In Proust, love, art and suffering are inextricably connected.  Love inevitably leads to suffering, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing because suffering leads to art.  For Proust, there is no art without suffering. The pain of grief, over a lost grandmother for example, may provide some impetus to art.  But there is no comparison to the suffering caused by love for inspiring true art.

Love is not a happy thing in Proust.  Of all the many, many relationships portrayed, I can only think of one that could possibly be described as “happy” (the artist Elstir and his wife).  And Proust spends very little time discussing that relationship, so I’m sure with a little more attention he would have found the misery there as well.  Although they’re not exactly relationships, probably the least miserable are the lesbians – they have ongoing sexual friendships that seem to be mostly free of the many downfalls of the other relationships portrayed in Proust.

The common pattern for “love” in Proust is that one partner is madly, passionately and jealously in love and the other partner is, in one way or another, using him or her.  This pattern applies for both heterosexual and homosexual (male) relationships.  The pattern is set at the beginning in Swann’s Way with the depiction of Swann’s disastrous relationship with Odette.  Every other love affair echoes this one.  Marriage is it’s own hell in Proust.  Love is not even expected and infidelity is the rule.  Of course, there’s no denying the appeal of that initial, passionate love that we often feel at the beginning of a love affair.  The uncertainty of it all, the all-consuming need to be with the loved one, and yes, even the jealousy.  But how sad that, to Proust, that is all that love is.  It seems so immature in a way.  Where is the enduring love?  The mutual love built on honesty and respect?  When reading about In Search of Lost Time before and while reading it, I frequently saw commentators describe Marcel’s relationship with Albertine as his “great love.”  But even that love affair follows the typical pattern.  In the end I felt sorry for Proust that he never experienced a deep and fulfilling love, but only these superficial passions based on mutual distrust.  I suppose we can hope that in his personal life Proust did experience more, but that he just didn’t feel a happy love made for very good reading.  And he wanted to make his point about the value of suffering.

To Proust, suffering, especially suffering caused by unrequited or lost love, opens the soul.  It makes one feel all of the things that one otherwise would not.  There is pain, of course, but there is also a certain amount of enlightenment that comes along with this type of suffering.  It reminds me of the Paul Simon song: “Losing love is like a window in your heart, everybody sees you’re blown apart…”  In this emotional state, the soul is bared for others to see, and also for you to see yourself more clearly.  Or so it would seem.  But to be honest, the suffering lover in Proust is usually mildly to completely delusional.  Swann makes every excuse for Odette to avoid having to face her duplicity.  He ruins his life in order to be with her and she doesn’t even love him.  By the end, he doesn’t even love her.  That doesn’t sound like enlightenment to me.  But I suppose an artist doesn’t have to understand his own life, as long as he can create beauty.

Is Proust right about art and suffering?  He’s certainly not the only one to feel that way.  History is replete with suffering artists.  But there’s the other side of the coin as well – those who access their creative side in times of elevated mood.  Or as my mother-in-law calls it, exuberance.  She’s literally writing the book on exuberance, so she knows what she’s talking about.  So artists can be depressed or they can be manic.  Can an artist just be content?  Maybe not.  I certainly know from my own point of view that I’m much more likely to pursue creative writing (as opposed to this kind of writing) when in a state of depression or at least melancholy.  You might imagine that Dan Brown pumps out his thrillers in a state of relative contentment, but I think we can all agree that’s not really “art”.  Art should make us feel connected in an intimate way to the artist, so we need the artist to at least appear to open up.  Which brings us back the open soul of the suffering artist.

Although suffering is necessary for art, one can suffer without getting around to actually creating any art.  In the book, Marcel spends almost his entire life planning to begin work on writing his novel.  Yet he doesn’t actually begin until the end, as an old man.  Every day he tells himself that he will begin tomorrow.  How many of us have experienced the same thing?  Whether it’s to begin writing or to learn knitting or to make healthy eating and lifestyle changes.  We’re always so sure that tomorrow we will find the time or the motivation to do the thing we know we want to do.  And what is it that we do instead?  We spend too much time on facebook or other internet time wasters.  I’m not prone to spending excessive time in front of the T.V., but I know that’s a big one for many people.  I’ve actually found that now that I get to spend so little time on myself (thanks to my baby girl), I spend it more fruitfully.  Maybe too much leisure time is what stops us from doing what would bring us more real satisfaction.  Certainly Marcel suffered from an excess of leisure.  With all the time in the world, he could never find the time to do the one thing he kept telling himself he would do – pursue art.  And when he finally did get around to creating his art, he was long past the stage of suffering over love.  But he was still suffering – he had finally discovered lost time, only to realize that he was at the end and would not be able to regain time forever.  Maybe mortality is truly the ultimate inspiration for great art.

