Like Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, In Search of Lost Time is a book lovely to behold, but terrifying to seize. A monumental opus destined, it seems, to draw its gang of admirers and doomed, at the same time, to suffer the forgetting of its hesitant lovers.
The interpreters of the mind believe that the things we desire most are the things we cannot own. Such is the same loss, perhaps, that looks into my eyes every time I think of Proust. His work is everything I want in a novel. Yet it is, strangely, unlike all the books that I love.
The affection that one feels for Proust’s work arrives even before one is able to get hold of the book, flip through its pages, and consume the incommunicable pleasures of its words. Normally, one hears of the novel from namedroppers whose habit it is to dangle the obscure in order to announce their erudition.
In college not too long ago a professor, herself an established fictionist and essayist, quoted a memorable line from Proust. The passage was so beautiful I was tempted to cite it when I answered an example in another class. When my paper was returned, the quote from Proust was highlighted with a red ball pen and on the margin was written the professor’s ecstatic exclamation. It turned out the professor did not know, too, of the line’s enchanting life, until I quoted it.
Such is what I allude to when I say that one falls in love with Proust ahead of actually being able to know his novel. Everyone just talks about the book’s wonders one cannot escape getting fond first of the fictions orbiting around its existence.
Until now, however, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time remains unfinished. Sometimes, I catch myself looking at the book, lying among well-trodden novels in my small collection. These books that I have read are unlike Proust’s in that I have loved them after knowing their characters, the beginnings of their lives, the paths they take or shun, their loves, the author’s final words on the last page.
For how indeed can one make oneself tackle the novel’s more than 3,000 pages, its more than one million words collected in tome after tome? It is told that the poet Virginia Moreno found herself, one fine day, making the decision to read all of Proust in seven volumes. Soon enough, Moreno locked herself up in one of the rooms at the old Luneta Hotel where she spent seven full months devouring Proust, in perfect solitude.
Elsewhere, I have read about Proust’s brother who remarked that the sad thing is that people have to be dreadfully ill or have broken a leg in order to have the opportunity to read In Search of Lost Time. Perhaps the prohibitive nature of Proust’s novel is the identical source of its allure. One desires the book for what it promises to say, but hates it just the same for the great pains one has to endure in deciphering its meaning.
The sheer length of the book, however, is possibly one of the human mind’s most enduring monuments, reminding us of what the human will can do, what it is capable of overcoming. For at the heart of the novel is, indeed, the labor of human memory to recover the essential in the midst of enveloping dissipation and loss.
The most remembered scene in the book reveals, for example, the recovery of essence as the narrator sits at home one winter afternoon, feeling cold and disconsolate with the day he has had and with the possibility of another unexciting day ahead. The narrator breaks off a piece of petites madeleines, sinks it into the tea and takes a sip, at which point a delicious joy invades his whole body. "And at once," Proust writes, "the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me."
At a time where words can no longer promise to be true and feelings become increasingly treacherous, Proust’s novel moors us to the essential that persists beyond our own living days. The likelihood of such a redemption that one finds in Proust is threatened, however, by the limitations that the novel itself imposes. To read the book the way Moreno does, for example, is ostensibly something that belongs to the chi-chi ones who can cuddle up in the restful rooms of such places as the long vanished Luneta Hotel.
But I also read somewhere of someone, who over many years, read Balzac’s entire Comédie Humaine on the way to and from work, on the subway train.
Now I think of the number of trips on the jeep that will take me to finish the book of Europe’s last great writer, the number of revolutions, coup d’etats, floods, typhoons, deaths, and volcanic eruptions to bring In Search of Lost Time, finally, to its suitable end.
And I think once more of the book’s ultimate possession.