My Year With Proust - Day 353

For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart.  It is, no doubt, the existence of our body, which we may compare to a vase enclosing our spiritual nature, that induces us to suppose that all our inner wealth, our past joys, all our sorrows, are perpetually in our possession.  Perhaps it is equally inexact to suppose that they escape or return.  In any case if they remain within us, for most of the time it is in an unknown region where they are of no use to use, and where even the most ordinary are crowded out by memories of a different kind, which preclude any simultaneous occurrence of them in our consciousness.  But if the context of sensations in which they are preserved is recaptured, they acquire in turn the same power of expelling everything that is incompatible with them, of installing alone in us the self that originally lived them.  Now, inasmuch as the self that I had just suddenly become once again had not existed since that evening long ago when my grandmother had undressed me after my arrival at Balbec, it was quite naturally not at the end of the day that had just passed, of which that self knew nothing, but - as though Time were to consist of a series of different and parallel lines - without any solution of continuity, immediately after the first evening at Balbec long ago, that I clung to the minute in which my grandmother had stooped over me. The self that I then was, that had disappeared for so long, was once again so close to me that I seemed still to hear the words that had just been spoken, although they were now no more than phantasm, as a man who is half awake thinks he can still make out close by the sound of his receding dream.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 784

Another, in a seemingly endless stream, of beautiful, thoughtful, ruminations on memory and meaning from Proust.  He is still struggling with the memories of his grandmother that have come flooding back during his visit to Balbec.  Proust proposes, "It is, no doubt, the existence of our body, which we may compare to a vase enclosing our spiritual nature, that induces us to suppose that all our inner wealth, our past joys, all our sorrows, are perpetually in our possession."  But, of course, they are not always in our possession.  "In any case if they remain within us, for most of the time it is in an unknown region where they are of no use to use, and where even the most ordinary are crowded out by memories of a different kind, which preclude any simultaneous occurrence of them in our consciousness."  It's easy to see why people write books claiming that Proust was a neuroscientist before there was a field of neuroscience.  You only need to go back to the famous discourse on the tea and petite madeleines to understand, although understand is probably too strong a word, how one recovers these memories.

What is key in this particular section is that the shock of the flooding gives Proust back himself, which he suggests has been gone for some time.  "Now, inasmuch as the self that I had just suddenly become once again had not existed since that evening long ago when my grandmother had undressed me after my arrival at Balbec"  If, as Linden and many others, the self is a construct of memory and perception, it would not be surprising that a "hidden" or suppressed memory might, in addition to forming the self, also play a role in re-forming the self.  "The self that I then was, that had disappeared for so long, was once again so close to me that I seemed still to hear the words that had just been spoken, although they were now no more than phantasm, as a man who is half awake thinks he can still make out close by the sound of his receding dream."  In the Quran it is repeatedly pointed out that Allah is closer than your jugular vein.  It seems to be the case with memory as well.