One Year In Search of Lost Time ~ 2015 discussion

The end of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.

Can you believe it!

What a glorious feeling!

And what a gorgeous ending it is!

Congratulations to those who made it :-)

Bravo...and welcome to the Proustian fold!

Interesting to note Proust's nod to Montaigne--both at the beginning and end of the novel.

Montaigne: "I myself am the subject of my book."
https://archive.org/stream/essaysmich...

Proust: "...I myself was the immediate subject of my book:...."

"I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I awoke; it did not offend my reason, but lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a previous existence must be after reincarnation; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to apply myself to it or not; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for my eyes, but even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, something dark indeed." MP (SW)



Montaigne's end pages (bottom of page 449, in Vol 3 "Of Experience") on "stilts."
https://archive.org/stream/essaysofmo...

Proust's last page on "stilts."

"I understood now why it was that the Duc de Guermantes, who to my surprise, when I had seen him sitting on a chair, had seemed to me so little aged although he had so many more years beneath him than I had, had presently, when he rose to his feet and tried to stand firm upon them, swayed backwards and forwards upon legs as tottery as those of some old archbishop with nothing solid about his person but his metal crucifix, to whose support their rushes a mob of sturdy young seminarists, and had advanced with difficulty, trembling like a leaf, upon the almost unmanageable summit of his eighty-three years, as though men spend their lives perched upon living stilts which never cease to grow until sometimes they become taller than church steeples, making it in the end both difficult and perilous for them to walk and raising them to an eminence from which suddenly they fall. And I was terrified by the thought that the stilts beneath my own feet might already have reached that height; it seemed to me that quite soon now I might be too weak to maintain my hold upon a past which already went down so far. So, if I were given long enough to accomplish my work, I should not fail, even if the effect were to make them resemble monsters, to describe men as occupying so considerable a place, compared with the restricted place which is reserved for them in space, a place on the contrary prolonged past measure, for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch the distant epochs through which they have lived, between which so many days have come to range themselves—in Time." MP

(This connection was found by my fellow Proust group member, Sharon Girard-proustmatters)

I'm not quite sure what to think yet. Actually i found stumbling on "The End" a bit perplexing, the end is not immediately that grand, not that it needs to be. Though it is a beautiful metapher that you stand on your growing past which accompanies you.
It's interesting that the novel concludes with hardly any action, no final conclusion of any story threads, rather with introspection, fittingly i suppose, mirroring life, which rarely has these culminating end points either as in other novels.

It's tempting to reread after this, and not sure about a 2016 yearlong read, but i hope i'll do it soon.

Ah, the ending. I was stuck by this unexpected moment:

"...I was astonished to see at her side a girl of about sixteen, whose tall figure was a measure of that distance which I had been reluctant to see. Time, colourless and inapprehensible Time, so that I was almost able to see it and touch it, had materialised itself in this girl, moulding her into a masterpiece, while correspondingly, on me, alas! it had merely done its work." Marcel Proust

And this passage, which gathered all the threads together:

"Numerous for me were the roads which led to Mlle de Saint-Loup and which radiated around her.

"Firstly the two great 'ways' themselves, where on my many walks I had dreamed so many dreams, both led to her: through her father Robert de Saint-Loup the Guermantes way; through Gilberte, her mother, the Méséglise way which was also 'Swann’s way'.

"One of them took me, by way of this girl’s mother and the Champs-Elysées, to Swann, to my evenings at Combray, to Méséglise itself; the other, by way of her father, to those afternoons at Balbec where even now I saw him again near the sun-bright sea.
[...]
"And the Verdurins, though they might be diametrically opposed to these other characters, were yet linked to Odette through her past and to Robert de Saint-Loup through Charlie—and in the Verdurins’ house too what a role, what an all-important role had not the music of Vinteuil played!
[...]
"Certainly, if he was thinking purely of the human heart, the poet was right when he spoke of the 'mysterious threads' which are broken by life. But the truth, even more, is that life is perpetually weaving fresh threads which link one individual and one event to another, and that these threads are crossed and recrossed, doubled and redoubled to thicken the web, so that between any slightest point of our past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us an almost infinite variety of communicating paths to choose from." Marcel Proust