Finding Time Again by Marcel Proust

Author:Marcel Proust [Proust, Marcel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780141956794
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-12-06T23:00:00+00:00

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.

So I had already come to the conclusion that we have no freedom at all in the face of the work of art, that we cannot shape it according to our wishes, but that as it pre-exists us, and both because it is necessary and hidden, and because it is, as it were, a law of nature, we have to discover it. But is not this discovery, which art can cause us to make, the discovery, fundamentally, of the thing that ought to be most precious to us, and of which we normally remain unaware for ever, our true life, our reality as we have experienced it, which is often so different from what we believe it to be that we are filled with happiness when some chance event brings the real memory back to us? I found further support for this view in the falsity of so-called realist art, which would not be so untruthful if life had not given us the habit of expressing our experience in ways that do not reflect it, but which we none the less take in a very short space of time to be reality. I felt that I would not have to worry about the various literary theories which had troubled me now and then – notably those which critics had developed at the time of the Dreyfus Affair and which they had taken up again during the war, with the intention of ‘bringing the artist down from his ivory tower’ and encouraging the abandonment of frivolous or sentimental subjects in favour of the great workers’ movements or, if crowds were not possible, at least of noble intellectuals or heroes rather than insignificant members of the idle rich (‘I must admit that the depiction of these useless people leaves me rather cold,’ Bloch would say).

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