My Year With Proust - Day 49

   "So the 'Meseglise way' and the 'Guermantes way' remain for me linked with many of the little incidents of that one one of all the divers lives along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in sudden reverses of fortune, the richest in episodes; I mean the life of the mind.  Doubtless it makes in us an imperceptible progress, and the truths which have changed for us its meaning and its aspect, which have opened new paths before our feet, we had for long been preparing for their discovery; but that preparation was unconscious; and for us those truths date only from the day, from the minute when they became apparent.  The flowers which played then among the grass, the water which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as environment to their apparition lingers around the memory of them still with its unconscious or unheeding air; and, certainly, when they were slowly scrutinized by this humble passer-by, by this dreaming child - as the face of a king is scrutinized by a petition lost in the crowd - that scrap of nature, that corner of a garden could never suppose that it would be thanks to him that they would be elected to survive in all their most ephemeral details; and yet the scent of hawthorn which strays plundering along the hedge from which, in a little while, the dog-roses will have banished it, a sound of footsteps followed by no echo, upon a gravel path, a bubble formed at the side of a water-plant by the current, and formed only to burst - my exaltation of mind has borne them with it, and has succeeded in making them traverse all these successive years, while all around them the once-trodden ways have vanished, while those who thronged those ways, and even the memory of those who thronged those trodden way, are dead.  Sometimes the fragment of landscape thus transported into the present will detach itself in such isolation from all associations that it floats uncertainly upon my mind, like a flowers island of Delos, and I am unable to say from what place, from what time - perhaps, quite simply, from which of my dreams - it comes.  But it is pre-eminently as the deepest layer of my mental soil, as firm sites on which I still may build, that I regard the Meseglise of Guermantes 'ways'.  It is because I used to think of certain things, of certain people, while I was roaming along them, that the things, the people which they taught me to know, and these alone, I still take seriously, still give me joy. Whether it be that the faith which creates has ceased to exist in me, or that reality will take shape in the memory alone, the flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 193-194

What is fascinating about this passage it that it touches upon the role, not simply that memory has on us, but the role that we have on memory, and thus reality. Through readings in both the Linden and Hock books from Concepts of the Self the students learn that memory is a malleable thing, and that when we recall a memory we're actually only going back to the last time that the memory was accessed, as compared to truly jumping back twenty years to when it was initially perceived and imprinted on our mind. This means that when we pull out the memory we are viewing it with new eyes, through different emotional and experiential lenses; we're different people, so we're seeing perceiving the memory in a different way.  And when we put the memory away again we aren't storing the original pristine memory, but the reconsidered and reconfigured one. So, the memory transformed us, but we continually transform the memory, which in turn continues to transform us; a dance across the decades. More philosophically, and I guess I would argue more importantly, in the very act of initially capturing the perception we have given it a permanence, a reality, albeit an evolving reality, that it would not have had on its own.  We have taken, to use Proust's own words, the most "ephemeral" of passing perceptions - an image or a scent (and because of the unique structure of the brain, especially a scent) - and transformed a spiderweb into an anvil (or, considering how the past weighs on people, it might be better to say an anchor), which has such tangible mass that what we see today cannot equal what we saw twenty years ago - or even be real.  As Proust opines, the "reality will take shape in the memory alone, the flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers."

It seemed like the appropriate place to include Poussin's Et in Arcadia ego, for the obvious reasons.  It's also the title of my one of my favorite Millennium episodes.