My Years With Proust - Day 723

   I have said that it would be impossible to depict our relationship with anyone whom we have even slightly known without passing in review, one after another, the different settings of our life.  Each individual therefore - and I was myself one of those individuals - was a measure of duration for me, in virtue of the revolutions which like some heavenly body he had accomplished not only on his own axis but also round other bodies, in virtue, above all, of the successive positions which he had occupied in relation to myself.  And surely the awareness of all these different planes within which, since in this last hour, at this party, I had recaptured it, Time seemed to dispose the different elements of my life, had, by making me reflect that in a book which tried to tell the story of a life it would be necessary to use not the two-dimensional psychology which we normally use but a different sort of three-dimensional psychology, added a new beauty to those resurrections of the past which my memory had effected while I was following my thoughts alone in the library, since memory by itself, when it introduces the past, unmodified, into the present - the past just as it was at the moment when it was itself the present - suppress the mighty dimension of Time which is the dimension in which life is lived.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 1087

Everything is starting to come together for Marcel as he wades his way through the party that dominates the last hundred pages or so of the novel.  He begins to understand the complexity of the challenge ahead of him as he tries to regain Time: "And surely the awareness of all these different planes within which, since in this last hour, at this party, I had recaptured it, Time seemed to dispose the different elements of my life, had, by making me reflect that in a book which tried to tell the story of a life it would be necessary to use not the two-dimensional psychology which we normally use but a different sort of three-dimensional psychology . . ."  It's as if he's saying that understanding the present was complicated enough, and required a "two-dimensional psychology," but reclaiming the past required a "three-dimensional psychology."  Part of this, it seems to me, relates to the challenge of bringing the past to life again.  While you can dissect a corpse you can't psychoanalyze it.  As Proust shares, " . . . since memory by itself, when it introduces the past, unmodified, into the present - the past just as it was at the moment when it was itself the present - suppress the mighty dimension of Time which is the dimension in which life is lived." Now, how does one do this?  Or can one do this?  If we cannot actually make our way back to that pure, unsullied memory to live it again - because every time we've previously "relived" that memory we've also altered it - then can we ever truly understand the past because the past is perpetually being transformed into the present, just as the present was being transformed into the past.  Maybe the process of trying is as close as can get, and maybe that's enough.