essential book, the only true book, was not something the writer needs to invent, in the usual sense of the word, so much as to translate, because it already exists within each of us. The writer’s task and duty are those of a translator.

Very many people, therefore, leave it at that, extracting nothing from their impressions, growing old useless and unsatisfied, like celibates at the shrine of art! They have the bitterness that goes with virginity and indolence, but which in those instances can be cured by pregnancy or work. They get more excited by works of art than real artists do, because their excitement, not being for them the result of hard introspective investigation, bursts outward, overheats their conversation and makes them go red in the face. They think they are accomplishing something by shouting ‘Bravo, bravo’ at the tops of their voices after the performance of a work they enjoy. But these demonstrations do not force them to clarify the nature of their enjoyment, and they remain unaware of it.

since they cannot take in the truly nourishing elements in art, they are permanently in need of artistic pleasures, victims of a bulimia which never lets them feel satisfied. So they go to concert after concert to applaud the same work, believing that by being there they are fulfilling a duty, an obligation, in the way that other people feel a duty to attend board meetings or funerals.

Preserved by our memory, it is the piecemeal sequence of all those inaccurate expressions, in which nothing of what we have really experienced remains, which constitutes our thought, our life, reality, and all that the so-called art of ‘real life’ can do is to reproduce that lie, in an art which is as simple as life, devoid of beauty, and such a tedious and pointless duplication of what our eyes see and our intellect records that one wonders where anyone who engages in it can find the joyous, dynamic spark capable of setting his task in motion and then keeping it going. The greatness of true art, on the other hand, the sort of art that M. de Norpois would have called dilettante amusement, lies in rediscovering, grasping hold of, and making us recognize this reality, distant as it is from our daily lives, and growing more and more distant as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes denser and more impermeable, this reality which we run a real risk of dying without having known, and which is quite simply our life. Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature.

as art exactly reconstructs life, an atmosphere of poetry will always hover around the truths that one has reached in oneself, a gentle sense of mystery which is merely the remains of the semi-darkness we have had to pass through, the indication, as precisely marked as on an altimeter, of the depth of a work.

Each person who makes us suffer can be linked by us to a divinity of which he or she is only a fragmentary reflection at the lowest level, a divinity (or Idea) the contemplation of which immediately gives us joy in place of the pain we had before. The whole art of living is to use the people who make us suffer simply as steps enabling us to obtain access to their divine form and thus joyfully to people our lives with divinities.

all these raw materials for a literary work were actually my past life; I understood that they had come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in idleness, in tenderness, in sorrow, that they had been stored up by me without my divining their ultimate purpose, even their survival, any more than a seed does as it lays up a reserve of all the nutrients which will feed the plant. Like the seed, I would be able to die when the plant had developed, and I began to see that I had lived for its sake without knowing it, without ever having realized that there should be some contact between my life and the books I had wanted to write

this life, the memories of its times of sadness, its times of joy, formed a reserve comparable to that of the albumen stored in the ovule of a plant and from which it draws the nourishment it needs to transform itself into a seed, before anybody is aware that the embryo of a plant is developing,

The man of letters envies the painter, he would like to make sketches, to take notes, but if he does so it is a waste of time. When he writes, though, there is not one gesture of his characters, not one mannerism, one tone of voice, which has not been supplied to his inspiration by his memory, there is not one name of an invented character beneath which he cannot subsume sixty names of characters he has seen, one of whom has posed for the grimace, another for the monocle, this one for anger, that one for the conceited movement of the arm, etc. And then the writer realizes that while his dream of being a painter was not realizable in a conscious and deliberate manner, it has nevertheless been realized and that the writer, too, has created a sketch book without being aware of it.

The only things he remembers are the general. It was by tones of voice like these, by such facial movements, even if seen in his earliest childhood, that the life of others was represented in his mind, and when later he comes to write, he will describe a common movement of the shoulders, as realistically as if it had been written in an anatomist’s note-book, but in order here to express a psychological truth, and then on to those shoulders graft somebody else’s neck-movement, each person having contributed his momentary pose.

the resentment at the affront, or the pain of rejection would then have been territories we would never have known, and discovering them, painful though it is for a man, is a valuable experience for an artist.

