My Years With Proust - Day 691

   I knew for one thing that countries were not such as their names painted them to my imagination, so that now it was scarcely ever except in my dreams, while I was asleep, that a place could lie spread before me wrought in that pure matter which is entirely distinct from the matter of the common things that we see and touch but of which, when I had imagined these common things without ever having seen them, they too had seemed to me to be composed: and I knew also that the same was true of that other species of image which is formed by the memory, so that not only had I failed to discoverer the beauty of Balbec as I had imagined it when I had gone there for the first time, I had failed also when I went back the second time to rediscover the remembered beauty which that first visit had left me.  Experience had taught me only too well the impossibility of attaining in the real world to what lay deep within myself; I knew that Lost Time was not to be found again on the piazza of St Mark's any more than I had found it again on my second visit to Balbec or on my return to Tansonville to see Gilberte, and that travel, which merely dangled once more before me the illusion that these vanished impressions existed outside myself, could not be the means which I sought.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 910

"Experience had taught me only too well the impossibility of attaining in the real world to what lay deep within myself; I knew that Lost Time was not to be found again on the piazza of St Mark's any more than I had found it again on my second visit to Balbec or on my return to Tansonville to see Gilberte, and that travel, which merely dangled once more before me the illusion that these vanished impressions existed outside myself, could not be the means which I sought."   I was talking to a friend today about the quest for Lost Time, and whether or not Proust, or for that matter his half-witted protege me, was really trying to find Lost Time at all.  I'm a historian by training, and maybe by temperament, which means that I'm always trying to make sense of the past, and that therefore I place greater weight on the past than it deserves.  Hence, in s relationship, I'm the one who is going to say something like, "but you promised me," which is really just a celebration of an event in the past, and thus I'm way too often guilty of being guilty of exactly the sort of thing Marcus Aurelius warns us against.  My point was that maybe what I was trying to do was not to regain Lost Time, but rather to free myself from it.