*Time Regained
Time Regained, Remembrance of Things Past -Marcel Proust
Thom Conroy recommended to me reading Proust and then added, “It will change your life.”
It did.
His notions of time and courage, of love and despondency, I feel are so near to my own that I don’t know if his many million words substituted my own understanding or if, in his eloquence, he reached a level of translatable, glossolalic, transmogrifying, universal truth that my nascent balks at the world are necessarily, not to any genius of my own, in tune to. Yet I know, I know that we are kin. In the same way that the old, forgetful, wiry, stumbling character of Marcel remembers as if Time were no chasm to be bridged, the ferruginous, clear ringing of the gate’s bell as Swann finally took leave of his parents for the evening and young Marcel had only the dreamy, swaddling glory of being embraced and kissed by his soporific mother to look forward to, I know that there is a brotherhood, a pledge and almost a religion shared between Proust and I that needs traverse no lacuna of time or dismemberment of ocean.
His androgyny is commonly accepted, but I think that Proust takes his art not only to the substratum of ambisexuality, but to a place that is truly beyond gender, beyond Greek or Jew, beyond today or tomorrow. It is a spirit that is beyond exhaustion, not triumphing over it. It is a patience that has looked into the face of beauty and found nothing left to wait for. There is nothing to wait for, the fanning of these pages like billows plushing oxygen into the burning bush. Look hard.
Perhaps I am exaggerating, for surely, the opus is flawed, but there leaves in me and in Proust and in the world not a reflection of the glory of the world, but a veritable modicum of Gloria itself.
“We think that we are in love with a girl, whereas we love in her, alas! only that dawn the glow of which is momentarily reflected on her face.”
Nice to see Apocalypse Now pilfer matching Wagner’s Valkyries to a raid of zeppelins. (p. 781)
“phrases of music half emerging like the shoulders of water-nymphs.”
“A moment of the past, did I say? Was it not perhaps very much more: something that, common both to the past and to the present, is much more essential than either of them? … a fragment of time in pure state.”
“The railway, according to this mode of thinking, was destined to kill contemplation and there was no sense in regretting the age of diligence.”
“The happy years are the lost, the wasted years, one must wait for suffering before one can work. And then the idea of the preliminary suffering becomes associated with the idea of work and one is afraid of each new literary undertaking because one thinks of the pain one will first have to endure in order to imagine it.”
“Oblivion is at work within us.”
“A feeling of vertigo seized me as I looked down beneath me, yet within me, as though from a height, which was my own height, of many leagues, at the long series of the years.”
Thom Conroy recommended to me reading Proust and then added, “It will change your life.”
It did.
His notions of time and courage, of love and despondency, I feel are so near to my own that I don’t know if his many million words substituted my own understanding or if, in his eloquence, he reached a level of translatable, glossolalic, transmogrifying, universal truth that my nascent balks at the world are necessarily, not to any genius of my own, in tune to. Yet I know, I know that we are kin. In the same way that the old, forgetful, wiry, stumbling character of Marcel remembers as if Time were no chasm to be bridged, the ferruginous, clear ringing of the gate’s bell as Swann finally took leave of his parents for the evening and young Marcel had only the dreamy, swaddling glory of being embraced and kissed by his soporific mother to look forward to, I know that there is a brotherhood, a pledge and almost a religion shared between Proust and I that needs traverse no lacuna of time or dismemberment of ocean.
His androgyny is commonly accepted, but I think that Proust takes his art not only to the substratum of ambisexuality, but to a place that is truly beyond gender, beyond Greek or Jew, beyond today or tomorrow. It is a spirit that is beyond exhaustion, not triumphing over it. It is a patience that has looked into the face of beauty and found nothing left to wait for. There is nothing to wait for, the fanning of these pages like billows plushing oxygen into the burning bush. Look hard.
Perhaps I am exaggerating, for surely, the opus is flawed, but there leaves in me and in Proust and in the world not a reflection of the glory of the world, but a veritable modicum of Gloria itself.
“We think that we are in love with a girl, whereas we love in her, alas! only that dawn the glow of which is momentarily reflected on her face.”
Nice to see Apocalypse Now pilfer matching Wagner’s Valkyries to a raid of zeppelins. (p. 781)
“phrases of music half emerging like the shoulders of water-nymphs.”
“A moment of the past, did I say? Was it not perhaps very much more: something that, common both to the past and to the present, is much more essential than either of them? … a fragment of time in pure state.”
“The railway, according to this mode of thinking, was destined to kill contemplation and there was no sense in regretting the age of diligence.”
“The happy years are the lost, the wasted years, one must wait for suffering before one can work. And then the idea of the preliminary suffering becomes associated with the idea of work and one is afraid of each new literary undertaking because one thinks of the pain one will first have to endure in order to imagine it.”
“Oblivion is at work within us.”
“A feeling of vertigo seized me as I looked down beneath me, yet within me, as though from a height, which was my own height, of many leagues, at the long series of the years.”
posted by JohnWashington at 5:34 PM
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