In Search of Lost Time

by Marcel Proust

  But this optical illusion which brought back to me a moment of the past incompatible with the present could not last. The scenes played out by our voluntary memory, of course, can be prolonged, as they require no more effort on our part than leafing through a picture-book. Long ago, for example, on the day when I had to go to the house of the Princesse de Guermantes for the first time, from the sun-filled courtyard of our house in Paris, I had idly gazed on images of my choice, of the place de l’Église in Combray, or the beach at Balbec, as if I had been leafing through an album of water-colours painted in the different places I had been to choose illustrations of each of these days, enabling me to say, with the selfish pleasure of a collector, as I catalogued the illustrations of my memory: ‘I’ve certainly seen some beautiful things in my life.’ My memory probably then affirmed the difference between these sensations; but all it could do was to rearrange homogeneous elements in different ways. The same was not true of the three recollections I had just had and in which, instead of giving me a more flattering idea of my self, I had on the contrary almost doubted that self’s current reality. Just as on the day when I had dipped the madeleine in the warm herb tea, in the place where I happened to be, wherever that were, then in my bedroom in Paris, or today, at this moment, in the library of the Prince de Guermantes, or a little earlier in the courtyard of his hôtel, there had been within me, irradiating a small area around me, a sensation (taste of the soaked madeleine, the sound of metal, a feeling underfoot) which was common to the place where I was and also to another place (my aunt Octave’s bedroom, the railway carriage, St Mark’s baptistery). And at the moment I was working this out, the piercing noise of a water-pipe, just like those long cries that in summer the pleasure boats sometimes made in the evening off the coast at Balbec, made me feel (as I had already once at Paris, in a grand restaurant, at the sight of a luxurious

  dining-room half empty, summery and hot) much more than a sensation simply analogous to the one I had had at the end of the afternoon at Balbec when all the tables were covered with their cloths and their silverware, the vast bay-windows wide open to the beach, in one long space, a single wall of glass or stone, while the sun slowly descended over the sea where the ships were starting their cries, and all I had to do, to join Albertine and her friends who were walking on the sea-front, was to step over the wooden frame, scarcely higher than my ankle, into a groove in which, to let the air into the hotel, all the continuous panes of glass had been slid. But the painful memory of having loved Albertine was not a part of this sensation. The only painful memory is of the dead. And they rapidly decay and nothing remains, even around their tombs, save the beauty of nature, silence and pure air. Yet it was not just an echo, the duplicate of a past sensation, that the sound of the water-pipe had just made me experience, it was that sensation itself. In this instance, as in all the preceding ones, the shared sensation had sought to recreate the old location around it, while the actual location which now occupied the place used all the resistance of its substantiality to oppose this intrusion into an hôtel in Paris of a Normandy beach, or a railway embankment. The seaside dining-room at Balbec, with its damask linen laid out like altar cloths to receive the setting sun, had tried to undermine the solidity of the Guermantes’ hôtel, to force open its doors, and for a moment had made the sofas around me flicker, as on another occasion it had done to the tables in the Paris restaurant. Always, in resurrections of this sort, the distant location engendered around the common sensation would be meshed for a moment, like a wrestler, with the actual location. The actual location had always been the winner; and the loser had always seemed to me to be the more beautiful; so beautiful that I remained in ecstasy on the uneven paving-stones, as before the cup of tea, attempting to retain, when it appeared, and bring back, the moment it escaped me, this influx and rejection of Combray, or Venice, or Balbec, which surged up only to abandon me a few moments later in the midst of these new surroundings, permeated though they now were by the past. And if the current location had not immediately been victorious, I believe I would have lost consciousness; because these resurrections of the past, for the second they last, are so complete that they do more than simply force our eyes to stop seeing the room around them in order to look at the railway line bordered with trees or the incoming tide. They force our nostrils to breathe the air of places that are actually far away, our will to choose between the different plans they suggest to us, our whole person to believe itself surrounded by them, or at least to stumble between them and the present locations, in a dizzying uncertainty akin to that which one sometimes experiences through some ineffable vision at the moment of falling asleep.

