I understood now why it was that the Duc de Guermantes, who to my surprise, when I had seen him sitting on a chair, had seemed to me so little aged although he had so many more years beneath him than I had, had presently, when he rose to his feet and tried to stand firm upon them, swayed backwards and forwards upon legs as tottery as those of some old arch-bishop with nothing solid about his person but his metal crucifix, to whose support there rushes a mob of sturdy young seminarists, and had advanced with difficulty, trembling like a leaf, upon the almost unmanageable summit of his eighty-three years, as though men spend their lives perched upon living stilts which never cease to grow until sometimes they become taller than church steeples, making it in the end both difficult and perilous for them to walk and raising them to an eminence from which suddenly they fall. And I was terrified by the thought that the stilts beneath my own feet might already have reached that height; it seemed to me that quite soon now I might be too weak to maintain my hold upon a past which already went down so far. But at least, if strength were granted me for long enough to accomplish my work, I should not fail, even if the results were to make them resemble monsters, to describe men first and foremost as occupying a place, a very considerable place compared with the restricted one which is allotted to them in space, a place on the contrary prolonged past measure - for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch epochs that are immensely far apart, separated by the slow accretion of many, many days - in the dimension of Time.
Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1106-1107
Wow, I can't believe that I've reached the end, if it is the end, of my clumsy, ill-considered commentary on Remembrance of Things Past. When I began this two years ago I didn't really think that I'd bang away for seven-hundred thirty-seven posts, although, considering that Proust's work of over three-thousand pages I should I figured that it would a challenge. I don't know if I'm prepared for it to end, if for no other reason than I don't feel qualified to comment on what I think of Proust or how the process has changed me. I told someone the other day that there are a small number of books that definitively made me a better person: Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, the Qur'an and Remembrance of Things Past. There are books that changed me, such as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio or W. Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Six Pence or Haruki Mirakakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Charles Dickens's David Copperfield or Brooks Hansen's The Chess Garden because I read them at times of my life when I was growing or in a state or change or even a state of crisis, and they helped me understand myself and grow - or even just survive - but I don't think that's the same as definitively making me a better person. The Qur'an and the Meditations were very obvious choices on that front, but why Proust? Maybe it's a reflection on the mental discipline that it took to get all the way through the novel and to comment on it every day for two years, but it's certainly more than that. In the process of accompanying Proust on his journey through the past, I was forced to address my own, and it has often been an uncomfortable experience. I've had to come face to face with so many of my own failings and the damage that I've done to people I love, but maybe in the process of facing these problems, even if I'm positive I have not been nearly hard enough on myself, I can find ways to address these shortcomings and make it up to them. I think I've learned that the essential human drive is the quest for beauty, and that every other possible answer to that question is a subset of that greater need. And to understand and reach that beauty, and I'm not nearly there yet, I had to address a lot of ugliness. In the end, as Proust reminds us, it is in vain that we linger before the hawthorns.
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