For a long time, I have enjoyed reading the work of Marcel Proust, who died one hundred years ago this week, in November 1922.
Proust’s most famous book, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu was initially translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past and then later as In Search of Lost Time, and both titles describe something important about the content of the work, that it is concerned with the operation of memory and that we experience the passage of time as loss, although neither English title quite captures the ambiguity and élan of the original French, and which tells of the perpetual struggle to keep fixed in one’s mind that which is forever fading away, and the paradoxical truth that as we grow older we have more experience of life to draw upon but we have also more that is forgotten, either partially or wholly, and this personal experience of the accumulation of knowledge that is never fully accessible to us – and, as Swann was to discover and Marcel was to repeat, such knowledge often takes the form of wisdom after the event – is also replicated in society at large, where we are surrounded by evidence of previous eras, accumulated over many generations, in the form of church spires, the names of towns, the great aristocratic families with their distinctive lineages and estates, the famous artworks of earlier periods hung in galleries or frescoed onto walls, and the culinary customs passed down within families that specify how asparagus should be cooked or that madeleines might permissibly be dipped into the tisanes with which they are served, all this social and cultural history both grows and fades at the same time, indubitably present in shaping our lives while often bereft of the values that once attached to it, simultaneously in and out of our conscious reach, and that consequently both our individual and our collective lives are conducted in a world that is saturated with meanings many of which we are no longer aware of, unless or until some accidental moment or event – unintended and involuntary – jolts our memory and brings back to our recollection something from our past that casts light upon the present, and suddenly – miraculously – we gain or regain insight into the true meaning of our lives.
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