My Year With Proust - Day 50

"And yet, because there is an element of individuality in places, when I am seized with a desire to see again the 'Guermantes way', it would not be satisfied were I led to the ranks of a river in which were lilies as fair, or even fairer than those in the Vivonne, any more than on my return home in the evening, at the hour when there awakened in me that anguish which later on in life, infiltrates love, and can become inseparable from it, I should have wished for any strange mother to come in and say good night to me, though she were far more beautiful and more intelligent than my own. No: just as the one thing necessary to send me to sleep contented (in that untroubled peace which no mistress, in later years, has ever been able to give me, since one has doubts of them at the moments when one believes in them, and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in her kiss, the heart of my mother, complete, without scruple or reservation, unburdened by any liability save to myself) was that it should be my mother who came, that she should incline towards me that face on which there was, beneath her eye, something that was, it appears, a blemish, and which I loved as much as all the rest . . ."  

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 194-195

Proust once again reflecting upon the purity and beauty of memory, and (well, duh) this is doubtless Proust at his best.  He speaks of the contented sleep and "untroubled peace" that his mother could give him, and which no mistress was ever able to give him in later years. The juxtaposition of mother and mistress is a little jarring here, and is doubtless ripe for psychoanalytical analysis (especially pseudo-psychoanalytical analysis) but that's less interesting to me than the merger of his mother and memory.  Granted, everyone has - or at least should have (we can all dream) - extraordinarily tender memories of our mothers. However, in Remembrance of Things Past I think that Proust's mother is more of a metaphor for the love and purity and steadfastness that one finds in memory. And truthfully, what loves you more totally and unquestionably and unconditionally than memory?