  So it began to seem that what the being which had now been resuscitated in me three or four times had just enjoyed might well have been fragments of existence which had escaped from time, but that the contemplation of them, while a contemplation of eternity, was itself fugitive. And yet I felt that the pleasure it had brought to my life, albeit at rare intervals, was the only one that was both real and fertile. The sign of the unreality of the others is surely shown clearly enough, either by the impossibility of their satisfying us, as for instance in the case of social pleasures, which at best result in discomfort caused by the ingestion of awful food, or friendship, which is a fiction because the artist who, for whatever reason, gives up an hour of work to spend an hour chatting with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist (friends being friends only within the ambit of that mild eccentricity which accompanies our lives, and which we acquiesce in, but which in our heart of hearts we know is like the wanderings of a madman who believes the furniture is alive and talks to it), or else by the sadness which follows their satisfaction, as with the sadness I felt on the day when I had been introduced to Albertine, for the trouble I had gone to, slight though it was, in order to obtain something – the acquaintance of a young girl – which seemed a slight thing only because I had obtained it. Even a more profound pleasure, like the one I should have been able to experience when I loved Albertine, was in fact perceived only inversely, through the anxiety I felt when she was not there, because when I was sure that she would soon be with me again, as on the day when she came back from the Trocadéro, I had seemed to experience no more than a vague sense of worry, whereas I became more and more excited the more deeply I penetrated, with an increasing sense of personal joy, into the sound of the knife or the taste of the tea which had brought into my bedroom my aunt Léonie’s bedroom, and with it all of Combray, and its two ways. I had therefore decided to cling on to this contemplation of the essence of things, to stabilize it, but how, by what means? Of course at the moment when the stiffness of the napkin had brought back Balbec, and for an instant had caressed my imagination, not only with the view of the sea as it had been on that day, but with the smell of the room, the strength of the wind, the desire for lunch, the uncertainty which walk to take, all of it tied to the feeling of the linen like the thousand wings of angels which revolve a thousand times a minute; and of course, at the moment when the unevenness of the two paving-stones had extended the thin, desiccated images I had of Venice and St Mark’s, and all the sensations I had felt there, into every sense and each dimension, linking the square to the church, the canal to the landing-stage and, to everything the eye can see, the world of desires seen only by the mind, I had been tempted, if not, because of the time of year, to go back and float along the canals of Venice, for me associated principally with the spring, then at least to return to Balbec. But I did not linger for an instant over this thought. In the first place, I knew that places were not the same as the pictures conjured up by their names, and that it was almost only in my dreams, in my sleep, that a place stretched out before my eyes in that pure materiality that is completely distinct from the ordinary things that we can see and touch, and which I always used to imagine them as possessing. But even when it came down to images of an altogether different kind, those of memory, I knew that the beauty of Balb
ec was something I had never experienced when I was there, and that the beauty it left me with, the beauty of memory, was something I was unable to discover when I went back there to stay for a second time. I had too much experience of the impossibility of making contact in reality with what lay deep within myself; it was not in St Mark’s Square, any more than it had been in my second visit to Balbec or in my return to Tansonville to see Gilberte, that I would find Lost Time, and travel, which did nothing but offer me once again the illusion that these bygone impressions had an existence outside of me, in some corner of a particular place, could not be the means which I was looking for. And I did not want to let myself be taken in yet again, for what I wanted to do was to find out once and for all whether it was truly possible to reach that which, always disappointed as I had been in the presence of places and human beings, I had (even though that piece of chamber music by Vinteuil seemed to tell me the opposite) believed to be unreachable. I was therefore not going to attempt another experiment on a path that I had long known led nowhere. Impressions of the sort that I was trying to stabilize would simply evaporate if they came into contact with a direct pleasure which was powerless to bring them into being. The only way to continue to appreciate them was to try to understand them more completely just as they were, that is to say within myself, to make them transparent enough to see right down into their depths. I had been unable to know pleasure at Balbec, any more than the pleasure of living with Albertine, which had become perceptible to me only after the event. And the recapitulation I was making of all the disappointments of my life, as I had lived it, and which made me believe that its reality must reside somewhere else than in action, was not bringing the different disappointments together in a purely fortuitous manner in accordance with the circumstances of my existence. I felt very strongly that the disappointments of travel and the disappointments of love were not different disappointments, but the varied aspect taken on, according to the circumstances which bring it into play, by our powerlessness to realize ourselves in material pleasure or real action. And, thinking once again about the extra-temporal joy caused by the sound of the spoon or the taste of the madeleine, I said to myself: ‘Was this the happiness which the sonata’s little phrase offered to Swann, which he was unable to find in artistic creation and therefore mistook by assimilating it to the pleasure of love; was this the happiness I had felt as a presentiment, even more supra-terrestrial than the little phrase of the sonata, of the mysterious, glowing appeal of the septet which Swann had not been able to recognize, being dead like so many others before the truth made for them can be revealed to them? And anyway, it would not have been any use to him, for the phrase could easily symbolize an appeal, but not create the powers to make Swann the writer that he was not.’

