More than one of the men and women who had been brought together by this party, or of whose existence it had reminded me by evoking for me the aspects which he or she had in turn presented as from the midst of different, perhaps opposite circumstances one after another they had risen before me, brought vividly before my mind the varied aspects of my own life and its different perspectives, just as a feature in a landscape, a hill or a large country house, by appearing now on the right hand and now on the left and seeming first to dominate a forest and then to emerge from a valley, reveals to a traveller the changes in direction and the differences in altitude of the road along which he is passing. As I followed the stream of memory back towards its source, I arrived eventually at images of a single person separated from one another by an interval of time so long, preserved within me by "I's" that were so distinct and themselves (the images) fraught with meanings that were so different, that ordinarily when I surveyed (as I supposed) the whole past course of my relations with that particular person I omitted these earliest images and had even ceased to think that the person to whom they referred was the same as the one whom I had later got to know, so that I needed a fortuitous lightning-flash of attention before I could re-attach this latter-day acquaintance which he or she had possessed for me. Mlle Swann, on the other side of the hedge of pink hawthorn, throwing me a look of which, as a matter of fact, I had been obliged retrospectively to re-touch the significance, having learnt that it was a look of desire; Mme Swann's lover - or the man who according to Combray gossip occupied that position - studying me from behind that same hedge with an air of disapproval which, in this case too, had not the meaning which I had ascribed to it at the time, and then later so changed that I had quite failed to recognise him as the gentleman at Balbec examining a poster outside the Casinok, the man of whom, when once every ten years I happened to remember that first image, I would say to myself: "How strange! That, thought I did not know it, was M. de Charlus!"; Mme de Guermantes at the marriage of Dr Percepied's daughter; Mme Swann in a pink dress in my great-uncle's study; Mme de Cambremer, Legrandin's sister, so fashionable that he was terrified that we might ask him to us an introduction to her - all these images and many others associated with Swann, Saint-Loup and others of my friends were like illustrations which sometimes, when I changed to come across them, I amused myself by placing as frontispieces on the threshold of my relations with these various people, but always with the feeling that they were no more than images, not something deposited within me by this particular person, not something still in any way linked to him.
Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1017-1018
Marcel wanders through the party that dominates so much of the final one-hundred pages of Time Regained, the final volume of Remembrance of Things Past, and he focuses on Mme Swann and flashes back on a much earlier memory of her, "on the other side of the hedge of pink hawthorn." What grabbed me when I read this passage was Marcel's note about the time, every ten years of so, when he would remember that scene next to the hawthorns. As we know, when we remember something we're not recalling the original memory, but actually only going back as far as the last time we remembered it. Hence, there's really no such thing as a pristine, original memory. Of course, Proust senses this (and maybe he was a proto-neuroscientist, as the book suggests - which maybe someday I'll actually read) when he points out: "Mlle Swann, on the other side of the hedge of pink hawthorn, throwing me a look of which, as a matter of fact, I had been obliged retrospectively to re-touch the significance, having learnt that it was a look of desire . . ."
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