Discordance

When I try to reckon up all that I owe to the Méséglise way, all the humble discoveries of which it was either the fortuitous setting or the direct inspiration and cause, I am reminded that it was in that same autumn, on one of those walks, near the bushy slope which overlooks Montjouvain, that I was struck for the first time by this discordance between our impressions and their habitual expression.


The Méséglise way is simply one of the regular walks the narrator would take while in Combray, first mentioned a couple of posts ago. Two things to note here. First, again we see his entirely elusive sense of time. He talks about "that same autumn," but we really don't know which autumn that was. The particular stands for the general, somehow. And then that resonant sentence about the "discordance between our impressions and their habitual expression." In Search Of Lost Time, among many many other things, is an effort by Proust to wrestle with the way habit dulls our senses, renders us careless and insensitive to Life itself. Here he points out that inside us it's a war we constantly lose, since we may well feel one thing but for any number of reasons learn to express the feeling in a way that does not do it justice or, even, communicate it at all.