‘But, heavens above! exclaimed Jupien, I was quite right not to want us to go too far. Look, he’s already managed to get into conversation with a gardener’s boy. Good-bye, sir, I’d better leave you, I can’t leave my invalid alone for a second, he’s nothing but a great baby.’
I got out of the cab again shortly before arriving at the Princesse de Guermantes’s house and began to think once more about the lassitude and boredom with which, the previous evening, I had tried to note the line, in one of the most reputedly beautiful parts of the French countryside, that separated shadow from light on the trees. Certainly, the intellectual conclusions I had drawn from it did not affect my sensibility so cruelly today. They were still the same. But as happened each time I was wrenched out of my habits, going out at a different time, or to a new place, I felt acute pleasure. The pleasure today seemed to me to be a purely frivolous one, that of going to an afternoon party at the house of the Princesse de Guermantes. But since I knew now that I could never attain to anything more than frivolous pleasures, what point would there be in refusing it? I told myself again that I had not experienced, when I attempted that description, anything of the enthusiasm which, if not the only one, is one of the main criteria of talent. I tried now to extract from my memory other ‘snapshots’, particularly the snapshots it had taken in Venice, but the very word made it as boring as a photograph exhibition, and I felt that I had no more taste, or talent, for describing now what I had seen earlier, than yesterday for describing what I was observing, at that very moment, with a doleful and meticulous eye. Any moment now, hosts of friends whom I had not seen for such a long time would doubtless be asking me to give up this isolation and to devote my days to them. I had no reason to refuse them since I now had proof that I was no longer good for anything, that literature could no longer bring me any joy, whether through my own fault, because I was not talented enough, or through the fault of literature, if it was indeed less pregnant with reality than I had thought.
When I pondered what Bergotte had said to me: ‘You are ill, but one cannot feel sorry for you because you have the joys of the mind,’ it struck me how wrong he had been about me. How little joy there was in this sterile lucidity! I could even add that if perhaps I did sometimes have pleasures – not of the intellect – I wasted them, and always on a different woman; so that if destiny had granted me another hundred years of life, free of infirmities, it would only have added successive extensions to a tediously protracted existence, which there seemed to be no point in prolonging thus far, let alone even further. As for the ‘joys of the intellect’, could I use that phrase for these cold observations which my perceptive eye or my precise reasoning picked out without any pleasure and which remained infertile?
But sometimes it is just when everything seems to be lost that we experience a presentiment that may save us; one has knocked on all the doors which lead nowhere, and then, unwittingly, one pushes against the only one through which one may enter and for which one would have searched in vain for a hundred years, and it opens.
Turning over the dismal thoughts which I have just set down, I had entered the Guermantes’ courtyard and in my distraction had failed to see an approaching car; at the chauffeur’s shout I had time only to step smartly aside, and as I retreated I could not help tripping up against the unevenly laid paving-stones, behind which was a coach-house. But at the moment when, regaining my balance, I set my foot down on a stone which was slightly lower than the one next to it, all my discouragement vanished in the face of the same happiness that, at different points in my life, had given me the sight of trees I had thought I recognized when I was taking a drive round Balbec, the sight of the steeples of Martinville, the taste of a madeleine dipped in herb tea, and all the other sensations I have spoken about, and which the last works of Vinteuil had seemed to me to synthesize. Just as at the moment when I tasted the madeleine, all uneasiness about the future and all intellectual doubt were gone. Those that had assailed me a moment earlier about the reality of my intellectual talent, even the reality of literature, were lifted as if by enchantment.
Without my having started a new line of thought, or discovered a decisive argument, the difficulties which just now were insoluble had lost all their importance. This time, though, I had decided not to resign myself to not knowing the reason for it, as I had done on the day I tasted the madeleine dipped in herb tea. The happiness that I had just experienced was indeed just like that I had felt when eating the madeleine, and the cause of which I had at that time put off seeking. The difference, purely material, was in the images each evoked; a deep azure intoxicated my eyes, impressions of coolness and dazzling light swirled around me and, in my desire to grasp them, without daring to move any more than when I had tasted the madeleine and I was trying to bring back to my memory what it reminded me of, I continued, even at the risk of making myself the laughing-stock of the huge crowd of chauffeurs, to stagger, as I had done a moment before, one foot on the raised paving-stone, the other foot on the lower one. Each time I simply repeated the outward form of this movement, nothing helpful occurred; but if I succeeded, forgetting about the Guermantes’ party, in recapturing the feeling I had experienced when I put my feet down in that way, then the dazzling and indistinct vision brushed against my consciousness, as if it were saying: ‘Seize hold of me as I pass, if you are strong-minded enough, and try to solve the riddle of happiness I am offering you.’ And almost at once I realized that it was Venice, all my efforts to describe which, and all the so-called snapshots taken by my memory, had never communicated anything to me, but which the sensation I had once felt on the two uneven flagstones in the baptistery of St Mark’s had now at last expressed for me, along with all the other sensations associated with that sensation on that day, which had been waiting in their place, from which a sudden chance had imperiously made them emerge, in the sequence of forgotten days. In the same way, the taste of the little madeleine had reminded me of Combray. But why had the images of Combray and Venice given me at these two separate moments a joy akin to certainty and sufficient, without any other proofs, to make death a matter of indifference to me?
