On the contrary, having forgotten the exact manner in which they faded away and wanting to re-learn this, to hear them properly again, I was obliged to block my ears to the conversations which were proceeding between the masked figures all round me, for in order to get nearer to the sound of the bell and to hear it better it was into my own depths that I had to re-descend. And this could only be because its peal had always been there, inside me, and not this sound only but also, between that distant moment and the present one, unrolled in all its vast length, the whole of that past which I was not aware that I carried about within me. When the bell of the garden gate had pealed, I already existed and from that moment onwards, for me still to be able to hear that peal, there must have been no break in continuity, no single second at which I had ceased or rested from existing, from thinking, from being conscious of myself, since that moment from long ago still adhered to me and I could still find it again, could retrace my steps to it merely by descending to a greater depth within myself. And it is because they contain thus within themselves the hours of the past that human bodies have the power to hurt so terribly those who love them, because they contain the memories of so many joys and desires already effaced for them, but still cruel for the lover who contemplates and prolongs in the dimension of Time the beloved body of which he is jealous, so jealous that he may even wish for its destruction. For after death Time withdraws from the body, and the memories, so indifferent, grown so pale, are effaced in her who no longer exists, as they soon will be in the lover whom for a while they continue to torment but in whom before long they will perish, once the desire they owed its inspiration to a living body is no longer there to sustain them.
Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1105-1106
Proust is still fixated on the bell, the ferruginous sound (see, I did make an effort to use that word more in polite company, or at least the company that reads this blog) of which keeps bringing him back to his childhood. "When the bell of the garden gate had pealed, I already existed and from that moment onwards, for me still to be able to hear that peal, there must have been no break in continuity, no single second at which I had ceased or rested from existing, from thinking, from being conscious of myself, since that moment from long ago still adhered to me and I could still find it again, could retrace my steps to it merely by descending to a greater depth within myself." It wasn't simply that the bell reminded him of the first time he heard it, and the person that he was then, but that the bell had never stopped sounded and that person in the past had never stopped existing; this is because Marcel himself had never stopped existing and thus the memory had never stopped existing, which meant that that moment had not stopped existing. It's like there are little Russian nesting doll versions of ourselves living inside of ourselves, just as the earlier reptile brain continues to exist within our modern brain. So all of these different versions of ourselves negotiate with each other as we work through each day to construct a new reality?
"For after death Time withdraws from the body, and the memories, so indifferent, grown so pale, are effaced in her who no longer exists, as they soon will be in the lover whom for a while they continue to torment but in whom before long they will perish, once the desire they owed its inspiration to a living body is no longer there to sustain them." Oddly, this passage reminds me of a conversation that we had today in my Heroines & Heroes class about the nature of being a heroine/hero, and the externality of heroism. Essentially, if no one saw you carrying out a heroic act were you actually a hero, and thus your heroism died with you. I favored a more internal sense of a heroic (read moment of sacrifice/selflessness) deed, but I granted that in a godless universe no one would know your heroism and thus it would die with you. With that in mind, what happens to the wealth of memories which you have carefully squirreled away over the years if there is no afterlife? Do they simply disappear. Marcus Aurelius suggested that soon you will have forgotten the world and the world will have forgotten you. What a pity that those memories are gone, unless you, like Proust, record them in detail in your own version of Remembrance of Things Past or your own blog. It's not as if you can download them all, at least yet.
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