And then a new light, less dazzling, no doubt, than that other illumination which mad made me perceive that the work of art was the sole means of rediscovering Lost Time, shone suddenly within me. And I understood that all these materials for a work of literature were simply my past life; I understood that they had come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in indolence, in tenderness, in unhappiness, and that I had stored them up without divining the purpose for which they were destined or even their continued existence any more than a seed does when it forms within itself a reserve of all the nutritious substances from which it will feed a plant. Like the seed, I should be able to die once the plant had developed and I began to perceive that I had lived for the sake of the plant without knowing it, without ever realising that my life needed to come into contact with those books which I had wanted to write and for which, when in the past I had sat down at my table to begin, I had been unable to find a subject. And thus my whole life up to the present day might and yet might not have been summed up under the title: A Vocation. Insofar as literature had played no part in my life the title would not have been accurate. And yet it would have been accurate because this life of mine, the memories of its sadnesses and its joys, formed a reserve which fulfilled the same function as the albumen lodged in the germ-cell of a plant, from which that cell starts to draw the nourishment which will transform it into a seed long before these is any outward sign that the embryo of a plant is developing, though already within the cell there are taking place chemical and respiratory changes, secret but extremely active.
Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 935-936
Although Proust has been circling around this realization forever, he here clearly spells out the fact that that literature, and specifically the creation of what would become Remembrance of Things Past, is what will help him recover Lost Time. He tells us, "And then a new light, less dazzling, no doubt, than that other illumination which mad made me perceive that the work of art was the sole means of rediscovering Lost Time, shone suddenly within me." And this brings up the question: does a quest like this require, if not a years-long struggle like Proust's pursuit, a deliberately structured approach? His memory flashes had been random and unexpected, but they led to a much more intentional quest. On a much less impressive front, I took on the challenge of writing on Proust every day for what has turned out to be almost two years, and while I had several goals, one of them was to try and grapple with my own past (at which I've been much less successful than Proust, but I've had the occasional victory). Maybe one way to think of Proust's odyssey is to think of it as research. I can remember reading through so many 16th century letters and governmental documents that I discarded as I sorted through material that would prove the basis for my dissertation. Proust could not have known what were the essential memories when he began his search and thus it became necessary to view seemingly all of them to find the key ones (let alone the fact that the quest alone is probably the most important factor). Proust explains: "And I understood that all these materials for a work of literature were simply my past life; I understood that they had come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in indolence, in tenderness, in unhappiness, and that I had stored them up without divining the purpose for which they were destined or even their continued existence any more than a seed does when it forms within itself a reserve of all the nutritious substances from which it will feed a plant." We always have to write what we know, and what do we know more than our own life? But here's the thing: it really is a Catch-22 because unless we examine our own life we don't really know our own life at all.
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