Proust, as a writer, rambled. In his six-volume opus, he took pages and pages to describe a room or an outdoor scene. He got his timelines mixed up, and often had someone talking to his main character in book four that had died in book two. He was clearly an insufferable snob. But, he is probably my favorite author of all time. Simply because if you stick with him to the end, you feel a sense of comfort about love and loss and the troubled majesty of humanity.
One of the reasons that I love In Search of Lost Time is Proust’s attempt to recover sensations, memories, himself in an earlier time. Reading the novel, one gets the sense that the young Marcel is not the same as the old Marcel - something has been lost. Time ravages not only the outward form of the body, but the inward solidity of the mind. By the end of our lives, we are scattered personalities, having left pieces of ourselves in the past.
For Proust, it is the tiniest thing that sparks a memory: the taste of a favorite food, the sound of a bell, the smell of a perfume, the light falling across a room in a particular way. However, when he wants to conjure up a feeling from the past, he fails - it falls flat. Desiring a return to the past can do nothing; the mind will go where it wants.
It is as though he fears that all the intense emotions that he has felt throughout his life - especially for those who have died - were never really real at all. All the moments of intense joy and pain are chimerical, he cannot recall them in enough detail. That is why, I think, that Proust spends so much of his time in description. It’s as though he is trying to submerse himself in the past in order to recover his loves.
Even his grandmother’s memory has faded. He mourns the fact that he no longer feels the pain of her loss so intensely, that he is able to go on without her. As well as without his great love, Albertine. He questions if his love for these women - his mother, too - was authentic. If it was, then why doesn’t it remain with him? He rebukes himself for living long after they have gone.
On Memorial Day, I think that this sentiment is apropos.
My mother died on Memorial Day a very long 22 years ago. Today, when reading a story about the absence of red, plastic poppy flowers, the traditional button-hole flower of remembrance, I wept. In Peet’s coffee, of all places. I had a Proustian moment of memory - unbidden, unsought, vividly and instantly recalled. I thought of a Memorial Day in the distant past, long before my mother’s untimely death, when she had purchased us both a poppy from a Veteran selling them in front of a store. As I read, I suddenly remembered the old man’s grizzled hands, the white box that held all the artificial poppies, the collection jar. I remembered the thin, green-paper wrapped wire stem that I bent around my finger like a ring. I remembered the black, round center of the flower, and strange feel of the fake petals. I remembered the old man’s cap, and the rows of pins on his uniform.
In essence, I remembered what it used to feel like to be a young child with her mother on an early summer afternoon.
Often, I worry that I have forgotten her completely. Over time, I lost her slowly: first, the tenor of her voice; then, the contours of her face and the color of her hair; finally, what she liked or how she moved. Everything faded into the memory files of my mind, in places that I can no longer access easily - if at all. It sometimes feels as if I birthed myself, as though I never had a mother or a life before the accident. As though everything that happens to me is always in a post-loss framework.
Those moments when I do suddenly remember the past - like today in Peet’s - are extremely painful, but necessary.
The truth is, we never stop missing those we have lost. But we do forget, if not completely. As I age, I realize that nostalgia is a powerful force. The past beckons to all of us, good or bad, and we all - at some point - go in search of lost time or things past.
Read Proust this summer if you haven’t already. There are bits of comfort and wisdom in there, if you are patient enough to discover them. And while you are frolicking on your day off, remember for just a moment those that you have loved, as well as those brave soldiers and civilians that others have loved and lost.
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Memorial Day Sonnet
If Liberty means anything to me,
I will remember what my freedom cost,
By those who gave their all to keep me free,
Whose lives were sacrificed, but never lost.
I will remind myself of what they did,
And keep them dearly cherished in my heart;
Their honor never from me shall be hid
And I will know they always did their part
To save our nation and its people here,
To pledge their lives in defense of our ways,
To show that freedom always outlives fear,
And sacrifice is hallowed all our days.
If Liberty means anything to me,
I will remember those who kept me free.
© John Stuart 2008
Pastor at Erin Presbyterian Church,
Knoxville, Tennessee
http://media.libsyn.com/media/stushie/Memorial_Day.mp3
I had to read Proust in French - I say had to because it is so dense, with sentences that run to chapters, it became a chore more than anything. I wonder if picking it up and trying again I’ll see it differently.
Great post. I sometimes tear up thinking of my sister, who was killed at 18 when I was only seven. My thoughts of her aren’t so much what was, but wishes of what might have been.