My Year With Proust - Day 329

That great game of hide and seek which is played in our memory when we seek to recapture a name does not entail a series of gradual approximations.  We see nothing, then suddenly the correct name appears and is very different from what we were trying to guess. It is not the name that has come to us. No, I believe rather that, as we go on living, we move further and further away from the zone in which a name is distinct, and it was by an exercise of my will and attention, which heightened the acuteness of my inward vision, that all of a sudden, I had pierced the semi-darkness and seen daylight.  In any case if there are transitions between oblivion and memory, then these transitions are unconscious.  For the intermediate names through which we pass before finding the real name are themselves false, and bring us nowhere nearer to it.  They are not even, strictly speaking, names at all, but often mere consonants which are not to be found in the recaptured name.  And yet this labour of the mind struggling from blankness to reality is so mysterious that it is impossible after all that these false consonants are really lifelines clumsily thrown out to enable us to seize hold of the correct name.

Marcel Proust, Cites of the Plain, p. 675

For fairly obvious reasons this is making think of the brilliant movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where I learned that Jim Carrey is actually a very talented performer and was reminded, once again, what an extraordinary actress Kate Winslet is.  Occasionally I will show this film in Concepts of the Self.  It makes me think of the concept of "hiding" memories from the world.  We all hide pictures and emails from ex-girlfriends in misleading file names on our computers and phones, but I think we also do that with memories.  Like the misleading files, these memories are stored in a different life "folder," where others are not allowed to access.  And just as you don't allow your current girlfriend to roam around on your computer or phone, you don't allow her to roam around in your memories.  You avoid topics or you change the subject, and you protect those "files."  She would love to erase them, but just as you would have trouble doing so, you also don't want to do so. That person and that memory created you, and you, in a very real sense, wouldn't exist without that person and that memory.  That said, in the process of hiding them they often are hard to track down, and then they, or in this case she, comes rushing back into your life, much like the first time you met her.