Those bright eyes

Her black eyes gleamed, and since I did not at that time know, and indeed have never since learned, how to reduce a strong impression to its objective elements, since I had not, as they say, enough "power of observation" to isolate the notion of their color, for a long time afterwards, whenever I thought of her, the memory of those bright eyes would at once present itself to me as a vivid azure, since her complexion was fair; so much so that, perhaps if her eyes had not been quite so black--which was what struck one most forcibly on first seeing her--I should not have been, as I was, so especially enamored of their imagined blue.


Phew. A lot to unpack here. "I did not at that time know, and indeed have never since learned": what's going on with that? What an odd way to phrase that. Normally if you note that you didn't know something at some point in the past you are simultaneously acknowledging that you have since learned. Proust instead phrases it to accentuate his own perceived shortcoming. And yet as his reader, you feel compelled to disagree, sort of. That is, you have by now, 150 pages in, been bombarded with his efforts to describe things both in his outer and inner worlds. So it would seem obvious that he can do what he says he can't--that is, reduce a strong impression to its objective elements. Isn't that what the whole book is sort of about? But then again, he may not believe that he's doing that at all. He is lost in his own subjectivity--and by implication telling us all that we are lost in our own--and so despairs of ever making that translation from subjective to objective.

But, in any case, for him to accuse himself of lacking enough "power of observation" seems almost a purposeful joke. And yet at the same time he is here noting a powerful truth that is perhaps one of his gargantuan novel's most abiding themes: that we are ever prisoner to our own memories, which themselves are inescapably divorced--sometimes in small ways, sometimes in large ways--from what actually happened. His idea that the very blackness of Gilberte's eyes was itself what caused him to remember--and love--them as bright blue strikes me as an incredibly complex metaphor for something that I can't quite put my finger on.