I felt something close to horror at myself, as perhaps might some nationalist party in whose name hostilities had been fought out, and who alone would benefit from a war in which large numbers of noble victims had suffered and died, without even knowing (which for my grandmother at least would have been some compensation) the outcome of the struggle.

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book is a great cemetery where the names have been effaced from most of the tombs and are no longer legible. Yet there are times when one remembers a name perfectly well, but without knowing whether anything of the person who bore it survives within these pages. That girl with the very deep-set eyes and the drawling voice, is she here? And if she really does repose here, then do we any longer know in what part, or how to find her underneath the flowers?

It is true, then, that we are obliged to relive our private suffering with all the courage of a doctor who continues to give himself a dangerous course of injections. At the same time, though, we have to think about it in its general form, which enables us to some extent to escape its grasp, makes everybody sharers in our pain, and may even offer a kind of joy. Where life walls us in, the intellect cuts a way out, for although there may be no cure for love that is not reciprocated, the investigation of one’s suffering does provide a way out, even if only by revealing its likely consequences.

happiness alone is good for the body; whereas sorrow develops the strength of the mind.

It is only out of a habit derived from the insincere language of prefaces and dedications that writers talk about ‘my reader’. In reality each reader, when he is reading, is uniquely reading himself.

The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument which he offers the reader to enable him to discern what without this book he might not perhaps have seen in himself.

I understood the meaning of death, loves, the pleasures of the mind, the use of suffering, a vocation, etc. For while names had lost their individuality for me, words were yielding up their full meaning. The beauty of images lies behind things, the beauty of ideas in front of them. So that the former cease to impress us when we reach them, whereas we have to go beyond the latter in order to understand them.

She seemed, like an exhausted swimmer for whom the shore appears a long way away, to be scarcely able to rise above the waves of time that were submerging her. Gradually, though, by dint of studying her face, hesitant and uncertain like an unreliable memory which can no longer retain the shapes of earlier times, I finally managed to retrieve something of it by playing a little game of eliminating the squares and hexagons which age had added to her cheeks.

for just as it is hard to imagine that a dead person used to be alive, or that somebody who was alive is now dead, it is almost as difficult, and of the same order of difficulty (for the annihilation of youth, the destruction of a person full of energy and light-heartedness, is already a form of oblivion), to conceive that she who was young is now old, when the juxtaposition of the appearance of this old woman with that of the young one seems so strongly to exclude it that old and young and old again seem to be taking it in turns, alternating as in a dream, so that one would never have believed that this one had ever been that one, that they are made of the same material, that the original stuff did not take refuge elsewhere, but through the cunning manipulation of time has become this, that it really is the same material, never having left the one body – without the clue of the identical name and the positive testimony of friends, and the one appearance of verisimilitude provided by the rosacea, once a small patch among clusters of golden corn, now broadly spread beneath the snow.

And as with snow, too, the degree of whiteness of the hair seemed generally to be a sign of the depth of time lived, like those mountain-tops which, even when they seem to the naked eye to be at the same level as others, nevertheless reveal their altitude by their degree of snowy whiteness. Yet this is not universally true, especially among women. Thus the locks of the Princesse de Guermantes, which when they were grey and lustrous as silk looked like silver around her domed forehead, now that they had become white had taken on a tow-coloured, woolly mattness, which had the opposite effect of making them look as grey as dirty snow that has lost its sheen.

As for the old men whose features had changed, they still tried to keep permanently fixed on their faces one of those fleeting expressions one adopts for a second in front of a camera in an attempt either to make the most of one’s best features or else to compensate for some defect; they looked rather as if they had finally become immutable snapshots of themselves.

When he was young he had had blue eyes, always laughing, perpetually in motion, clearly in quest of something I had never thought about and which was likely to be very unselfish, the truth probably, pursued in perpetual uncertainty, with a sort of childishness but with an errant respect for all the friends of his family. Now a capable, influential and despotic politician, those blue eyes of his, which had never actually found what they were looking for, had lost their mobility, which gave them a pointed look, as if from beneath a frowning eyebrow. And the expression of gaiety, freedom and innocence had turned to one of cunning and dissimulation.