My Year With Proust - Day 191

"But should a sensation from a bygone year - like those recording instruments which preserve the sound and the manner of the various artists who have sung or played into them - enable our memory to make us hear that name with the particular ring with which it then sounded in our ears, we feel at once, though the name itself has apparently not changed, the distance that separates the dreams which at different times its same syllables have meant to us.  For a moment, from the clear echo of its warbling in some distant spring-time, we can extract, as from the little tubes used in painting, the exact, forgotten, mysterious, fresh tint of the days which we can believed ourselves to be recalling, when, like a bad painter, we were giving to the whole of our past, spread out on the same canvas, the conventional and undifferentiated tones of voluntary memory.  Whereas, on the contrary, each of the moments that composed it employed, for an original creation, in a unique harmony, the colours of that time which are now lost to us and which, for example, still suddenly enrapture me if by some change the name 'Guermantes,' resuming for a moment after all these years the sound, so different from its sound to-day, which it had for me on the day of Mlle Percepied's marriage, brings back to me that mauve - so soft and smooth but almost too bright, to new - with which the billowy scarf of the young Duchess glowed, and, like two inaccessible, ever-flowering periwinkles, her eyes, sunlit with an azure smile.  And the name Guermantes of those days is also like one of those little balloons which have been filled with oxygen or some other gas; when I come to prick it, to extract its contents from it, I breathe the air of the Combray of that year, of that day, mingled with a fragrance of hawthorn blossom blown by the wind from the corner of the square, harbinger of rain, which now sent the sun packing, now let it spread itself over the red woolen carpet of the sacristy, clothing it in a bright geranium pink and in that, so to speak, Wagnerian sweetness and a solemnity in joy that give such nobility to a festive occasion.  But even apart from rare moments such as these, in which suddenly we feel the original entity quiver and resume its form, carve itself out of syllables now dead, if in the dizzy whirl of daily life, in which they serve only the most practical purpose, names have lost all their colour, like a prismatic top that spins too quickly and seems only grey, when, on the other hand, we reflect upon the past in our day-dreams and seek, in order to recapture it, to slacken, to suspend the perpetual motion by which we are borne along, gradually we see once more appear, side by side but entirely distinct from one another, the tints which in the course of our existence have been successively presented to us by a single name."

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 5-6

Just when I think that Proust has most brilliantly and beautifully rendered the ethereal nuances of memory he tops himself once again; what an extraordinary passage.  As I'm wont to opine, I only wish I were smarter and better educated, because a smarter and more scholarly version of myself could probably write a novel just on the emotions and reflections expressed in this one paragraph.  Sadly, you're stuck with me, but we'll soldier on as best we can.

The first thing that jumped out at me on my re-read of this section is his comments on music, and how it relates to the Discography discussion we've been carrying on for eleven weeks now.  On the one hand it's funny to think of how much the world has changed in the century since the publication of Remembrance of Things Past: "But should a sensation from a bygone year - like those recording instruments which preserve the sound and the manner of the various artists who have sung or played into them . . . "  When we each have hundreds or thousands of songs on our phones, it's difficult to imagine an age when just the concept of recording the sound seemed otherworldly.  He then follows it up by pointing out how that the recording will "enable our memory to make us hear that name with the particular ring with which it then sounded in our ears, we feel at once, though the name itself has apparently not changed, the distance that separates the dreams which at different times its same syllables have meant to us.  For a moment, from the clear echo of its warbling in some distant spring-time, we can extract, as from the little tubes used in painting, the exact, forgotten, mysterious, fresh tint of the days which we can believed ourselves to be recalling . . . " Why does music invoke such extraordinary memories?  We know that scent provokes vivid memories because the part of the brain relating to smell is hard up against the part of the brain that manages memory.  I don't know about the auditory structure of the brain, but I guess my theory would be that music is, by definition, very evocative and malleable - unlike a more concrete visual image - so from the very beginning it is grist for the memory's mill.  Moreover, it also, again arguably more than visual images, elicits intense emotion, and it is emotion that stamps memory.  For example, I associate songs such as Birds, Winterlong, Linger, Fountain of Sorrow, Please Do Not Let Me Go, Minneapolis, Summerlong, Empty Threat, English Girls Approximately, Those Three Days, Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want with various and sundry women (and showing a rare sense of decorum I won't identify), and because they are stamped with intense emotion, the memories come flooding back.

I also like his comparison of memory to a spinning top, and how they all seem to flow together in the way the different colors of the top blur into grey.  It seems to me that one of the things that Proust does best is slow down or stop the movement of the top, and this allows him to identify and dissect the different colors that make up his memories.  One of the reasons why I embarked on this project, beyond my decades old desire to read Remembrance of Things Past, is a desire to develop that same skill, or some limited version of it.  Essentially, in an attempt to make some sense of my life it seems necessary to gain some greater mastery over my own past, my own memories.  However, as we know, memories are gossamer things, and one never knows whether in the process of selecting and separating out these memories for study that you aren't actually damaging them if not truly creating new false memories.  Having said that, even if you're manipulating corrupted data, the process of identifying it and trying to make sense of it promotes self-reflection and hopefully some measure of insight.