“The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.”
From the day we are born, we carry with us a bouquet of memories. Like the flowers of a meadow they blossom and wilt, some staying for years, others lost to the recesses of time. This begs the question: If memories come in and out of life, as often and as ungraspable as flakes of snow cascading in a winter storm, what importance can they really hold?
Our experiences are often emboldened with time. A simple hill becomes an otherworldly mountain for a bright-eyed child; a slight frown from a passerby becomes a lifelong insecurity; even the vestige of a goodnight kiss can fill one’s soul to the brim with warmth. We go through life as everyday creatures, stuck between responsibilities and vices that send our impressionable minds through whirlwinds of thought and worry, while our past holds a tapestry of immeasurable abstract beauty, always just out of the mind's eye.
And thus is the world captured in Marcel Proust’s seminal novel, In Search of Lost Time. Published in seven separate volumes over a decade and a half and finalized posthumously in 1927, the novel marks a tangible changing point in the schemata of literature. In the years since, writers have sought to imitate it, others to parody it, yet it remains fixed as a centerpiece of the modernist movement, one of the most vibrant periods of time in the history of literature. It still to this day holds the Guinness World Record for the longest novel ever published.
So what is it about, and why should one brave the 4,500-page count and the endless discourse about translation just to find a copy of the first volume?
In short: to smell the flowers.
Less enigmatically, Proust managed to accomplish, like no other author ,other than maybe James Joyce, a true mirror into life itself. The novel is daunting in length and readability, consisting of labyrinthian sentences of nested clauses that stretch on average 50 words, highlighted by a particularly infamous 923-word sentence in the fourth novel. Yet, to the trained eye, the prose simply flows. It is the stanzas of a master poet translating onto the page his most cherished memories. In each volume, sentence, and word, Proust manages to capture the tragic condition we all find ourselves in, always just within grasp of something beautiful, but curtailed by the demands of routine existence.
The novel follows the story of a writer, who, for the sake of brevity, I will simply refer to as Marcel. Always a book in hand from a young age, he vows to write a novel. Marcel lives in an upper middle-class apartment but spends his summers in an idyllic country town, Combray, France, with his parents, their maid François, and his grandmother. Together, these forces of influence mold Marcel’s departure from the clandestine world of his room, ripe with books and full of room for his thoughts, to French high society. Amongst French society, Marcel is quickly enveloped in an upward ascent, sharing in friendship with many of France’s most powerful figures of the time in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Paris’ wealthiest district. In the world of the intellectual salon and house party, he finds himself at home amongst men and women deemed most “respectable” by higher society. Following artists, barons, and dukes, he shapes his life to become that of a story worth telling: one of intrigue, wealth, and glamour.
Underneath the glamour, however, Marcel remains unsatisfied. Crippled with anxiety and a myriad of health issues, each day becomes a challenge, each morning an exercise in finding a reason to get out of bed. As the world around him expands, his own mind seems to contract, trapping him amidst a stream of consciousness that threatens to swallow him whole in unending terrors and frivolities. At the epicenter of his ails are two issues: love and work.
As the years pass by like the passing vignettes from the window of a moving train, the book remains unwritten, unattempted, and the dreams of ascent in the artistic world begin to crumble. Despite the apparent splendor of life, he cannot find a way to translate it to the page. Simultaneously, his insecurities leak into his relationship, primarily with his lover Albertine. He becomes completely crippled with a jealous longing for an unrequited love he himself is incapable of reciprocating leading to a separation in which she leaves him no more than a short letter.
By the final volume, he is almost completely alone. Time has stripped away almost all that he held dear, and on the streets of Paris, the talk of war drowns out all other conversation. Albertine, his grandmother, his parents, and many other faces of the past have left him forever, and all that remain are old friends, once vibrant, but rendered shadows of their former selves by the constant crawl of time.
In the midst of death, however, Marcel is granted an epiphany. Surrounded by vestiges of times past, he finds his purpose. He was always a writer, and thus it is his duty to write and to salvage his lost time through his art. He is unable to run from himself any longer, and in the twilight years of his life finds his motivation to write.
Through his novel, Proust manages to capture the human experience as a whole through its two most important factors: memory and time, and in doing so reveals the underlying beautiful melancholy of existence. Melancholy describes a state of pensive sadness. In a state of melancholy, the world seems to slow down, and all that remains is what lies right before you. From this state arise the memories that feel as though they bleed right through the fabric of time. “Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”
Oftentimes we’re told to shy away from this mode of existence. In a world where productivity holds precedence over hobbies, passions, and even happiness, there is no place nor incentive for thoughtfulness. But in living as so many of us have, vacillating between work and the endless opportunities of stimulation modern life offers us, we’ve lost sight of the fundamental beauty of life. Melancholy finds us in those moments of inactivity, of true relaxation, and threatens to tear us from our passivity, but perhaps what it is truly doing is showing us a way out. Proust shows us that only in slowing down, in taking time to notice the finer details, in recognition and remembrance of things past, can we discover the beauty imminent in the world around us.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”