My Years With Proust - Day 736

   In this vast dimension which I had not known myself to possess, the date on which I had heard the noise of the garden bell at Combray - that far-distant noise which nevertheless was within me - was a point from which I might start to make measurements.  And I felt, as I say, a sensation of weariness and almost of terror at the thought that all this length of Time had not only, without interruption, been lived, experienced, secreted by me, that it was my life, was in fact me, but also that I was compelled so long as I was alive to keep it attached to me, that it supported me and that, perched on its giddy summit, I could not myself make a movement without displacing it.  A feeling of vertigo seized me as I looked down beneath me, yet within me, as though from a height, which was my own height, of many leagues, at the long series of the years.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 1106

We've reached the high point of the party, at least for Marcel, and almost the end of the novel.  He understands the adventure and also the challenge that awaits him.  In a moment of pristine clarity he realizes: "And I felt, as I say, a sensation of weariness and almost of terror at the thought that all this length of Time had not only, without interruption, been lived, experienced, secreted by me, that it was my life, was in fact me, but also that I was compelled so long as I was alive to keep it attached to me, that it supported me and that, perched on its giddy summit, I could not myself make a movement without displacing it."  We've talked before about the Things We Carry (and that is a novel I need to reread) and it sometimes staggering when you consider the weight of them.  They're sort of like the chains that Jacob Marley, and Ebenezer Scrooge, carried around in A Christmas Carol.  When I was engaged to the LBG she would sometimes get puzzled/angry at the complexity of my life and its concomitant relationships, and I could only tell her that I was over fifty and I was decades into a life well and messily lived.  And, unlike Proust, I wasn't even trying to make sense of it, just survive it.

And we've reached the penultimate post on this two year journey.  So, if anyone ever asks you how blog posts it takes to comment on all of Remembrance of Things Past, the Correct Answer is 737. Having said, that, I suspect there will be additional posts as I come to terms with all this, especially when I embark on the great Re-Read.

"One . . . two . . . three . . . seven hundred thirty-seven [crunch]."