My Years With Proust - Day 683

   Still asking myself this question, and determined to-day to find the answer to it, I entered the Guermantes mansion, because always we give precedence over the inner task that we have to perform to the outward role which we are playing, which was, for me at this moment that of guest.  But when I had gone upstairs a butler requested me to wait for a few minutes in a little sitting room used as a library, next to the room where the refreshments were being served, until the end of the piece of music which was being played, the Princess having given orders for the doors to be kept shut during its performance.  And at that very moment a second intimation came to reinforce the one which had been given to me by the two uneven paving-stones and to exhort me to persevere in my task. A servant, trying unsuccessfully not to make a noise, chanced to knock a spoon against a plate and again that same species of happiness which had come to me from the uneven paving-stones poured into me; the sensation was again of great heat, but entirely different: heat combined with a whiff of smoke and relieved by the cool smell of a forest background; and I recognised that what seemed to me now so delightful was that same row of trees which I had found tedious both to observe and to describe but which I had just now for a moment, in a sort of daze - I seemed to be in the railway carriage again, opening a bottle of beer - supposed to be before my eyes, so forcibly had the identical noise of the spoon knocking against the plate given me, until I had had time to remember where I was, the illusion of the noise of the hammer with which a rail-wayman had remedied some defect on a wheel of the train while we stopped near the little wood. And then it seemed as though the signs which were to bring me, on this day of all days, out of my disheartened state and restore to me my faith in literature, were thronging eagerly about me, for, a butler who had long been in the service of the Prince de Guermantes having recognised me and brought to me in the library where I was waiting, so that I might not have to go to the buffet, a selection of petits fours and a glass of orangeade, I wiped my mouth with the napkin which had given me, and instantly, as though I had been the character in the Thousand and One Nights who unwittingly accomplishes the very rite which can cause to appear, visible to him alone, a docile genie ready to convey him to a great distance, a new vision of azure passed before my eyes, and but an azure that this time was pure and saline and swelled into blue and bosomy undulations, and so strong was this impression that the moment to which I was transported seemed to me to be the present moment: more bemused than on the day when I had wondered whether I was really going to be received by the Princesse de Guermantes or whether everything around me would not collapse, I thought that the servant had just opened the window on to the beach and that all things invited me to go down and stroll along the promenade while the tide was high, for the napkin which I had used to wipe my mouth had precisely the same degree of stiffness and starchedness as the towel with which I had found it so awkward to dry my face as I stood in front of the window on the first day of my arrival at Balbec, and this napkin now, in the library of the Prince de Guermantes's house, unfolded for me - concealed within its smooth surfaces and its folds - the plumage of an ocean green and blue like the tail of a peacock.  And what I found myself enjoying was not merely these colours but a whole instant of my life on whose summit they rested, an instant which had been no doubt an aspiration towards them and which some feeling of fatigue or sadness had perhaps prevented me from enjoying at Balbec but which now, freed from what is necessarily imperfect in external perception, pure and disembodied, caused me to swell with happiness.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 900-901

Marcel, finally almost making it into the party at the Guermantes mansion for the party, has another intense flash of memory, building upon the one he experienced with the uneven paving stones outside the building.  Once again, it's something simple: wiping his mouth with a napkin that reminds him of a towel he used at Balbec..  Proust writes, " . . . I wiped my mouth with the napkin which had given me, and instantly, as though I had been the character in the Thousand and One Nights who unwittingly accomplishes the very rite which can cause to appear, visible to him alone, a docile genie ready to convey him to a great distance . . ."  It is a typically beautifully rendered description, but what interests me about all of this is how, in Proust's mind, "And then it seemed as though the signs which were to bring me, on this day of all days, out of my disheartened state and restore to me my faith in literature, were thronging eagerly about me . . ."  It's almost is if Proust saw literature as not only having a purpose, but that it existed almost as an outside, organic entity.  These flashes of memory were fueling his desire to be a writer because it was empowering his own desire to write, and writing served as the mechanism for exploring the past and regaining time, and thus meaning.  To me, this also brings up the broader question of the purpose of literature, but that's a much larger discussion than a professor facing a small virtual mountain of papers has time to tackle this morning.  Still, I also wanted to tag this line: "And what I found myself enjoying was not merely these colours but a whole instant of my life on whose summit they rested, an instant which had been no doubt an aspiration towards them and which some feeling of fatigue or sadness had perhaps prevented me from enjoying at Balbec but which now, freed from what is necessarily imperfect in external perception, pure and disembodied, caused me to swell with happiness."  Marcel is climbing out of his despair, but he's also realizing that literature is giving him the tools to understand events that at the time were beyond his ability to grasp.