The vast structure

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.


Okay, so maybe it's one of the more over-intellectualized excuses for writing an extended flashback in the history of literature, but it's quite a tour de force nonetheless. When I first started reading the book, many years ago (I started it probably three different times before finally sticking with it), I was enduringly frustrated by Proust's obscure sense of time. You have to kind of learn to love that if you're going to read it all the way through. One is never sure when anything is happening. He goes backwards and forwards, from general (e.g. childhood) to specific (e.g. one particular encounter on one particular day) and back again without much warning.

In the end, one grows to see that he is "simply" (although it's very complicated) reflecting how the mind works. Everything is jumbled together. We can consciously go in to retrieve one particular thing, but it's always stuck onto other things, often seemingly unrelated. The entire madeleine episode in fact takes place in the vaguest of time and places--he identifies it as simply as "one day in winter," "many years" since he had thought about his family's country home in Combray. He writes continually about the real world and yet continually, only, relentlessly, through the filter of his own individual being. Which is all any of us have.