"And I should have required also that they be the same women, those whose costume interested me because, at a time when I still had faith, my imagination had individualized them and had provided each of them with a legend. Alas! in the acacia-avenue - the myrtle-alley - I did see some of them again, grown old, no more now than grim spectres of what once they had been, wandering to and fro, in desperate search of heaven knew what, through the Virgilian groves. They had long fled, and still I stood vainly questioning the deserted paths. The sun's face was hidden. Nature began again to reign over the Bois, from which had vanished all trace of the idea that it was the Elysian Garden of Women; above the grimcrack windmill the real sky was grey, the wind wrinkled the surface of the Grand Lac in little wavelets, like a real lake; large birds passed swiftly over the Bois, as over a real wood, and with shrill cries their Druidical crown, and with Dodonaic majesty, seemed to proclaim the unpeopled vacancy of this estranged forest, and helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to see in reality the pictures that are stored in them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places that we have known belong not only to the little world of space on which we map them for our convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas! as the years."
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 447
I've we've finally arrived, eighty-one posts in, to the final sentences of Swann's Way. The other night I was reading on into Within a Budding Grove, and found myself moved to let several of my friends know that I have arrived at page eight-hundred of the entire Remembrance of Things Past, which, by my brief math at that moment, constituted around eighteen percent of the way in. A younger, more impatient man - or one who was not so maniacally task-oriented - might have found those statistics daunting if not overpowering, but I had the opposite response. Rather, I was oddly relieved and reassured that I still have eight-two percent of the novel to read. When I was on Facebook I used to run a monthly music discussion for my friends, and the friends of their friends. Similarly, at school I used to organize a monthly discussion which I entitled The Correct Answer, where you pose a question every month - a question that definitively did not have a correct answer or even a Correct Answer, but if you were chosen to pose the question that month and moderate the discussion, the reward was that the end you were allowed to identify the Correct Answer (these things always tend to work best when there's a hook, and this was a moderately successful one). One month I asked folks to give their opinion of the greatest last line or lines of a novel or chapter within a novel or of a short story. It's difficult to do much better than: "The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places that we have known belong not only to the little world of space on which we map them for our convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas! as the years." This is especially true of the line, "remembrance of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment." This has been one of my favorites for years, and has been one of my Facebook quotes for years and has also popped repeatedly here on this blog as a featured quote - and doubtless had been sent around via Twitter more than a few times. One way to consider that line would be that life is regret, because every memory is based on regret - either because that moment will never come again or because of something bad you did or something that you wish you done (and, this one, of course, is always the most poignant and thus powerful and memorable). As we know from David Linden's Accidental Mind (aka The Pumpkin Book) emotion is used to stamp a memory, and what is more powerful than regret. Anyway, even if I were not dedicated to finishing all of Proust this year (or, more realistically, over the next year or so), those last couple lines would inspire me to push on.
No comments:
Post a Comment