As a narrator, Marcel Proust looks chaotic, very unstable, composing long sentences and unusual grammar that confuses the reader’s mind conceived sort of triviality of misunderstanding I am willing to put into this essay. It’s a break of the spell of cliché and the fable circling around in present reader’s opinions, for a long time imprinted, when the first or the last book of In Search of Lost Time has been lend, for instance, between an enthusiast and surprised inquirer.
Opening motives of Swan’s Way, The First Book
The Time, part one
Breaking the wall of human memory can be established by human nature, which possibly can conquer the time. Somehow by mistreating ourselves by fate, we find ourselves in a certain disposition, anxiety and depersonalization by Time Lost by wasting it. Proust memories were always, as his jumping and switching from the current part of the narrator’s time and the topic; or the topic that is related to a different circumstances and time, which makes another confusion. There dwells a magic treatment of reoccurrence and searching for an opportunity for past and possible inevitable unreasonable fakeness, and especially the pessimistic illusion of the future. Future based upon the past that cannot be changed but found again from something that has been always continuously forever lost.
Inevitable modality of invisible can be found in a passage dedicated to the content of all upcoming books (Swans’ Way etc.), to a Celtic believe about a soul, spirit imprinted by natural magical metempsychosis into a tree, a plant, or a person living or dead. The spirit itself represents the mentioned illusion of possible founded and opportunities lost future. That makes the entire process come into a progress of meeting fragments of human imagination of truth and inevitable reality that dreads us by our own consciousness and conscious. The mechanism is simple: breaking the spell by realizing the connection between.
All is based upon eternal conscious of doing wrong; perhaps misunderstanding, mistaken deed, or lack of satisfaction of ourselves reasonable enough to be lead by anxiety. Itself is a certainly never-ending inescapable act. Anxiety plays the same magical almost mystical theme. It belongs to the unmistakable impossibility to establish an uncertain and suspicious future that practically does not exists. For sure there exists the Past only, and present is anxiety itself. Supposedly keeps us alive as the major factor of our conscious mind where the search for mistake begins to find it’s the reasoning:
“I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognized their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.”
The first exquisite, evident proving opening remarks to Search according to my base theory of time’s role in Search, is certainly mentioned in the most famous Proustian page, pages of Madeleine.
“And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea. The the sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks’ windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the forms of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long-dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past, nothing subsists after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this the memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on color and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognizable, so in that the moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.”