Still wondering what the answer was, and determined to find it that day, I entered the Guermantes’ hôtel, because we always place less importance on the inner tasks we have to carry out than we do on the visible role we are playing, which, on this occasion, was that of a guest. But when I reached the first floor, a butler asked me to go into a small library-cum-sitting-room, next to the room where the refreshments were, and wait for the few moments until the piece being played was over, the Duchesse having ordered the doors to be kept closed during its performance. At that very moment, a second intimation occurred to reinforce the one which the two uneven paving-stones had just given me and to exhort me to persevere in my task. A servant, trying fruitlessly not to make any noise, had just knocked a spoon against a plate. The same kind of happiness I had felt from the uneven flagstones flooded over me; the feeling was again one of great heat, but quite different: mingled with the smell of smoke, alleviated by the cool fragrance of a forest setting; and I recognized that what I was enjoying so much was the same row of trees that I had found tedious to observe and to describe, and beside which, opening the bottle of beer I had had with me in the carriage, I had just for a moment, in a sort of dizziness, believed myself to be, so powerfully did the sound of the spoon against the plate give me, before I had time to pull myself together, the illusion of the sound of a workman’s hammer doing something to one of the wheels of the train while we were halted beside the little wood. It seemed after that as if the signs which were, on this day, to bring me out of my despondency and renew my faith in literature were intent on multiplying themselves, for a butler who had long been in service with the Prince de Guermantes having recognized me, and having brought to me in the library, where I stayed in order to avoid going in to the refreshment room, a selection of petits fours and a glass of orangeade, I wiped my mouth with the napkin he had given me; but
immediately, like the character in theArabian Nights who, without knowing it, performs precisely the ritual which makes appear, visible to himself alone, a docile genie ready to take him far away, a new vision of azure passed in front of my eyes; but it was pure and saline, and billowed into a bluish, bosomy swell; the impression was so strong that the moment I was reliving seemed actually to be the present; more stupefied than the day when I wondered whether I was really going to be welcomed by the Princesse de Guermantes or whether the whole prospect was about to dissolve, I thought that the servant had just opened the window on to the beach and that everything was inviting me to go down and stroll along the sea-front at high tide; the napkin which I had taken to wipe my mouth had exactly the same stiffness and the same degree of starch as the one with which I had had so much trouble drying myself in front of the window, the first day after my arrival in Balbec, and, now in this library in the Guermantes’ hôtel, it displayed, spread across its folds and creases, the plumage of an ocean green and blue as a peacock’s tail. And it was not just these colours which filled me with joy, but a whole moment of my life which aroused them, which had probably been an aspiration towards them, which some sense of fatigue or of sadness had perhaps prevented me from enjoying at Balbec, and which now, freed of whatever was imperfect in the external perception, pure and disembodied, filled me with delight.
The piece that was being played was about to end at any moment, at which point I would be obliged to enter the drawing-room. I therefore forced myself to try to see as clearly and quickly as possible into the nature of the identical pleasures I had just experienced three times in a few minutes, and then to isolate the lesson I was to draw from it. On the enormous difference between the true impression we have had of a thing and the artificial impression we give ourselves of it when we try by an act of will to represent it to ourselves, I did not pause; remembering too clearly with what relative indifference Swann had once been able to speak of the days when he had been loved, because beneath his words he saw something different, and the sudden pain that the little phrase of Vinteuil had caused him by bringing back those very days, just as he had felt them at the time, I understood only too well that what the sensation of the uneven flagstones, the stiffness of the napkin, the taste of the madeleine, had awoken within me bore no relation to what I was trying to remember about Venice, about Balbec and about Combray, with the help of a uniform memory; and I understood that life might be deemed dreary, even though at certain moments it may seem so beautiful, because for the most part it is on the basis of something quite different from it, on the basis of images which retain nothing of life itself, that we judge it and that we disparage it. At most I noted incidentally that the differences which there are between each of the real impressions – differences which explain why a uniform depiction of life cannot be a good likeness – was probably because the slightest word we have spoken at any point in our lives, the most insignificant action, was surrounded by, and was a reflection of, things which logically were not connected to it, were separated from it by the intelligence which had no need of them for its rational purposes, but in the middle of which – here, the pink reflection of the evening on the flower-covered wall of a country restaurant, a feeling of hunger, the desire for women, the pleasure of luxury – there, the blue scrolls of the morning sea enveloping the musical phrases which partially emerge from them like the shoulders of mermaids – the gesture, the simplest action remains enclosed as if within a thousand sealed vessels each one of which would be filled with things of a completely different colour, odour and temperature; quite apart from the fact that these vessels, arranged across the full length of our years, during which we have never ceased to change, even if only our thoughts or our dreams, are placed at quite different heights and give us the sensation of extraordinarily varied atmospheres. Admittedly, these are changes that we have accomplished imperceptibly; but between the memory which suddenly comes back to us and our current state, even between two memories of different years or places or times, the distance is such that it is enough, apart even from any specific originality, to render them incomprehensible to each other. Yes, if the memory, thanks to forgetfulness, has not been able to make a single connection, to throw up a single link between it and the present moment, if it has stayed in its place, at its date, if it has kept its distance, its isolation in the depths of a valley or at the very peak of a summit, it suddenly makes us breathe a new air, new precisely because it is an air we have breathed before, this purer air which the poets have tried in vain to make reign in paradise and which could not provide this profound feeling of renewal if it had not already been breathed, for the only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost.
