"And so it was, for a long time afterwards, when I lay awake at night and revived old memories of Cambray, I saw no more of it than this sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background, like the panels which a Bengal fire or some electric sign will illuminate and dissect from the front of a building the other parts of which remain plunged in darkness: broad at its base, the little parlour, the dining-room, the alluring shadows of the path along which would come M. Swann, the unconscious author of my sufferings, the hall through which I would journey to the first step of that staircase, so hard to climb, which constituted, all by itself, the tapering 'elevation' of an irregular pyramid and, at the summit, my bedroom with the little passage through whose glazed door Mamma would enter; in a word, seen always at the same evening hour, isolated from all its possible surroundings, detached and solitary against its shadowy background, the bare minimum of scenery necessary (like the setting one sees printed at the head of an old play, for its performance in the provinces) to the drama of my undressing, as though all Combray had consisted of but two floors joined by a slender staircase, and as though there had been no time there but seven o'clock at night. I must own that I could have assured any questioner that Combray did include other scenes and did exist at other hours than these. But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by an exercise of the will, by my intellectual memory, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shows us of the past preserve nothing of the past itself, I should never had had any wish to ponder over this residue of Combray. To me it was in reality all dead.
Permanently dead? Very possibly.
There is a large element of hazard in these matters, and a second hazard, that of our own death, often prevents us from waiting for any length of time the favours of the first."
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 44-45
I've always had this theory, which is not completely farcical, that we go into our chosen careers not because of some assumed strength or talent, but rather but to, probably unconsciously, although maybe not, make up for or process some shortcoming in our nature. For instance, I taught with a man one time whose doctorate was in communication, and who staffed communication courses, but who, by his own admission, was a terrible public speaker. Essentially, he had trouble communicating his ideas to others. One time he told me that it was a joke in his field that folks when into communication because they could not communicate. This reminds me of the old line that people went into psychology to try and sort out their own deep psychological issues. With this sketchy logic in mind, maybe historians choose their field in an attempt to find a history to replace their own. The problem is that, as any historian worth his salt will tell you, is that we don't really know that much about the past. Despite the extraordinary love affair that the West has always had with the Greeks, the reality is that we've preserved a very tiny sliver of Greek culture. We know that Sophocles, arguably the greatest Greek tragedian, wrote one-hundred-twenty plays, of which we have seven extant works. We don't even know with any certainty where Alexander the Great, certainly the most famous person of the ancient world, is buried. And even when we do have history, it tends to be the shiny bits, and the less interesting segments, which may actually provide much more context, are generally lost.
That said, is our own personal memory any different? What is beautiful about this particular passage from Proust is how he recognizes that his memory was "isolated from all its possible surroundings, detached and solitary against its shadowy background, the bare minimum of scenery." Neuroscientists and psychologists will tell you that when you call up a memory you're not actually going back to the moment when the image was captured, but rather once to the last time it was accessed. To me this means that the memory is constantly being carved away to its quintessence, or, more importantly, its perceived quintessence. So, just as the present self is negotiated and constructed, is the past also negotiated and constructed, not once but continually? Its important because so much of our personality is a product of our memory. Proust proposes that, "To me it was in reality all dead." Potentially, but is anyone more fascinated with the past than Proust? Clearly, we have a long way to go before we can answer this question with any certainty, both for Proust and for me.
And while I'm thinking about it, I suppose it doesn't matter if the true memory is gone - and all that remains is the adulterated image. In the end, it's probably the perception of the memory that has shaped our personalities far more than the actual pristine events.
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