The Captive – aka The Prisoner by Marcel Proust

The musings of an adolescent male, perhaps not a completely formed adult human being, if such a state is ever achieved by anyone privileged to participate in the experience of this process we call life, the very process of feeling and responding to sensory existence, events that then might be recorded as recollections of that remembered experience in sufficient detail so that, at an indeterminate future time – are not all futures indeterminate? - except for the inevitable eventual failure of non-existence - that experience can be recalled, redrafted, relived, perhaps even to the extent that it might bear even a passing resemblance to the reality it recalls, or perhaps these memories might be rendered, via mis-recollection or mis-representation or merely by reinterpretation founded in doubt, self-analysis or mere deception, to become less than accurate, a mere doffing-of-the-hat acknowledgment in greeting to a now remote truth largely ignored, or merely taken for granted, then, these musings, themselves not really of an adolescent by age, but certainly one by character, and frequenting an upper-class, privileged society, perhaps as its captive or indeed prisoner, a society whose claims to represent wide experience is itself utterly bogus, since it comprises only those with pretensions to power and status, though often these people attain neither, despite their airs and graces, their titles, their honors, their unmentioned assets or over-valued, under-used property, their taste in fashion, arts or decor notwithstanding, especially in music, which often forms the background to their heart-felt but usually vapid conversation, words which habitually talk of sex, sexuality, marriage, concubinage, loves, lovers, loved, not loved or hated, cohabitants, commercially contracted or even voluntary relationships, especially when a young woman, girl perhaps, like Albertine chooses – chooses, I say! - to inhabit to the unmarried Paris abode of he who muses in adolescent fashion, about whether she really cares for him, loves him, thinks of him, or merely uses him to further her own interest in her own sex, in Andrée for instance, causing the adolescent to wander again and anew through his own musings, to reassess his own priorities, recalling Gilberte, for instance, a focus of his attention from some time before, a past that may even be continuing, or a boy’s obsession with Odette, officially Madame Swann, who before marriage made her a living largely on her back, a posture that facilitated the advantage of a particularly propertied client who admitted her to the permanence of his own impermanent life, and who thus never really found admittance to that titled society she regularly was forced - willingly it has to be said - to frequent, then these musings of the young, adolescence-passed man might just, in an imagined world, relate to the reality all these people lived, but by its variance from that reality might appear to be more about the writer carrying out the act of recollecting than any detail attributed to those he describes, so this reality becomes a record of things past, the remembrance of things past, thus rendered almost permanent by the pen’s commitment to paper, re-drawing and re-writing that reality, at least until it might encounter a full stop.