Marcel Proust’s seven-volume, 4000+ page masterpiece is, as the title reveals, an essay on Time.  The first volume and the last volume deal most directly with Time, while the middle volumes serve as the background needed to understand Marcel’s final reclaiming of Time at the end of the book.  The episode of the madeleine, which occurs in the first volume, is a pivotal moment in the novel.  In this episode, Marcel as an older man dips a madeleine in tea and takes a bite of it.  He is instantaneously transported back to a moment from his childhood where he had a similar experience.  But it is not just that the memory is called to mind.  His entire awareness of the present moment is obscured by all aspects of that past moment returning to him.  He is literally transported back to a moment of Time that had, until then, been Lost.

As I watch my baby girl grow and change every day, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about time; the way it crawls and races, squeezes out in small drops and rushes past in a flood, and the fact that I don’t want to miss any of this time with her.  “It goes by so fast.”  I swear there must be an international meeting of all parents of older children where they are instructed to give this advice to parents of young babies.  How else to explain that every single parent uses this exact phrase when they see you with your little one?  I know, I know.  This time is precious, cherish it while it lasts, it will be over before you know it.  I get it.  But do I really?  Can we ever really get it?  Can we understand the speed with which time goes as we’re living each individual day?  I always remember a conversation I had with my father as I was finishing college.  “It went so fast,” I told him.  “Just wait until you wake up one day and look in the mirror and you’re 50 and you still feel 20 and you don’t know how you got here.”  Thanks for the pick-me-up, dad.  But as Marcel discovers at the end of “In Search of Lost Time,” we may only see the truth in retrospect.

And even if we receive this advice and try to honor it, what can we do?  I try to practice mindfulness and awareness of the present moment, so as not to lose time without truly living it.  But how often have I come to the end of a day spent in chores, habits and routines and discovered that it has gone before I even knew it.  And if time only speeds up as we age, how to stop that “Wait, I’m 50” moment from happening?

In the last volume of In Search of Lost Time Marcel attends a party in Paris after a long absence.  At first, he believes it is a fancy dress party and that all of the guests have put on disguises of old age because he recognizes no one.  Then he realizes that everyone he used to know is old now.  And, more brutally, he realizes that he, too, is old.  It is at this same party that he has finally found Lost Time.  The episode of the madeleine from the first volume is revisited and he experiences other epiphanies as well.  And though he had experienced such things before, it is only now, as an old man, that he finally understands.  This is the only way to find Lost Time – you cannot go there of your own volition –  Time must overtake you, sweep you away, and leave you, finally, with a sense of fleeting completeness.

The title of this work is sometimes translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past.  That title seems wholly inadequate – things past can be remembered, but that is not what Proust describes.  Remembrance is something we do – the regaining of Lost Time is something that happens to us.  We may try to remember to make it happen more often, but it doesn’t work that way.  We must cherish each moment of Lost Time that we regain, because it will not happen very often and it will only be when we least expect it.

Near the end of the novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, the mother of the family is blind and dying.  She asks her son to read aloud to her her diaries from when she was a young woman.  He knows that she’s looking for something, but he doesn’t know what.  Finally he reads a passage where she describes experiencing a moment of pure happiness and joy.  A moment that she vows to hold on to and to keep with her always.  He sees his mother calm and she tells him he can stop reading the diaries now.  She has found her moment of Lost Time and she can die in peace.  We should all have at least one moment of pure joy that we can hold on to – one moment of Lost Time that we can find again at the end.

(Obviously there is much, much more to say about In Search of Lost Time but this seemed like enough to be getting on with.  I may reflect on other themes, such as love, art, suffering, social status, homosexuality, politics, patriotism, war, etc, in future posts.)