Virginia Woolf once said “My great adventure is really Proust. Well — what remains to be written after that?” I am not going to pretend that I am an expert on Proust. French literature is never my strength. I had my first passing encounter with "In Search of Lost Time" in my all-time favorite movie "Love Letter" directed by Iwaii Shunji. It was a fleeting moment on the screen, but the book is the symbolic underpinning of the whole story (click here for a synopsis of the movie).
I always want to get to know the nuts and bolts that make my favorite movie so divinely presented. I downloaded the first volume of ISLT–Swann's way–for free on kindle last month. I finished reading it and now I understand Woolf's compliment, as least insofar as the first volume is concerned. It is a quasi-autobiography of Proust's ill-stricken life where he spent most of the time in his uncle's residence in a fictional town called "Combray". It is not a novel with billowing plots and thrilling scenes and extraordinary characters. The majority of the body is about his perception of the world beholds him and description of natural landscapes. Proust's sensitivity and unparalleled textual mastery exudes from his captivating descriptive narratives. He captures the inner world of emotion for an introvert and a bibliophile. Reading him is reassuring, therapeutic and socially elevating because I feel that I am not alone. Some of the favorite excerpts from Swann's Way:
"no one perhaps could have understood my feelings at that moment so well as he; to him, the anguish that comes from knowing that the creature one adores is in some place of enjoyment where oneself is not and cannot follow—to him that anguish came through love, to which it is in a sense predestined, by which it will be seized upon and exploited; but when, as had befallen me, it possesses one’s soul before love has yet entered into one’s life..."
“A book is the product of a different self from the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices. If we mean to try to understand this self it is only in our inmost depths, by endeavoring to reconstruct it there, that the quest can be achieved.”
"These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted for more than a few seconds; it often happened that, in my brief spell of uncertainty as to where I was, I did not distinguish the various suppositions of which it was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscopy."
"even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people."
"And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die."
"it is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them."