  Yet after a moment I realized, having given some thought to these resurrections of memory, that in another way, obscure impressions had sometimes, even already at Combray on the Guermantes way, attracted the attention of my thoughts, in the way these reminiscences did, but not then hiding a past impression but a new truth, a precious image that I sought to discover by efforts of the same kind as those which one makes to remember something, as if our most beautiful ideas were like tunes in music which come back, so to speak, to us without our ever having heard them, and which we do our best to listen to and to transcribe. I remembered with pleasure, because it showed me that I was already the same then and gave me back something that was fundamental to my nature, but also with sadness when I thought that I had not progressed since then, that in Combray already I used attentively to fix before my mind’s eye some image which had impelled me to look at it, a cloud, a triangle, a church spire, a flower, a pebble, feeling that there might be something quite different beneath the signs which I had to try to uncover, some form of thought they translated like those hieroglyphics that people used to believe represented only material objects. Doubtless the effort of deciphering was difficult but it alone gave reading a degree of truth. For the truths that the intellect grasps directly as giving access to the world of full enlightenment have something less profound, less necessary about them than those that life has, despite ourselves, communicated in an impression, a material impression because it enters us through our senses, but one from which it is also possible to extract something spiritual. So in each case, whether we are dealing with impressions such as that made on me by the sight of the steeples of Martinville, or recollections like that of the unevenness of the two steps or the taste of the madeleine, I had to try to interpret the sensations as the signs of so many laws and ideas, at the same time as trying to think, that is to draw out from the penumbra what I had felt, and convert it into a spiritual equivalent. And what was this method, which seemed to me to be the only one, but the making of a work of art? The consequences of this were already thronging into my mind; for whether it was a matter of recollections of the sort characterized by the sound of the fork or the taste of the madeleine, or of those truths written with the aid of figures, the meaning of which I was trying to find in my head where, church steeples or wild grasses, they composed a complicated and elaborate book of spells, their primary character was that I was not free to choose them, that they were given to me just as they were. And I sensed that this was the mark of their authenticity. I had not been looking for the two uneven paving-stones in the courtyard where I stumbled. But the very fortuity, the inevitability of the manner in which the sensation was encountered, controlled the authenticity of the past that it resuscitated, the images it let loose, since we feel it striving towards the light, we feel the joy of the real, found again. It is also the control of the truth of the whole picture made out of contemporary impressions that it brings in its train, with this infallible proportion of light and shade, intensity and omission, memory and forgetfulness, of which conscious memory or observation will always be incapable.

  As for the inner book of unknown signs (signs which seemed to stand out, as it were, in relief, and which my attention, exploring my unconscious, cast around for, stumbled over, and traced the shapes of, like a diver feeling his way underwater), for the reading of which nobody else could provide me with any rules, reading them becomes one of those acts of creation in which nobody can take our place or even collaborate with us. So many people are discouraged from writing because of this! There are almost no tasks they will not take on in order to avoid it. Every major event, from the Dreyfus Affair to the war, provided further excuses for writers not to decipher that book – they wanted to ensure the triumph of justice, to rebuild the moral unity of the nation, they were much too busy to think about literature. But these were simply excuses because they did not have, or no longer had, genius, or to put it another way, instinct. For instinct shows us the work we have to do and intelligence provides the pretexts for evading it. Excuses have absolutely no place in art, mere intentions do not count for anything, the artist has to listen to his instinct all the time, with the result that art is the most real thing there is, the most austere school of life, and the true Last Judgment. That book, the most painful of all to decipher, is also the only one dictated to us by reality, the only one whose ‘impression’ has been made in us by reality itself. Whatever the ideas that may have been left in us by our life, their material outline, the trace of the impression they originally made on us, is always the indispensable warrant of their truth. The ideas formed by pure intelligence contain no more than a logical truth, a possible truth; their choice is arbitrary. The book whose characters are forged within us, rather than sketched by us, is the only book we have. Not that the ideas which we form ourselves may not be logically right, but that we do not know whether they are true. Only the impression, however slight its material may seem, however elusive its trace, can be a criterion of truth, and on that account is the only thing worthy of being apprehended by the mind; it alone, if the mind can elucidate its truth, can bring the mind to a more perfected state, and give it pure happiness. An impression is for the writer what an experiment is for the scienti
st, except that for the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes it, and for the writer it comes afterwards. Anything we have not had to decipher, to bring to light by our own effort, anything which was already clearly visible, is not our own. The only things that come from ourselves are those we draw out of the obscurity within us, which can never be known by other people.

  A slanting ray of the setting sun suddenly reminded me of a time in my early childhood which I had completely forgotten about, when, as my aunt Léonie had a fever which Dr Percepied was afraid might be typhoid, they put me for a week in the little bedroom Eulalie usually occupied, looking over the place de l’Église, where there was nothing but rush matting on the floor and thin percale curtains which were always buzzing with a sunlight that I was not used to. And, seeing how the memory of an old servant’s little bedroom suddenly added such a different and delightful stretch of time to my past life, I contrasted this with the utter absence of impressions left on my life by the most sumptuous celebrations in the most princely mansions. The only slightly bad thing about this room of Eulalie’s was that in the evenings, because of the proximity of the viaduct, one heard the hooting of the trains. But because I knew that these bellowings proceeded from properly regulated machines, they did not frighten me in the way that I might have been frightened, in prehistoric times, by the cries of a nearby mammoth on its wild and unpredictable path.