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lukeblundell 's review for:
The Way by Swann's
by Marcel Proust
Helped me better understand what a contradiction it is to search in reality for memory's pictures, which could never have the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from not being perceived by the senses. The reality I had known no longer existed. That Mme Swann did not arrive exactly at the same moment was enough to make the avenue different. The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions that formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is only regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.
This might be the only paragraph of vol. 1 which I happen to wholeheartedly agree with. The rest is still, without doubt, some of - if not - the best prose I've ever read. It's so obvious to me now seeing Nabokov's trademarks coming from this text; that moment in the garden of his childhood where time stands still and he presses pause on all its sounds. The rest of this is cherishing (rather than lamenting) the power of memory, how looking back on the past might be the only certain thing there is. The involuntary memory, of the sonata Swann forgot he knew the tune of, or of the taste of madeleine's which pulls back the curtain of Proust's entire childhood, each road and face and smell. This is also one of my favourite feelings in the world. It is raw catharsis when it happens. I just don't think all of a life should be dedicated to it. If anything, there's something really, really lonely about a man in his late thirties writing a 4,000-page account of how florid his boyhood gardens were. Maybe it's a shared loneliness, that I'm doing the same.