I should have no occasion to dwell upon this visit which I paid to the neighbourhood of Combray at perhaps the moment in my life when I thought least about Combray, had it not, precisely for that reason, brought me what was at least a provisional confirmation of certain ideas which I had first conceived along the Guermantes way, and also of certain other ideas which I had conceived on the Meseliglise way. I repeated every evening, in the opposite direction, the walks which we used to take at Combray, in the afternoon, when we went the Meseglise way. One dined now at Tansonville at any hour at which in the past one had long been asleep at Combray. And because of the seasonal heat, and also because Gilberte spent the afternoon painting in the chapel attached to the house, one did not go out for one's walk until about two hours before dinner. The pleasure of those earlier walks, which was that of seeing, on the way home, the crimson sky framing the Calvary or mirroring itself in the Vivonne, was now replaced by the pleasure of setting forth at nightfall, when one encountered nothing in the village save the blue-grey, irregular and shifting triangle of a flock of sheep being driven home. Over one half of the fields the sun had already set; above the other half the moon was already alight and would soon bathe them in their entirety. It sometimes happened that Gilberte let me go without her, and I set off, trailing my shadow behind me, like a boat gliding across enchanted waters. But as a rule Gilberte came with me. The walks that we took thus together were very often those that I used to take as a child: how then could I help but feel much more acutely even than in the past on the Guermantes way the conviction that I would never be able to write, reinforced by the conviction that my imagination and my sensibility had weakened, when I found how incurious I was about Combray? I was distressed to see how little I relived my early years. I found the Vivonne narrow and ugly alongside the towpath. Not that I noticed any great physical discrepancies from what I remembered. But, separated as I was by a whole lifetime from places I now happened to be passing through again, there was lacking between them and me that contiguity from which is born, even before we have perceived it, the immediate, delicious and total deflagration of memory. Having doubtless no very clear conception of its nature, I was saddened by the thought that my faculty of feeling and imagining things must have diminished since I no longer took any pleasure in these walks.
Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 709-710
And so we've now passed into Time Regained, the seventh and final volume of Remembrance of Things Past. I suppose I should do some research into how the last few volumes were published posthumously after Proust's death and the role that others played in finalizing the novel, but at this point I'm mainly concerned with the final copy as it exists and my response to it. As I've said from the beginning, this isn't meant to be a scholarly examination of Remembrance of Things Past, a task I'm eminently unqualified to bring about. Still, before my first re-read of the novel, which I'm guessing will be in about three years, I'm hoping to read a biography of Proust and some more scholarly work on Remembrance of Things Past, or, maybe I won't, and instead I'll just happily exist within the confines of the novel.
As we begin Marcel seems a little sad and struggling with some elegiac memories, but there doesn't seem to be the almost crushing pain that marked so much of The Fugitive. Instead he's involved with Gilberte, herself very unhappy, in a relationship that has yet to be defined, although it's difficult to read an account of their time together without assuming that they're lovers. It's not the mad passion of new love, but instead the comfortable relationship that a man would have with an ex-mistress when they get together years later, more of an homage to the past than a celebration of the present or the future. Essentially, Marcel feels numb, which in its own way is a process of healing. In these early days of the novel he seems mainly concerned about his lack of connection to the past: "But, separated as I was by a whole lifetime from places I now happened to be passing through again, there was lacking between them and me that contiguity from which is born, even before we have perceived it, the immediate, delicious and total deflagration of memory. Having doubtless no very clear conception of its nature, I was saddened by the thought that my faculty of feeling and imagining things must have diminished since I no longer took any pleasure in these walks." I suppose most of us feel this pain, and fear, on some level, the loss of the past, but it must have been particularly haunting to Proust since his driving force was to recapture the past, and how was he even to write without this inspiration?
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