My Years With Proust - Day 717

And then, since the past, however remote it may be for a woman like the Duchess who has more head than heart, may nevertheless chance to have escaped oblivion, "Do you recall," she said, as though to thank me for remembering her dress and her shoes, "that Basin and I brought you home in our carriage?  You couldn't come in with us because of some girl who was coming to see you after midnight. Basin thought it the funniest thing in the world that you should receive visits at such an hour." Indeed that was the evening when Albertine had come to see me after the Princesse de Guermantes's party and I recalled the fact just as clearly as the Duchess, I to whom Albertine was now as unimportant as she would have been to Mme de Guermantes had Mme de Guermantes known that the girl because of whom I had had to refuse their invitation was Albertine. (In fact, she was quite in the dark as to the identity of this girl, had never known it and only referred to the incident because of the circumstances and the singular lateness of the hour.)  Yes, I recalled the fact, for, long after our poor dead friends have lost their place in our hearts, their unvalued dust continues to be mingled, like some base alloy, with the circumstances of the past.  And though we no longer love them, it may happen that in speaking of a room, or a walk in a public park, or a country road where they were present with us on a certain occasion, we are obliged, so that the place which they occupied may not be left empty, to make allusion to them, without, however, regretting them, without even naming them or permitting others to identify them.  Such are the last, the scarcely desirable vestiges of survival after death.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p 1064

Marcel continues his discussion with the Duchesse de Guermantes, and she repays his remembrance of her red dress with a memory of him (which Proust associates with her manners and her desire to return the favor).  She remembers how that very night Marcel had rushed off to meet an unnamed woman, not surprisingly Albertine, although the Duchesse certainly didn't know that then, and now, years after Albertine's death, it would have meant even less.  And, of course, in response to her query, Marcel does remember his disappearance, and then reflects, "Yes, I recalled the fact, for, long after our poor dead friends have lost their place in our hearts, their unvalued dust continues to be mingled, like some base alloy, with the circumstances of the past."  Our lovers and our friends, even the tangential ones, never really leave, even if it is only to get dragged into the retelling of another memory that is seemingly more important.  "Such are the last, the scarcely desirable vestiges of survival after death."  All of this, logically, reminds me of the Bill Evans's song Time Remembered - or maybe it's just the turning of the year and the passing of time.