Regaining Time

I have been reading Time Regained, reading and pondering it, underlining, noting this and that passage. My reading had seemed perfunctory, though pleasurable, until I came to the passage in which Marcel has finally been allowed into the salon of the Prince and Princess Guermantes. As you remember, he was asked to wait until a music recital finished, and sat outside the grand hall, musing about his past and eating tidbits brought to him by the Guermantes servants. Now Marcel is talking with Gilberte.

Bored I may have been as I stood talking this afternoon to Gilberte or Mme. De Guermantes, but at least as I did so I held within my grasp those of the imaginings of my childhood which I had found most beautiful and thought most inaccessible and, like a shopkeeper who cannot balance his books, I could console myself by forgetting the value of their actual possession and remembering the price which had once been attached to them by my desire.

Here, in a sentence, Marcel squarely faces the choice that has confronted him throughout the Search: Will he choose (to use Edmund Wilson’s phrase) “the life of art or the art of life”? He is bored by society people. Even the beloved Gilberte has become boring. Yet, “at least” (as if they were his lifeline) he has retained “the imaginings” of childhood. At this point in the unfolding of Proust’s sentence, Marcel has not thrown his weight to his imaginings; the word “imaginings” suggests something standing apart from the substantial and putatively real world of adulthood, a world Marcel has been a part of for years.

This is a moment of foreshadowing. Proust looks forward to the end of the sentence by introducing two contrary ideas, the beautiful and the inaccessible. How would anything we perceived as beautiful be inaccessible? Unachievable, perhaps, but not inaccessible. Proust’s words suggest we are still in childhood. When Marcel turns, in the sentence’s final clause, to the present moment—his presence in the Guermantes salon—we once again confront the initial dilemma. Marcel can find relief from the conflict between art and life only by forgetting the value of “actual possession” and remembering the price (the value) he once attached to his youthful imaginings. The simile of the shopkeeper is striking. He is the shopkeeper, balancing the value of actual possession with youthful imaginings. We do not yet know the result; this is a waypoint along the route that Marcel has journeyed now for 3000 pages. Nor are we shocked by his attempt to balance one way of living with another, for in the first pages of Time Regained Marcel put forth the choice: before him stood Swann’s Way or the Guermantes Way. Which would he choose? In this short sentence the choice has become more pressing, if not resolved. Marcel, like the shopkeeper, cannot yet balance his books.

I put down Time Regained, rose from my chair, and took from the shelf my copy of Irving Penn’s Moments Preserved. Haphazardly, I opened Penn’s book of photographs and looked. Before me lay portraits I had first seen nearly fifty years ago, and which retained the price that I had once attached to them by my youthful desires. Turning the pages, I stared at Corbusier, Mauriac, Carlo Levi, Gioni, Marin, Charlie Parker, Montale, T.S. Eliot. Marcel’s effort to balance actual possession with the price of past desire had suddenly become my own.