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Friday
Twelve years ago I lost a colleague and a dear friend, philosophy professor Alan Paskow, who in his final months decided that he should read Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I’ve often thought about his choice of reading, which helped me decide to choose it this year as my Lenten project. As I read it, I’m beginning to understand why it meant so much to someone who knew his end was coming.
Alan was a phenomenologist, which is to say (I turn to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy here) one who studies “structures of experience, or consciousness.” To do so, phenomenologists examine how we experience things, which is to say, “the meanings things have in our experience.” Put yet another way, phenomenology “studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first-person point of view.”
From what I’ve read so far, In Search of Lost Time is a phenomenologist’s dream work. Proust is committed to examining how we process experience. His most famous example, of course, is how the taste of a madeleine cookie brings back to him his childhood experiences in the village of Combray, which he has forgotten about.
Here’s the experience that sets off his search for lost time:
And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.
Proust traces the experience back to his aunt serving him madeleines when, as a child, he and his family would visit the village of Combray for Holy Week. Once he makes the connection, the many Combray memories come rushing back. Even though we forget people and things, Proust says, “the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment.” And because they remain, once activated they bear “the vast structure of recollection.”
Recollection fills in what before had felt like a blank canvas:
[I]mmediately 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.
Proust provides an enchanting analogy to capture what happens:
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 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.
What drew Alan to Proust was how he combines phenomenological reflections with vivid descriptions. Because Alan was dying, both the past and the present rose up in his mind. He wanted to immerse himself in both memory and present-day nature.
Sometimes we would sit on his pier and watch the sun set over the tidewater inlet by his house. I’m sure he recognized his own intense engagement with nature in Proust. Note, for instance, how the author describes hawthorn blossoms upon exiting the Easter service. One particular hawthorn tree, he observes,
was attired even more richly than the rest, for the flowers which clung to its branches, one above another, so thickly as to leave no part of the tree undecorated, like the tassels wreathed about the crook of a rococo shepherdess, were every one of them ‘in color’… And, indeed, I had felt at once, as I had felt before the white blossom, but now still more marveling, that it was in no artificial manner, by no device of human construction, that the festal intention of these flowers was revealed, but that it was Nature herself who had spontaneously expressed it (with the simplicity of a woman from a village shop, laboring at the decoration of a street altar for some procession) by burying the bush in these little rosettes, almost too ravishing in color, this rustic ‘pompadour.’ High up on the branches, like so many of those tiny rose-trees, their pots concealed in jackets of paper lace, whose slender stems rise in a forest from the altar on the greater festivals, a thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler in color, but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a cup of pink marble, its blood-red stain, and suggesting even more strongly than the full-blown flowers the special, irresistible quality of the hawthorn-tree, which, wherever it budded, wherever it was about to blossom, could bud and blossom in pink flowers alone.
As Alan and I talked, I would sometimes share my own stories of how literature had enhanced my engagement with nature. I remember telling him about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is about a man who thinks he only has a year left to live. As a result, the world becomes more vivid than it ever has before, with the poet providing us with a gorgeous description of nature’s life and death cycle. And I talked about how, after my oldest son died, I would look out at the green forest by our house and marvel at the relentless intensity of trees, bushes and grasses. It was a prodigal summer, as Barbara Kingsolver puts it, informing me, as the Green Knight tries to inform Camelot, that nature insists upon itself. Attention must be paid.
As I read In Search of Lost Time, I think of how Alan was determined to lose no more time. One way he made time count was by reading a book that was worth reading.