A review by korrick
The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust

5.0

But in exchange for what our imagination leads us to expect and we give ourselves so much futile trouble trying to find, life gives us something which we were very far from imagining.

If you have come thus far in this search for time lost, here you may remember that, as unfeasible as it may seem, this is in fact but a part of a single work, one that built and built and has finally started to wind its way slowly down trains of thought already distilled, running on rails made efficient by readerly familiarity. It is not the end, not yet, but still there is the lingering sense of something other than the constant growth and spread of pure novelty of Swann, Flower, Guermantes, Sodom; rather than the youth of yore, the rites of maturation have begun. For the narrator is as gorgeously incisive as before, but in the throes of capture and flight he begins, truly begins, to consider others as being capable of the same inconsistent desire, the same instantaneous flutters of heart and habitus. Here, time begins its return.

The turnaround is slow, subtle, and fully explicated, as everything has ever been within the passes of these pages, but still much of a surprise, as while our narrator is a wonder with intimating at the countless facets of visual delight, relegating him to the category of 'spoiled brat' would be anything but too harsh a judgment. But, of course, his life has been a luxurious one, and it is a rare gift indeed to be considerate of others without ever having been forced to do so with little to no expectation of reward. If one wished to trivialize the matters bounded within the doubled novels of a single tome, it could be said that here, the narrator wins his toy long enough to become bored with it, and then has it taken away in such a manner that does not allow for any hint of retrieval, no matter how much the narrator wheedles or begs. But what is a mark of maturity if not the coming to terms with a incontrovertible refusal in such a way that enables a calmer, colder manner of evaluating the thwarting of future whims, fancies, dreams of any length and substantial measure? For if there's one thing to be said about having one's lifelong pursuits come to nothing, it's the resulting perspective and all the changes fortified on it.

In shorter, simpler terms, the narrator in the course of this 'chapter' of this over four thousand page 'novel' is reaching the aging complacency of been there, done that, but is not yet quite fully there. As this is Proust, what would normally be sketched out in a few sentences in other pieces of fiction is rhapsodized on for hundreds of pages, and what would merit only a passing glance is here expanded on to a glorious extent, to the point that one cannot simply read the changes the narrator's thought patterns undergo, the return of so many figures of his youth long ago given up for good, the application of experience painstakingly incorporated into the character to current circumstance, the slow giving way of future hopes to a more thoughtful measuring of the mix of past and present, but feel them. Life forces itself on the narrator once and for all, and with his spoiled sensibilities slighted, his anxious back and forth of flighty indecision decapitated in the street, he submits to the reality and comes out the better for it. His acute sensitivity to the flow of influence and infinite variety of observation protects him from the worst of protective mechanisms via calcification of personality, and while still fickle and overwrought, his path through life is no longer a linear one of ever constant horizons and ever rejected familiarity. Past and future are beginning to coalesce within his grasp, and the present is becoming less of a search and more of a complex interchange between self, time, and circumstance with every passing instance; a newness less pristine, a habit less condemned.

The sun has begun to set on the stage of this lengthy exploration of color, love, society, leaving a narrator beginning to learn that not all lost opportunities are worth forever mourning, that the paths of life led thus far are no less valuable for not having adhered to a past plan of action, however seemingly frivolous in nature or wasteful in scope of time. A beginning flicker of, yes, perhaps what one needs is not around the corner, an entirety necessitating a complete sacrifice of all that came before, but a hand in hand conjoining of accumulated self and subsequent surrounding. An acquiescence to the need of constant reevaluation, one inspiring and tiresome and inspiring again, fueled by nothing but a sense of one day looking back on it all and seeing something that, despite all the chaotic fumblings and discordant backtracks, shaped itself worthwhile. A day that has not yet come to pass, may never come to pass, will require so much for so long before coming to pass, and yet there is an undercurrent that will not be denied, a tidal flow that, for all its effacing tendencies on seaside shore, offers an integrated art of existence in flotsam left behind.

Composers do not remember this lost fatherland, but each of them remains all his life unconsciously attuned to it; he is delirious with joy when he sings in harmony with his native land, betrays it at times with his thirst for fame, but then, in seeking fame, turns his back on it, and it is only by scorning fame that he finds it when he breaks out into that distinctive strain the sameness of which—for whatever its subject it remains identical with itself—proves the permanence of the elements that compose his soul. But in that case is it not true that those elements—all the residuum of reality which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk, even from friend to friend, from master to disciple, from lover to mistress, that ineffable something which differentiates qualitatively what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in which he can communicate with others only by limiting himself to externals, common to all and of no interest—are brought out by art, the art of a Vinteuil like that of an Elstir, which exteriorises in the colours of the spectrum the intimate composition of those worlds which we call individuals and which, but for art, we should never know? A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.