For she had died at last

If the weather was bad all morning, my parents would abandon the idea of a walk, and I would remain at home. But, later on, I formed the habit of going out by myself on such days, and walking towards Méséglise-la-Vineuse, during that autumn when we had come to Combray to settle my aunt Léonie's estate; for she had died at last, vindicating at one and the same time those who had insisted that her debilitating regimen would ultimately kill her and those who had always maintained that she suffered from a disease that was not imaginary but organic...

At once one of the novel's characteristic achievements and its primary source of confusion is its slippery relationship with time. This may have been simultaneously intentional and unconscious. The novel is after all called In Search of Lost Time. But I'm not sure that Proust plotted out his narrative stream to describe events in time with quite the amount of befuddling fluidity as his natural writing style gravitates toward. This segment of a paragraph illustrates the enchanting craziness rather well. He begins in a way that speaks of how things generally were during childhood summers spent in Combray; the second sentence refers to somewhat more specific "later on"--namely, that one autumn when his family had to come to Combray after his aunt died. But this still exists in a vague, unspecified way--he is older than he was from his earlier Combray memories, but we don't know how old, and he is still not recalling specific events as much as general inclinations. The next number of pages he is now recalling that specific autumn in Combray but still, most often, in generalities. Even when he gets to one moment of specific memory, a few pages later, it is a memory of a particular awareness, completely having to do with internal feelings and recognitions, almost nothing to do with the actual concrete moment in time when he had the awareness.

Slippery stuff, but I think one's reading of the book is enhanced by trying to notice the way he slides in and around time and memories. That's really what he's up to here, not any kind of traditional narrative.

Derived not from books

The sculptor had also recorded certain anecdotes of Aristotle and Virgil, as precisely as Françoise in her kitchen was wont to hold forth about St. Louis as though she herself had known him, generally in order to depreciate, by contrast with him, my grandparents whom she considered less "righteous." One could see that the notions which the medieval artist and the medieval peasant (who had survived to cook for us in the nineteenth century) had of classical and of early Christian history, notions whose inaccuracy was atoned for by their honest simplicity, were derived not from books, but from a tradition at once ancient and direct, unbroken, oral, distorted, unrecognizable, and alive.

The narrator, in his elusive way, manages to put us inside a country church as he was just a moment earlier remembering a certain walk he and his family would take in the environs of Combray. We end up inside the church because he is remembering how they might take shelter there if it had begun raining while out on the walk. And there we are, both smoothly and abruptly, present with his memories about the church's interior. He recalls in particular the carved stone depictions of ancient saints and kings. The leaps he makes here are wonderful, and quite funny. Do not underestimate Proust's sense of humor.

We also see here one of the book's abiding, if subtle, themes: the disappearance of the remnants of feudal Europe, once and for all. Proust was on the scene as the ancient gave way to the modern, and noticed it, meditated on it, and commented on it. Maybe others were making similar comments at the time, but his are the ones with which we have largely been left.

Wholly Platonic satisfaction

It was an invitation which, two years earlier, would have incensed M. Vinteuil, but which now filled him with so much gratitude that he felt obliged to refrain from the indiscretion of accepting. Swann's friendly regard for his daughter seemed to him to be in itself so honourable, so precious a support that he felt it would perhaps be advisable not to make use of it, so as to have the wholly Platonic satisfaction of preserving it.


This is a very Proustian psychological wrinkle. I'm not sure how many people actually think like this--how much, that is to say, Proust continually and vigorously projected his own mini-neuroticisms onto his characters. But that may be besides the point. The mere process of his teasing out such observations--as here, with the composer Vinteuil, who was so moved by Swann's support that he preferred not to engage it--is itself the marvel. This long and winding book is full of such moments.

Powerless

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them...


This is why you can't argue with a zealot.

The complexity of circumstances

There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning...


The irony comes with those who are not, shall we say, rigid in their own virtue at all, yet remain sanctimonious in their condemnation of some alleged vice or another. Because Proust's comment here relates to a character--M. Vinteuil--whose daughter is widely suspected of being a lesbian (the word of course is not uttered), a certain recent vice president (ah! "vice" president!) of the U.S. comes to mind.

Dispatch from a bygone world

They held that one ought to set before children, and that children showed their own innate good taste in admiring, only such books and pictures as they would continue to admire when their minds were developed and mature. No doubt they regarded aesthetic merits as material objects which an unclouded vision could not fail to discern, wiwthout one's needing to nurture equivalents of them and let them slowly ripen in one's own heart.


The narrator is talking about his grandmother's sisters. It is the kind of observation that reminds us just how long ago this book was written, and what a bygone world he is reporting from. It can be easy to forget that when so many of his psychological insights seem not just up to date but sometimes, still, ahead of us. But here he gives us a glimpse of a mindset that predates our modern view of childhood. It is as fascinating as it is at once laughable and poignant--the knowledge that children have always been raised by adults convinced they know what they're doing, and yet if the adult lacks entirely any sense that a child is a being in development, then the adult is blind and the child, often, damaged.

White as a cloud

Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would creep up, white as a cloud, furtive, lustreless, suggesting an actress who does not have to "come on" for a while, and watches the rest of the company for a moment from the auditorium in her ordinary clothes, keeping in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself.


Proust is the master of the over-extended metaphor. He could have left this one early; the moon as an actress who doesn't have to come on for a while is effective in itself, it would seem. But one senses that Proust's metaphors unfold with so much detail in his own head that he can't help but reveal them to the depths that his brain has taken them, length and clarity of sentence be damned. It's almost like he doesn't trust our imaginations to be as rich as his. I can't say he's not justified in this opinion. While part of me is annoyed when he feels the need to spin his metaphors beyond normal bounds, part of me is ever fascinated by where he takes them, and by the greater spell they end up casting. Not only is his moon an actress who does not come on for a while, she sits in the auditorium, watching the play she is otherwise in "in her ordinary clothes." Will you look at a moon in the day sky the same way again?