My Years With Proust - Day 689

   But this species of optical illusion, which placed beside me a moment of the past that was incompatible with the present, could not last for long.  The images presented to us by the voluntary memory can, it is true, be prolonged at will, for the voluntary memory requires no more exertion on our part than turning over the pages of a picture-book.  On the day, for instance, long ago, when I was to visit the Princesse de Guermantes for the first time, I had from the sun-drenched courtyard of our house in Paris idly regarded, according to my whim, now the Place de l'Eglise at Combrary, now the beach at Balbec, as if I had been choosing illustrations for that particular day from an album of water-colours depicting the various places where I had been; and with the egotistical pleasure of a collector, I had said to myself as I cataloged these illustrations stored in my memory: "At least I have seen some lovely things in my life." And of course my memory had affirmed that each one of these sensations was quite unlike the others, though in fact all it was doing was to make varied patterns out of elements that were homogeneous.  But my recent experience of the three memories was something utterly different.  These, on the contrary, instead of giving me a more flattering idea of myself, had almost caused me to doubt the reality, the existence of that self.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 906

"At least I have seen some lovely things in my life." As part of his continued and extended reflection on the three intense flashes of memory (which I think I've done a remarkably poor job of analyzing, which I'm attributing to being sick, being buried by finals week grading, being poorly educated, and being not that bright; but maybe on my re-read I'll do a better job) thinks back to a time that he made the above statement on the eve of a trip to visit the Princesse de Guermantes in the past.  The point that Proust is making now is that he's not the same person at all who would have considered that a justifiable use of one's time. We've talked repeatedly about the role that class plays in Remembrance of Things Past, and one of the reasons why you would get to see some "lovely things" is that you have the resources to see some "lovely things," which can also limit your intellectual universe to a desire to see some "lovely things."  Now, I made the point a couple of times recently that maybe the whole point of the human experience since its inception was the quest for beauty, which I believe in more completely the older I get.  That, of course, is not the same thing, and might actually be the exact opposite, of a desire to see some "lovely things." In fact, I think the desire to see some "lovely things" is to the existential pursuit of the beauty is as masturbation is to great sex; a generally pointless, exercise in vapidity that in the end only distracts you from the real thing.  That said, how many of us never get beyond the desire to see some "lovely things"?  I think about that when I plan my study abroad trips with students, and how much richer the experience is because we've embedded them in a class that will give the students the ability, inshallah, to see this new world in a deeper, more meaningful way.