"As a rule, however, we did not stay indoors but went out. Sometimes, before going to dress, Mme Swann would sit down at the piano. Her lovely hands emerging from the pink, or white, or, often, vividly coloured sleeves of her crepe-de-Chine housecoat, drooped over the keys with the same melancholy which was in her eyes but was not in her heart. It was on one of those days that she happened to play for me the passage in Vinteuil's sonata that contained the little phrase of which Swann had been so fond. But often one hears nothing when one listens for the first time to a piece of music that is at all complicated. And yet when, later on, this sonata had been played to me two or three times I found that I knew it perfectly well. And so it is not wrong to speak of hearing a thing for the first time. If one had indeed, as one supposes, received no impression from the first hearing, the second, the third would be equally 'first hearings' and there would be no reason why one should understand it any better after the tenth. Probably what is wanting, the first time, is not comprehension but memory. For our memory, relatively to the complexity of the impressions which it has to face while we are listening, is infinitesimal, as brief as the memory of a man who in his sleep thinks of a thousand things and at once forgets them, or as that of a man in his second childhood who cannot recall a minute afterwards what one has just said to him. Of these multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing us with an immediate picture. But that picture gradually takes shape in the memory . . ."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 570
There is an old saying in India that no one ever hears the story of Rama for the first time, meaning that Indians are born (essentially hardwired) knowing the story of Rama and the Ramayana and by extension, and more profoundly, the essence of God. Sadly, most of our first meetings and first impressions are less ethereal, so we really are meeting people or viewing art or listening to music for the first time. Unless God is truly in everything, in which case we are constantly coming into contact with, and thus knowledge of, aspects of the divine all the time - and I could name works of arts or musical pieces that by bringing me closer to the infinite convinced me that they had to contain some manifestation of God - but that's a whole other discussion. I think what Proust is grappling with here is that intersection between memory and perception, and how one informs or defines the other. I know I've met people for the first time three or four times. It definitely says something bad about me that there are many more people that I've met for the first time three or four times than their are pieces of art that I've seen for the first time three or four times or songs that I've heard for the first time three or four times. The disparity doubtless relates to placing oneself in the appropriate position to receive the perception of the person or painting or song. By this I mean that if I enter a museum or a concert hall I've placed myself in a more advantageous position, physically, but more importantly intellectually and emotionally, to engage with that new perception. I've preconditioned myself to believe that the painting or song is the deliberate work of a unique creative personality, if not genius, and thus worth knowing, as compared to meeting someone who is a random product of some backseat assignation, and thus I'm not actually engaging with them. And see, that's entirely on me, that's my fault. I've arrogantly and almost certainly erroneously decided that the vast majority of people are not interesting; are not unique creations who have something to teach me; are not manifestations or reflections of God who might bring me closer to fine. Thus I've lived too much of my life internally and closed myself off from others way too much of the time, and hopefully I'll do a better job of starting each day as if I were entering a museum.
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