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. Remembering with what relative indifference Swann years ago had been able to speak of the days when he had been loved, because what he saw beneath the words was not in fact those days but something else, and on the other hand the sudden pain which he had been caused by the little phrase of Vinteuil when it gave him back the days themselves, just as they were when he had felt them in the past, I understood clearly that what the sensation of the uneven paving-stones, the stiffness of the napkin, the taste of the madeleine had reawakened in me had no connexion with what I frequently tried to recall to myself of Venice, Balbec, Combray, with the help of an indifferentiated memory; and I understood that the reason why life may be judged to be trivial although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful is that we form our judgment, ordinarily, on the evidence not of life itself but of those quite different images which preserve nothing of life - and therefore we judge it disparagingly.
Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 902
Last time we ended with this proclamation from Marcel: "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." On one level he's pointing out that, despite the challenge he was not going to be dismayed by the challenge of trying to make sense of these intense flashes of memory and the struggle to delve into his own past. On a deeper level he's reflecting on the difference between perception and reality. He immediately thinks of the experience of his friend Swann, who dominated so much of the early stages of Remembrance of Things Past. Proust tells us, "Remembering with what relative indifference Swann years ago had been able to speak of the days when he had been loved, because what he saw beneath the words was not in fact those days but something else, and on the other hand the sudden pain which he had been caused by the little phrase of Vinteuil when it gave him back the days themselves . . ." I think what he's saying is that there is the constructed reality of what we think happened and what we think it meant, which has very little to do with that reality. And this is why we have so much trouble regaining time, because we're looking for the wrong thing and using the wrong instruments. Instead, it's the unexpected trigger, such as the Vinteuil tune, which spurred the memory because it brings us to the true memory, not the constructed memory. Because of our inability to get at the truth, we end up only reaching a badly flawed copy, and because it possesses none of the clarity and charm and meaning of the original we mistakenly think that life itself is worthless, and, again to quote Proust, "we judge it disparagingly. In his own words: " . . . and I understood that the reason why life may be judged to be trivial although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful is that we form our judgment, ordinarily, on the evidence not of life itself but of those quite different images which preserve nothing of life - and therefore we judge it disparagingly." Once we come to the importance of Proust's quest. It's impossible, I would think, to read these words and not think of Plato's allegory of the cave and the difference between the perfect forms in the World of Forms and the deeply flawed, transient copies that exist in our world. In much the same way the constructed memories that we can attain are deeply flawed and temporary and not truly representative of the truth, and thus we disparage them and in turn devalue life itself.
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