Swann’s Path – In Search of Lost Time Volume 1 by Marcel Proust
Imagine a collage, an assemblage of the entire output of august artists, especially those of fin-de-siècle France, those one-time upstarts and latter-day establishment mainstays we’ve since learned to label “Impressionists.” Imagine also this vast canvas repeated in multiple shades, so as not only to present to the eye a vast, almost limitless expanse of color, of detail, of form, of beautiful ladies in the finest clothing, of gardens filled with flowers of every of the season, of the carriage-crowded streets of Paris shining through the murky, humid afternoons, of the multicolored lilies floating on the surface of the still lakes or tranquil streams of rural France, of the ballerinas performing their ballet or rehearse their slender legs outlined in the bar, but also revisit each view from multiple angles in different colors, at different times, from different perspectives with different impressions. It seems that we see the same things repeated, over and over again, but always different, always changed, always vivid. And imagine this presented not only in the brilliant colors of the original, but also in the nuances imposed by the vividly remembered memory that knows each scene, but cannot fix the exact date, time, or shape, so that they once again form truly solid living structures. rebuilt. of what the original eyes only partially registered. And then close those eyes, so that the images can be extracted from their memories, those indelible images, but perhaps inaccurately archived, that we have collected without realizing it by virtue of the unfinished act of living. And then we share that experience.
And then, in the words of the author himself, so it is with our own past. It is a work in vain to try to recover it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove useless. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of the intellect, in some material object (in the sensation that material object will give us) that we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether or not we find it before we ourselves have to die..
But the imperative is that we must try. We only get one shot at this moving target we call ‘life’ and our target is by its very nature wayward. We remain forever unsure of the boundary between what we remember and what we imagine, especially when one blends into the other in that uncontrolled, blur-edged, imposed confusion that inevitably results when we try to focus on a passing image and have only a memory of its image. momentary impression in the mind to remember any detail you threw.
And the result? The result is a passing stream, an ever-changing and ever-changing view that always comprises the same view, the same solid objects that once, or perhaps still, populated its shores. And, from the distance of time, who can be sure of what we feel? Who can be sure of the motive, the consequence, the intention, or the stratagem? Who can testify that those remembered words were spoken with love, hate, respect, mockery, criticism, praise, or just to pass the time we now realize we never had? Is it irony that perhaps it lasts longer, as in an invitation to dine with a family acquaintance, M. Legrandin?
Only the day before, I had asked my parents to send me to have dinner with him that same Sunday night. “Come and keep your old friend company,” he had said to me. “Like the bouquet that a traveler sends us from a land to which we will never return, come and let me breathe from the distant country of your adolescence the aroma of those spring flowers among which I also wandered, many years ago. Come with the primrose, with the canon’s beard, with the golden cup; come with the stone whip, of which the corsages are made, tokens of love, in the Balzacian flora, come with that flower of the Resurrection morning, the Easter daisy, come with the snow globes of the guelder rose, which they begin to embalm the alleys of your great-aunt’s garden with their fragrance before the last snows of Lent melt from her soil. Solomon, and with the multicolored enamel of thoughts, but they see, above all, with the spring breeze, still cooled by the last frosts of winter, that recedes, because of the two butterflies that have waited outside all morning, the closed portals of the first Jerusalem. “
At home the question arose whether, all things considered, he should still send me to dine with Monsieur Legrandin.
Irony, then, leaves its mark, but not as deep as the scars left by cuts from youthful love, obsession or jealousy. In a vast, detailed, and probably reconstructed recollection of M. Swann’s relationship with Odette, a woman he initially compares to an image in a Botticelli painting in the Sistine Chapel, we share the accelerated euphoria of a man who becomes obsessed with sensual beauty. of a desirable and available woman, we euphemistically accompany him in arranging the flowers that decorate her bodice and then suffer the woodworm, destroying doubts about her motives that spring from an all-encompassing and almost destroying jealousy.
There is, of course, a lot of socializing. It would not be far from the truth to observe that these people spend more time worrying about whom to specifically and justifiably include and exclude from a guest list than at work, in their beds, or on the road. And decisions are often based on class, that universal categorization and mark of quality that seems to permeate and suffocate human society at any time and place, the very quality that revolutions can occasionally but unsuccessfully try to eradicate. And what happens at these gatherings remains primarily social, whatever the focus of the evening.
If the pianist suggests playing the Ride of the Valkyries or the Tristan Prelude, Mme. verdurin he would protest, not because he disliked the music, but, on the contrary, that it made too violent an impression on him. “So you want me to have one of my headaches? You know very well, it’s the same every time I play that. I know what’s in store for me. Tomorrow, when I want to get up, nothing to do!” If he wasn’t going to play, they would talk, and one of his friends, usually the painter who was in fashion there that year, would “spin”, as M. Verdurin said, “a fucking funny story that made everyone crack up.” . with laughter”, and especially Mrs. Verdurin, for whom so strong was her habit of taking the figurative accounts of her emotions literally – Dr. Cottard, who was then starting in general practice, “would really have to come one day and set his jaw, which had been dislocated from laughing so much.
And this is a place and a time where no one lives life halfway, where no person is really reticent about expressing emotion, even when what is expressed quite sincerely may, at a later date, convey at least a partial sense of excess. . -statement. In his childhood he had been taught to caress and care for these sinuous, long-necked creatures, Chopin’s phrases so free, so supple, so tactile, that they begin seeking their final resting place somewhere beyond and far from earth. address. where they started, where you’d expect them to get to, phrases that have fun in those fantastic bypasses only to come back more deliberately with a more premeditated reaction, with more precision, like a crystal bowl that, if you hit it, will ring and it will throb until you cry out loud in anguish for grabbing your heart.
Contemplating this vast mosaic of stitched art, this jumble of people brought together by time and the filter of memory, can sometimes feel like taking an ocean voyage in a small boat, rigged with too scant a sail, a boat that, often calm. It seems to be drifting. The real trick, without a doubt, is to relax and let yourself go. Such is life, it seems.
