My Years With Proust - Day 696

   Certain people, whose minds are prone to mystery, like to believe that objects retain something of the eyes which have looked at them, that old buildings and pictures appear to us not as they originally were but beneath a perceptible veil woven for them over the centuries by the love and and contemplation of millions of admirers.  This fantasy, if you transpose it into the domain of what is for each one of us the sole reality, the domain of his own sensibility, becomes the truth.  In that sense and in that sense alone (but it is a far more important one than the other), a thing which we have looked at in the past brings back to us, if we see it again, not only the eyes with which we looked at it but all the images with which at the time those eyes were filled.  For things - and among them a book in a red binding - as soon as we have perceived them are transformed within us into something immaterial, something of the same nature as all out preoccupations and sensations of that particular time, with which, indissolubly, they blend.  A name read long ago in a book contains within its syllables the strong wind and brilliant sunshine that prevailed while we were reading it.  And this is why the kind of literature which contents itself with "describing things," with giving them merely a miserable abstract of lines and surfaces, is in fact, though it calls itself realist, the farthest removed from reality and has more than any other the effect of saddening and impoverishing us, since it abruptly severs all communication of our present self both with the past, in which things incite us to enjoy the essence of the past a second time.  Yet it is precisely this essence that an art worthy of the name must seek to express; the at least, if it fails, there is a lesson to be drawn from its impotence (whereas from the successes of realism there is nothing to be learnt), the lesson that this essence is, in part, subjective and incommunicable.

   Not is this all.  A thing which we saw, a book which we read at a certain period does not merely remain for ever conjoined to what existed then around us; it remains also faithfully united to what we ourselves then were and thereafter it can be handled only by the sensibility, the personality that were then ours.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 920-921

There are a couple concepts here which really grabbed my attention. Proust tells us, "A name read long ago in a book contains within its syllables the strong wind and brilliant sunshine that prevailed while we were reading it."  We know that our emotional state and our own experiences shapes our perception of art, just as my oft-repeated example of the three different times I read Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and the three different responses I had to the novel.  Similarly, the work of art absorbs the world around it, and I would argue that this is especially true of novels because the nature of the medium requires us to put some much work, and so much of ourselves, into them, so they in turn keep that portion forever bound up within the covers. My copy of Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle will forever carry with it the pain and guilty and fear that I felt on the first Christmas day after my marriage fell apart (I'm being more than a bit disingenuous in using that terminology since I was the one that left).  I was sad and miserable and broke, and treated myself to my first Murakami novel and spent the entire day locked up in my apartment in the Woolen Mill avoiding contact with other people.  I found myself at the bottom of a well worthy of Murakami.  I can never re-read the novel, and I have a couple times already, without feeling that same sense of personal loss and failure, and it continues to haunt the novel years later. 

I was also struck by this line: "For things - and among them a book in a red binding - as soon as we have perceived them are transformed within us into something immaterial, something of the same nature as all out preoccupations and sensations of that particular time, with which, indissolubly, they blend."  So much of the novel has, naturally, focused on the process where the present because the past, and for that matter the forgotten becomes the remembered.  Inherent in all this is the process where the material becomes the immaterial, which in turn gives it a transcendence and an immortality that it never possessed in its more material status.  Think of it this way: I was in love with a woman once, and she had a material form, a physical, carnal body, and while we were together we spoke words of the transcendent and the immortal as we promised the promises that lovers promise, but we were bound by the material world so the words meant nothing; but if the relationship ends, then her material body passes into the material world, and while that seems light as a wisp, in reality it possesses a permanence, and immortality, a weight, that the material version never achieved.