Lost Time Quotes

“The slow and painful transformation of a passionate and narrowly egotistical being into a man who gives himself over wholly to some great work or other that devours him, destroys him, lives in his blood, is a trial every creative being must endure.”
― Józef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

“The ensuing heartbreak produces the same result—a feeling of unreality, and the awareness that the pleasures of life and a final understanding of it exist in the act of creation, the sole true life and true reality.”
― Józef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

“Throughout war-torn Europe, civilian and military prisoners in other Soviet and German camps experienced similar revelations in the act of reading. Jorge Semprún, a Spanish writer working with anti-Franco forces in France, was arrested by the Gestapo and shipped to Buchenwald, where, he declared, he was saved by his focus on Goethe and Giraudoux. Yevgenia Ginzburg, a teacher and Communist Party member accused of Trotskyist sympathies, drew strength from Pushkin as she fought to stay alive in the Siberian Gulag. In his book If This Is a Man, Italian chemist and writer Primo Levi described the unexpected emergence of a jumble of lines of terza rima from The Divine Comedy as he was shouldering a vessel filled with a hundred pounds of murky soup out to a work detail in the fields at Auschwitz, a teenaged prisoner from Strasbourg at his side.”
― Józef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

“Proust asserted in Contre Sainte-Beuve, “what the intellect offers us under the name of the past is not the past. The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach.”
― Józef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

“Proustian methodology cannot be codified; Czapski learned to let the book come back to him without forcing it. Undertaking this process of reclamation, he came to understand that the true search of À la recherche is not for what one can remember, but for what one has forgotten. Samuel Beckett insisted that “the man with a good memory does not remember anything because he does not forget anything,” and claimed therefore that Proust “had a bad memory.” A good memory is “uniform, . . . an instrument of reference instead of discovery.” Like Proust’s journey, Czapski’s was one of discovery, and affirmation.”
― Józef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

“responds to him in a sentence that, unfortunately, I can only repeat inexactly, summarily, and my paraphrase risks trivializing it: Barrès states that a writer, before becoming a writer, must acknowledge his role and his mission as a Frenchman.”
― Józef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

“Bergson insisted that life is continuous and our perception of it discontinuous. It follows that our intelligence is incapable of forming an adequate idea of life. It is not intelligence but intuition that provides us with an adequate idea of life. (Intuition in humans corresponds to instinct in animals.) Proust attempts to overcome the problem of the discontinuity of perception with involuntary memory, with the intuition of creating a new form and a new vision that can furnish us with an impression of life’s continuity.”
― Józef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

“Initially taking up À la recherche du temps perdu on the basis of aesthetic inquiry, Czapski soon recognized its value as a practical template for survival. The lectures offered a viable counterpoint to the repeated interrogations the men were forced to endure. His lectures were an act of resistance, stimulating the recovery and retention of personal memories that could protect and defend his colleagues from the attempt to deprive each of them of a sense of self.”
― Józef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

“involuntary memory is in itself a kind of resurrection, bringing the past back to life, “taking on form and solidity.”
― Józef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

“At a forced labor camp in Kolyma, a remote Siberian Gulag, Russian writer Varlam Shalamov hoarded details about what he was enduring with the avidity of a starving man devouring food. A great master of the short story, Shalamov is like Chekhov in hell. A fifteen-hundred-page collection of his stories includes many with deceptively unassuming titles: “A Letter,” “Cherry Brandy,” “The Wheel-barrow.” His muted voice resonates with the poverty of his expectations. The constraints on his imagination continually reshape his understanding of the depths of brutality and tenderness. One story, simply called “Marcel Proust,” tells of his having stumbled, inconceivably, onto a copy of Le Côté de Guermantes at the bottom of a package of clothing sent to a doctor at his camp. Shalamov seized the volume and began to work his way through it, ravenously. Days of reading went by. Distracted by a question put to him by a fellow prisoner, he put the book down on a bench where he had been sitting and reading. Turning back to resume, he found it was gone. Theft was a reality of prison life, but Shalamov had managed to hold onto the book as long as he could. During that time he had sought out quiet corners to read, avoiding his barracks for many days. “Proust,” he wrote, “was more valuable than sleep.”
― Józef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

“perhaps most significantly, in summing up his talks on À la recherche, Czapski presents resurrection as the engine that drives Proust’s poetics of memory, fueled by the philosopher Henri Bergson’s ideas on intuition. Certainly, involuntary memory is in itself a kind of resurrection, bringing the past back to life, “taking on form and solidity.” The narrator of À la recherche, exposed to “the existence of a realm of awareness beyond the ordinary” in the novel’s final volume, is finally able to recognize his vocation as a writer.”
― Józef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

“what the intellect offers us under the name of the past is not the past. The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach.”
― Józef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp