Because I often had to glue one piece on to another, the papers that Françoise called my manuscribbles kept getting torn. But Françoise would always be able to help me mend them, just as she put patches on the worn-out parts of her dresses or, while she was waiting for the glazier, as I was for the printer, she would stick a piece of newspaper over a broken pane in the kitchen window. Françoise would say to me, pointing to my note-books, eaten away like wood that insects have got into: ‘It’s all moth-eaten, look, that’s a pity, there’s a page here that looks like lace,’ and examining it closely like a tailor: ‘I don’t think I can mend this, it’s too far gone. It’s a shame, those might have been your best ideas. You know what they used to say in Combray, even the best furriers don’t know as much as the moths. They always get into the best material.’
But given that individual entities (whether human or not) in a book are made up of a large number of impressions which, taken from many girls, many churches, many sonatas, are then used to form a single sonata, a single church, a single girl, should I not make my book in the same way as Françoise made her braised beef in aspic, which M. de Norpois had so much liked, in which the jelly was enriched by so many carefully selected extra pieces of meat? And I was finally on the point of achieving what I had so longed for on my walks on the Guermantes way and believed impossible, as I had believed it to be impossible, when I got back home, ever to get used to going to sleep without kissing my mother or, later, to the idea that Albertine loved women, an idea with which in the end I lived without even noticing its presence; for our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.
Yes, the idea of Time that I had just formed was telling me that it was time to apply myself to the work. It was high time; but, and this was the explanation for the anxiety which had beset me as soon as I entered the drawing-room, when the made-up faces had given me the idea of lost time, was there still time, and was I even still in a sufficiently fit condition? The mind has its landscapes and only a short time is allowed for their contemplation. My life had been like a painter who climbs up a road overhanging a lake that is hidden from view by a screen of rocks and trees. Through a gap he glimpses it, he has it all there in front of him, he takes up his brushes. But the night is already falling when there is no more painting, and after which no day will break. Only, one prerequisite of my work as I had just recently conceived it in the library was the thorough investigation of impressions which needed first to be recreated through memory. But that was threadbare.
First of all, nothing having yet been started, I might well feel anxious, even though I might think, on account of my age, that I still had a few years ahead of me, for my hour might strike at any moment. For I really had to start from the fact that I had a body, that is that I was perpetually under threat from a twofold danger, external and internal. Yet I spoke of it in those terms only as a convenience of language. For the internal danger, such as from a cerebral haemorrhage, is also external, as it threatens the body. And having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind. To human, thinking life, which should probably not be described as a miraculously perfected state of animal and physical life, so much as an imperfect state, still at the same rudimentary level as the communal existence of protozoa in polyparies or as the body of the whale, etc., in the organization of the life of the mind. The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.
But accepting the distinction between the two sorts of danger threatening the mind, and beginning with the external one, I remembered that in my life so far, it had often happened in moments of intellectual excitement in situations where any physical movement on my part was suspended, as for example when I left the Rivebelle restaurant, half drunk, in a carriage to go to a nearby casino, that I felt the present object of my thought very clearly within myself, and understood how entirely dependent on chance it was, not only that this object had not entered my thoughts before, but also that, along with my body, it might be annihilated at any moment. I did not worry much about that then. My cheerfulness was not tempered by prudence or anxiety. I did not care if this joy ended after a second and became nothing. It was no longer like that now; because the happiness I experienced now was not merely the product of a purely subjective tension of the nerves, which isolates us from the past but, quite the opposite, came from an expansion of my mind in which this past was reshaped and re-actualized, and this gave me, though unfortunately only for a moment, something of permanent value. I would have liked to bequeath it to those whom I could have enriched with my treasure. Certainly what I had experienced in the library and was trying to protect was still pleasure, but it was no longer selfish pleasure, or at least its selfishness (for all the fruitful altruisms in nature develop in a selfish way, human altruism that is not selfish is sterile, like the altruism of a writer who breaks off his work to see a friend in trouble, or to accept a public office, or to write propaganda articles) is of a kind that is useful for other people. I no longer had the indifference I used to feel coming back from Rivebelle, I felt myself enhanced by the work I carried within me (as if by something precious and fragile that had been entrusted to me and which I would have wished to pass on intact to the hands for which it was destined, which were not my own). Now, feeling myself the bearer of a work of literature made the idea of an accident in which I might meet my death seem much more dreadful, even (to the extent that the work seemed necessary and lasting) absurd, in contrast with the scope of my wishes, with the impetus of my thoughts, but that did not make it any the less possible since (as the simplest incidents show us every day of our lives, as when, while one is trying very hard not to make a sound that might disturb a sleeping friend, a carafe placed too near the edge of the table falls off and wakes him) accidents, being products of material causes, can perfectly well occur at a moment when very different wishes, which they unwittingly destroy, make them quite appalling. I was well aware that my brain was a rich mining-basin, in which was a vast expanse and enormous diversity of valuable deposits. But would I have time to exploit them? I was the only person capable of doing it. For two reasons: my death would mean the disappearance not only of the one mineworker capable of extracting these minerals, but also of the mineral deposit itself; and when, in a little while, I left to go home, it needed only the car I would take to crash into another for my body to be destroyed and for my mind, from which life would be withdrawn, to be forced to abandon for ever the new ideas which at this very moment, not having had the time to put them in the securer surroundings of a book, it was anxiously keeping locked up within its quivering, protective, but fragile pulp. But by a bizarre coincidence this rational fear of danger emerged at a moment when I had recently become much less concerned about the idea of death. There had been a time when the fear of no longer being myself had horrified me, and similarly with each new love I felt (for Gilberte, for Albertine), because I could not bear the idea that one day the being who loved them would no longer exist, which seemed like a kind of death. But after so much repetition, this fear had by a natural process become transformed into a trustful equanimity.
An accident affecting the brain was not even necessary. Its symptoms, which I perceived as a feeling of emptiness in my head and a tendency to forget everything so that things only ever recurred by chance, as when in sorting out one’s possessions one finds something one had forgotten or even had been searching for, were making me like a hoarder whose strong-box had a hole in it through which the wealth was progressively disappearing. For a while there existed a self which deplored the loss of these riches and tried to marshal the memory to resist it, but soon I felt that the memory, as it contracted, took this self with it.
If the idea of death during this period had, as we have seen, cast a gloom over love, the memory of love had for a long time now helped me not to be afraid of death. For I understood tha
t dying was not something new but quite the reverse, that since my childhood I had already died a number of times. To take the most recent period, had I not been more attached to Albertine than to my life? Could I conceive of my personality, then, without my love for her continuing? Now that I no longer loved her, I was no longer the being who loved her, but a different being who did not love her, I had stopped loving her when I became somebody else. But there was no suffering involved in becoming this other person, in not loving Albertine any longer; and certainly some day not having my body any longer could not possibly seem as sad, from any point of view, as not loving Albertine one day had once seemed to be. And yet, how little I cared now about not loving her! These successive deaths, so feared by the self they were doomed to annihilate, so meaningless, so gentle after they had happened and when the person who was afraid of them was no longer there to feel them, had enabled me for some time now to understand how unwise it would be to be frightened of death. But it was now that I had been indifferent to it for a while that I was starting to fear it again, although in a different form, not for myself but for my book, for the birth of which this life of mine threatened by so many dangers was, for a time at least, indispensable. Victor Hugo says:
‘Il faut que l’herbe pousse et que les enfants meurent.’124
Personally, I say that the cruel law of art is that human beings die and that we ourselves die after exhausting all the forms of suffering, so that not the grass of oblivion may grow, but the grass of eternal life, the vigorous grass of fruitful works of art, on which future generations will come, heedless of those asleep beneath it, to have their déjeuner sur l’herbe.125
I talked about external dangers; but there are internal dangers too. If I managed to escape an accident from without, who knows whether I might not be prevented from profiting from that grace by an accident supervening from within me, by some internal catastrophe, before the months needed to write this book had elapsed.
When in a few minutes I made my way home through the Champs-Élysées, who was to say that I would not be struck down by the same illness as my grandmother, one afternoon when she had gone there with me for a walk which was to be her last, although she had no suspicion, such is the ignorance in which we live, that the hand of the clock had, unawares, arrived at the point when the clenched spring of the clockwork was to strike the hour? Perhaps the fear of having already lived through almost the whole of the minute which precedes the first stroke of that hour, when it is already being prepared, perhaps this fear of the stroke that was about to toll in my brain, was like a shadowy recognition of what was about to occur, like a reflection in consciousness of the precarious state of the brain when its arteries are about to give up, something which is no more impossible than the sudden acceptance of death by men who have been wounded and who, although still lucid, when both the doctor and their desire to live attempt to mislead them, say, as they see what is about to happen: ‘I’m going to die, I’m ready,’ and write their farewells to their wife.
And in fact something very like this happened to me before I started my book, and happened in a guise I would never have suspected. People were telling me, one evening when I went out, that I was looking better than before, and expressing surprise that I still had all my black hair. But I nearly fell three times as I was going down the staircase. I had gone out for only two hours; but when I got back home, I felt as if I no longer had any memory, any thoughts, any strength, or even any existence. People might have come to see me, to proclaim me king, to seize me, to arrest me, and I would have allowed them to do it without uttering a word, without opening my eyes, like those people suffering from extremely bad seasickness who, in a boat crossing the Caspian sea, don’t even put up a show of resistance if they are told they are to be thrown overboard. I did not, strictly speaking, have anything wrong with me, but I felt that I was no longer capable of anything, as sometimes happens to old men, alert the day before, who having broken their hip or suffering from a bout of indigestion, take to their bed and adopt an existence which is nothing but a more or less extended preparation for their now inevitable death. One of the selves, the one which long ago used to take part in those barbaric festivals called dining out, and where, for the men in white tie, for the women half-naked and plumed, values are so reversed that someone who fails to turn up to dinner after having accepted, or simply does not arrive until the roast, commits an act more culpable than all the immoral acts discussed casually during dinner, along with recent deaths, and where death or life-threatening illness are the only excuses for not coming, so long as warning be given, even if one were dying, in sufficient time for another fourteenth guest to be invited, this one of my selves had kept its scruples and lost its memory. The other self, the one which had conceived his work, on the other hand still remembered. I had received an invitation from Mme Molé, and learned that Mme Sazerat’s son was dead. I had decided to use one of the hours after which I could no longer utter a word, my tongue being as tied as my grandmother’s had been when she was dying, nor even swallow milk, to send my excuses to Mme Molé and my condolences to Mme Sazerat. But after a few moments I forgot what I was meant to be doing. A fortunate forgetfulness, for the memory of my work was alert and ready to use the unexpected gift of the extra hour to lay the first foundations. Unfortunately, as I took hold of my note-book to start writing, Mme Molé’s card slid out and caught my attention. Immediately the forgetful self, which was able to dominate the other one, as is always the case with scrupulous barbarians who have been out to dinner, pushed away the note-book and wrote to Mme Molé (who would no doubt have been very impressed, had she known it, at my putting my reply to her invitation ahead of my architectural labours). Then a word in my reply suddenly reminded me that Mme Sazerat had lost her son, and I wrote to her too, then, having sacrificed a genuine duty to the factitious obligation to show that I was sensitive and polite, I fell back exhausted, closed my eyes and could do nothing but vegetate for a week. Yet while all these pointless duties, to which I was always ready to sacrifice the real one, had left my head after a few minutes, the idea of my construction never left me for an instant. I did not know if it would be a church in which the faithful would gradually be able to learn truths and discover harmonies, the great general plan, or if it would remain – like a druidic monument on the high point of an island – something for ever unvisited. But I had decided to devote all my powers to it, which seemed to be failing regretfully and so as to leave me time, once the walls were up, to close ‘the funerary gate’.126 Soon I was able to show people a few sketches. Nobody understood anything. Even those who were well disposed towards my perception of the truths which I intended subsequently to engrave within the temple congratulated me on having discovered them with a ‘microscope’, when on the contrary I had used a telescope to make out things which were indeed very small, but only because they were situated a long way away, each of them a world in itself. In the places where I was trying to find general laws, I was accused of sifting through endless detail. So what was the point of all of it? I had had a certain facility when I was young, and Bergotte had thought the pages I had written as a student ‘splendid’. But instead of working, I had lived a life of idleness, of dissipation and pleasure, of illness, anxieties and obsessions, and was undertaking my work on the eve of my death, without knowing anything about my craft. I no longer felt strong enough to face up to my obligations to other people, nor to my duties towards my thought and my work, still less to both of them. As far as the former were concerned, forgetting that there were letters to write, etc., simplified my task. But suddenly, after a month or so, the association of ideas caused me to remember them, with a twinge of conscience, and I was overwhelmed with the sense of my own impotence. I was surprised to discover that I did not really mind it, that since the day when my legs had trembled so badly while I was going down the staircase I had become indifferent to everything, I longed for nothing but rest, while I waited for the great repose which would finally come. It w
as not because I was postponing until after my death the admiration which, it seemed to me, people ought to have for my work that I was indifferent to the approbation of the current elite. The elite after my death could think what it liked, it would no longer be of any concern to me. In reality, if I thought about my work and not at all about the letters to which I ought to be replying, this was no longer because I was making any great distinction of importance between the two things, as I had done during my idleness and had continued to do after I had started work, until the day when I had had to catch hold of the staircase banister. The organization of my memory, of my preoccupations, was bound up with my work, perhaps because, whereas the letters were forgotten the moment after, the idea of my book was in my head, always the same, in a perpetual process of becoming. But it had also become tiresome. I felt like a son whose dying mother still feels the need to take care of him all the time, in between her injections and her cuppings. She may still love him, but knows this only through the exasperating sense of the duty she feels to look after him. In my case the powers of the writer were no longer up to the selfish demands made by the work. Since the day of the staircase nothing in the world, no happiness, whether it came from people’s friendship, from the progress of my work, from the hope of glory, reached me except as very weak, pale sunshine, not strong enough to warm me, to bring me to life, to give me any kind of desire, and yet it was still too bright, wan as it was, for my eyes, which preferred to close, and I turned my face to the wall. It seemed, from the slight movement I felt in my lips, that I must have had a little smile right at the corner of my mouth when a lady wrote to me: ‘I was very surprised to receive no reply to my letter.’ None the less, that would remind me of her letter, and I would answer it. In order that people should not think me ungrateful, I wanted to try to show the same level of politeness as that which people must have shown to me. And I was overwhelmed by the imposition on my failing existence of the superhuman fatigues of life. The loss of my memory helped me somewhat by cutting out some of my obligations; my work replaced them.
In Search of Lost Time Page 44