PROUST PASSAGES FOR PHD

FROM "TIME REGAINED"

Chatto and Windus 1970 trans. Andreas Mayor
p 248-9:
Certain people, whose minds are prone to mystery, like to believe that objects retain
something of the eyes which have looked at them, that old buildings and pictures appear
to us not as they originally were but beneath a perceptible veil woven for them over the
centuries by the love and contemplation of millions of admirers. This fantasy, if you
transpose it into the domain of what is for each one of us the sole reality, the domain of
his own sensibility, becomes the truth. In that sense and in that sense alone (but it is a far
more important one than the other), a thing which we have looked at in the past brings
back to us, if we see it again, not only the eyes with which we looked at it but all the
images with which at the time those eyes were filled. For things- and among them a book
in a red binding- as soon as we have perceived them are transformed within us into
something immaterial, something of the same nature as all our preoccupations and
sensations of that particular time, with which, indissolubly, they blend. A name read long
ago in a book contains within its syllables the strong wind and brilliant sunshine that
prevailed while we were reading it. And this is why the kind of literature which contents
itself with "describing things", with giving of them merely a miserable abstract of lines
and surfaces, is in fact, though it calls itself realist, the furthest removed from reality and
has more than any other the effect of saddening and impoverishing us, since it abruptly
severs all communication of our present self both with the past, the essence of which is
preserved in things, and with the future, in which things incite us to enjoy the essence of
the past a second time.
p253:
An image presented to us by life brings with it, in a single moment, sensations which are
in fact multiple and heterogenous. The sight, for instance, of the binding of a book once
read may weave into the characters of its title the moonlight of a distant summer night.
The taste of our breakfast coffee brings with it that vague hope of fine weather which so
often long ago, as with the day still intact and full before us we were drinking it out of a
bowl of white porcelain, creamy and fluted and itself looking almost like vitrified milk,
suddenly smiled upon us in the pale uncertainty of the dawn. An hour is not merely an
hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates, and what we call
reality is a certain connection between these immediate sensations and the memories
which envelope us simultaneously with them- a connection that is suppressed in a simple
cinematographic vision, which just because it professes to confine itself to the truth in fact

departs widely from it- a unique connection which the writer has to rediscover in order to
link for ever in his phrase the two sets of phenomena which reality joins together.
p227-8:
At most I noticed cursorily that the differences which exist between every one of our real
impressions- differences which explain why a uniform depiction of life cannot vear much
resemblance to the reality- derive probably from the following cause: the slightest word
that we have said, the most insignificant action that we have performed at any one epoch
of our life was surrounded by, and coloured by the reflection of, things which logically
had no connection with it and which later have been separated from it by our intellect
which could make nothing of them for its own rationaly purposes, things, however, in the
midst of which- here the pink reflection of the evening upon the flower-covered wall of a
country restaurant, a feeling of hunger, the desire for women, the pleasure of luxury; there
the blue volutes of the morning sea and, enveloped in them, phrases of music half
emerging like the shoulders of water-nymphs- the simplest act or gesture remains
immured as within a thousand sealed vessels, each one of them filled with things of a
colour, a scent, a temperature that are absolutely different from one another, vessels,
moreover, which being disposed over the whole range of our years, during which we have
never ceased to change if only in our dreams and our thoughts, are situated at the most
various moral altitudes and give us the sensation of extraordinarly diverse atmospheres. It
is true that we have accomplished these changes imperceptibly; but between the memory
which brusquely returns to us and our present state, and no less between two memories of
different years, places, hours, the distance is such that it alone, even without any specific
originality, would make it impossible to compare one with the other. Yes: if, owing to the
work of oblivion, the returning memory can throw no bridge, form no connecting link
between itself and the present minute, if it remains in the context of its own place and
date, if it keeps its distance, its isolation in the hollow of a valley or upon the highest peak
of a mountain summit, for this very reason it causes us suddenly to breathe a new air, an
air which is new precisely vecause we have breathed it in the past, that purer air which
the poets have vainly tried to situate in paradise and which could induce so profound a
sensation of renewal only if its had been breathed before, since the true paradises are the
paradises that we have lost.
228:
Over all these thoughts I skimmed rapidly, for another enquiry demanded my attention
more imperiously, the enquiry, which on previous occasions I had postponed, into the
cause of this felicity which I had just experienced, into the character of this certitude with
which it imposed itself. And this cause I began to divine as I compared these diverse
happy impressions, diverse yet with this in common, that I experienced them at the
present moment and at the same time in the context of a distant moment, so that the past

was made to encroach upon the present and I was made to doubt whether I was in the one
or the other. The truth surely was that the being within me which had enjoyed these
impressions had enjoyed them because they had in them something that was common to a
day long past and to now, because in some way they were extra-temporal, and this being
made its appearance only when, through one of these identifications of the present with
the past, it was likely to find itself in the one and only medium in which it could exist and
enjoy the essence of things, that is to say: outside time. This explained why it was that my
anxiety on the subject of my death had ceased at the moment when I had unconsciously
recognised the taste of the little madelaine, since the being which at that moment I had
been was an extra-temporal being and therefore unalarmed by the vicissitudes of the
future. This being had only come to me, only manifested itself outside of activity and
immediate enjoyment, on those rare occasions when the miracle of an analogy had made
me escape from the present. And only this being had the power to perform that task which
had always defeated the efforts of my memory and my intellect, the power to make me
rediscover days that were long past, the Time that was Lost.
p255 re: Walter Benjamin
..the essential, the only true book, though in the ordinary sense of the word it does not
have to be "invented" by a great writer- for it exists already in each one of us- has to be
translated by him. The function and the task of a writer are those of a translator.
NOTES
For my second chapter, I will add passages from the first two blocks of text above- in
particular the stuff on the red book and its originary synthesis of a singular context- which
is at the same time the context's originary synthesis of the book- is great as an example of
the two folded/ invaginating event of perception (currently p29): The title re-encountered
brings back the wind, the light, of the first time. But Proust masks the instability of the
original (the mark of his nostalgia?)- the first context itself must be full of traces, lines of
flight, resonances. The 'original moment' that encroaches upon the present is therefore
itself encroached upon, an encroachment that threatens its originary status as a pastpresent. Proust seems to solicit the present only to privilege past and future presents; we
must go further and destroy all presence. But not lose Proust's phenomenological insight
(ie grounding reality/ontology in a phenomenological methodology)- as with Dillon's
defence of Merleau-Ponty.
Involuntary memory, as the trace or resonance of the thing which disrupts a simple
objectal model of perception and epistemology, is phenomenologically groundedgrounded not in representation (voluntary memory as willful mental activity) but in the
experience of materiality- a play of light, the sonorous qualities of a bell etc.