"The second suspicion, which was really no more than a variant of the first, was that I was not situated somewhere outside Time, but was subject to its laws, just like those characters in novels who, for that reason, used to plunge me into such gloom when I read of their lives, down at Combray, in the fastness of my hooded wicker chair. In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one trends seems not to move, and one can rest assured. So it is with Time in one's life. And to make its flight perceptible novelists are obliged, by wildly accelerating the beat of the pendulum, to transport the reader in a couple of minutes over ten, or twenty, or even thirty years. At the top of one page we have left a lover full of hope; at the foot of the next we meet him again, a bowed old man of eighty, painfully dragging himself on his daily walk around the courtyard of a hospital, scarcely replying to what is said to him, oblivious of the past. In saying of me, 'He's no longer a child,' 'His tastes won't change now,' and so forth, my father had suddenly made me conscious of myself in Time, and caused me the same kind of depression as if I had been, not yet the enfeebled old pensioner, but one of those heroes of whom the author, in a tone of indifference which is particularly galling, says to us at the end of the book: 'He very seldom comes up from the country now. He has finally decided to end his days there.'"
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 520
As we've discussed, there is a lag time between when I first read these passages and make my initial notes in the book (usually little more than scribbles or a clumsily drawn star, which goes back to the approach I started in college decades ago; doubtless some professor I respected told me to do that) and later when I'm actually reflecting upon them in this blog. I built that into the system, although saying system is misleading because it came together in a much more organic fashion, so that I would have time to think about Proust's ideas and not just react to his words (a crime for which I punish my own students fairly harshly). Even then I'm still not prepared to reflect upon them at the depth that they deserve, which is why some of the posts are still almost in the form of a rough draft which I hope to come back to later. Essentially, I'm still mulling some things over, and may still be for months if not years. As I've often discussed, I think this blog is mainly for me and it's a conversation that I'm having with myself (although, oddly, 145 people actually showed up yesterday to read the blog, which I'm once again attributing to the underground network of Proust lovers). Currently there's a gap of around two-hundred and fifty pages between my reading and my writing, which gives me time to brood over the more subtle meaning. It is a massive novel, albeit it a beautiful work and one which clearly deserves its reputation. During the past blissfully quiet weekend I was able to read a hundred pages of Within a Budding Grove, which it dawned on me Sunday evening was 1/32nd of the way through the entire novel. I'm including this explanation because sometimes I need this time, and more, to delve into the complexity of this brilliant work. This is one of those passages.
When do we realize that we don't exist outside of Time? To me, the moments that I realized this the most intensely were the times when I realized that Time was moving inconsistently. Maybe the best way to explain that is to bring up two relationships, which, at least up to the moment, have served to bracket my love life. I've mentioned, and hopefully with the grace and affection they deserve, relationships I had at two very different times in my life. When I was twenty I fell in love with a woman who was twenty-four, and I think it was the first person I was ever truly in love with, although I don't think I understood that at the time. I can remember thinking then that as different a person as I was at twenty than I had been at eighteen (hearkening back to yesterday's rant, although in a more gentle fashion), she at twenty-four was seemingly decades ahead of me in regard to being a functioning adult. And I'm not simply talking about the ability to have an apartment or to pay the bills on time, but, and much more importantly, to love another person as an adult would love another person. It struck me at the time that time was speeding up, and while it was just revving up for me it had kicked into an entirely different gear for her. I would be drawn into this slipstream, as we all are, even if we're not quite clear what's happening. Fast forward a few decades to my lovely relationship with a funny and amazing young British woman. There was much too large an age difference to be explained logically, with me in my early fifties and her thirty, but she from the beginning made it clear that the age difference meant nothing to her and I eventually I mostly forgot about it (until I would see pictures of the two of us together). There were constant reminders of the years that separated us, some mundane and even comical, and other more profound. In the end I reflected back on my first love affair, and decided that it wasn't simply a case of time speeding up or slowing down; rather what I learned was that time was expanding for Laura and shrinking for me, which meant that not only was I not outside of Time, coming back to Proust, but on the other side of the more linear flow of time from your mature years. This is not meant to be sad, a tad elegiac, doubtless, but one of the advantages of witnessing the shrinking of time is that you appreciate things more. They possess a weight and a significance that they didn't before, mainly because as time shrinks or folds in on itself the events and people become correspondingly more prominent. Maybe that is what we mistake for wisdom.
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