And I noticed in passing that, in the work of art that I now, without having made any conscious resolution, felt close to undertaking, this would pose great difficulties. For I would have to execute its successive parts in slightly different materials, and would need to find one very different from that suited to memories of mornings beside the sea, or afternoons in Venice, if I wanted to depict the evenings at Rivebelle at the moment when, in the dining-room that opened on to the garden, the heat was beginning to break up, to subside and settle, when a last glimmer was still illuminating the roses on the walls of the restaurant, while the last water-colours of the day were still visible in the sky – in a different way, new, with a particular transparency and sonority, compact, cooling and pink.
I slid rapidly over all that, being more imperiously required to seek out the cause of this happiness and the nature of the certainty with which it imposed itself, an enquiry I had hitherto postponed. And I began to divine this cause as I compared these varied impressions of well-being with each other, all of which, the sound of the spoon on the plate, the uneven flagstones, the taste of the madeleine, had something in common, which I was experiencing in the present moment and at the same time in a moment far away, so that the past was made to encroach upon the present and make me uncertain about which of the two I was in; the truth was that the being within me who was enjoying this impression was enjoying it because of something shared between a day in the past and the present moment, something extra-temporal, and this being appeared only when, through one of these moments of identity between the present and the past, it was able to find itself in the only milieu in which it could live and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say outside of time. This explained why my anxieties on the subject of my death had ceased the moment when I unconsciously recognized the taste of the little madeleine, since at that very moment the being that I had been was an extra-temporal being, and consequently unconcerned with the vicissitudes of the future. It lived only through the essence of things, and was unable to grasp this in the present, where, as the imagination does not come into play, the senses were incapable of providing it; even the future towards which action tends surrenders it to us. This being had only ever come to me, only ever manifested itself to me on the occasions, outside of action and immediate pleasure, when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. It alone had the power to make me find the old days again, the lost time, in the face of which the efforts of my memory and my intellect always failed.
And perhaps, if just now I thought that Bergotte was wrong when he talked about the joys of the life of the mind, it was because at that moment what I meant by ‘life of the mind’ was the sort of logical reasoning which had no connection with it, or with what existed in me at that moment – exactly as I had been able to find life and society boring because I was judging them according to untruthful memories, whereas I had a considerable appetite for living now that a real moment of the past had just, on three separate occasions, been recreated within me.
Was it no more than a moment of the past? Perhaps it was a great deal more; something which, common both to the past and the present, is much more essential than either of them. So many times in the course of my life reality had disappointed me because at the moment when I perceived it, my imagination, w
hich was my only organ for the enjoyment of beauty, could not be applied to it, by virtue of the inevitable law which means that one can imagine only what is absent. But now all the consequences of that iron law had suddenly been neutralized, suspended, by a wonderful natural expedient, which had held out the prospect of a sensation – sound of a fork and a hammer, same book title, etc. – both in the past, which enabled my imagination to enjoy it, and in the present, where the actual shock to my senses of experiencing the sound, the touch of linen, etc., had added to the dreams of the imagination the thing which they were habitually deprived of, the idea of existence – and, thanks to this subterfuge, had allowed my being to obtain, to isolate, to immobilize – for the duration of a flash of lightning – the one thing it never apprehends: a little bit of time in its pure state. The being which had been reborn in me when, with such a tremor of happiness, I had heard the sound common at once both to the spoon touching the plate and the hammer hitting the wheel, or felt the unevenness beneath my feet common to the stones of the Guermantes’ courtyard and St Mark’s baptistery, etc., this spirit draws its nourishment only from the essence of things, and only in them does it find its sustenance and its delight. It languishes in the observation of the present where the senses cannot bring this to it, in the consideration of a past where the intelligence desiccates it, and in the expectation of a future which the will constructs out of fragments of the present and the past from which it extracts even more of their reality without retaining any more than is useful for the narrowly human, utilitarian ends that it assigns to them. Yet a single sound, a single scent, already heard or breathed long ago, may once again, both in the present and the past, be real without being present, ideal without being abstract, as soon as the permanent and habitually hidden essence of things is liberated, and our true self, which may sometimes have seemed to be long dead, but never was entirely, is re-awoken and re-animated when it receives the heavenly food that is brought to it. One minute freed from the order of time has recreated in us, in order to feel it, the man freed from the order of time. And because of that we can understand why he trusts his joy, and even if the simple taste of a madeleine does not seem logically to contain reasons for this joy, we can understand how the word ‘death’ has no meaning for him; situated outside time, what should he fear from the future?
In Search of Lost Time Page 23