My Years With Proust - Day 684

   The piece of music which was being played might end at any moment, and I might be obliged to enter the drawing room.  So I forced myself to try as quickly as possible to discern the essence of the identical pleasures which I had just experienced three times within the space of a few minutes, and having done so to extract the lesson which they might be made to yield.  The thought that there is a vast difference between the real impression which we have had of a thing and the artificial impression of it which we form for ourselves when we attempt by an act of will to imagine it did not long detain me.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 902

Proust has just experienced three vivid flashes of memory within a couple minutes, and this launches him into an intensive section of analysis - not only dominating a lengthy paragraph (which the passage featured above is only the beginning) but the next dozen pages.  So, get ready.  I'm going to break this up into several more manageable "chunks" for discussion.  This has been the nature of this project: I won't say a thing about twenty pages of text, and then devote four different posts to working my way through one dense paragraph.  Saying this, unfortunately, makes it seem like a chore, when it has been a joy from beginning to end.  When I was breaking these sections up in my mind - and in the childish scribbled notes on the pages of the book - I found myself wondering if I was not also doing this because I'm trying to put off finishing the project (well, the project isn't finished, because I have other plans for all this, but at least this part of the project).  I'm on page 902, which means that I "only" have 205 pages left, which is about two-thirds the length of an average novel.  With Proust all traditional standards go out the window.

In the space of a few minutes Marcel had experienced, and sensed, the "uneven paving-stones, the stiffness of the napkin, the taste of the madeleine" and now he was determined to tackle these stimuli and determine why they inspired the response that they did.  The problem was that he only had a few moments to do so before he would be distracted by being ushered into the party and concert.  He doesn't seem flustered by the challenge, and tells us: "The thought that there is a vast difference between the real impression which we have had of a thing and the artificial impression of it which we form for ourselves when we attempt by an act of will to imagine it did not long detain me."