Cities of the Plain by Marcel Proust

 

Times change. Of that there is no doubt. Platitudes, however, remain platitudes whenever they are, like a dose of vaccine, rolled out. Their use, perhaps just once, but certainly on the second occasion, ought to inoculate and protect their user from ever again suffering their nauseating mundanity. But such immunity is rarely achieved, especially amongst those who find simple instructions, such as "don't gather", “stay at home” or “avoid clichés, at all costs” quite impossible to interpret or indeed remember.

I recall the time, not so long distanced, when even the mention of certain sexual habits might only be referred to in passing, accompanied by the bat of an eye, the nervous clearing of the throat or the deliberate and calculated inclusion of classical allusion, lest the speaker appear himself to be tainted by such professedly immoral practices. The inclusion of gender was important, here, for these unspoken, unnamed behaviours, alluded to habits that remained illegal and indictable amongst men, while the female equivalent bore a different name, lusciously classical, and, whilst not officially tolerated, it generally remained beyond the interest of the law.

But it was not only the classical, but also the biblical world that provided the means of referring to these despicable, but apparently common practices. The Cities of the Plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, suffered divine retribution - at least the experience is recorded as divine - because of the prevalence of these crimes against nature within their walls. In more modern times, we have passed beyond the age when the natural can be criminal, and also beyond the clichés of vilifying and ridiculing via censorious judgment or humour. For all its use of the theme, the filmed series never did include the title Carry on Sodomy, despite the near-repeated scripts’ regular use of both censure and ridicule to raise laughs from audiences who elsewhere might judge and scorn.

And so we arrive at Sodom and Gomorrah, volume four of A La Recherche De Temps Perdu, A Remembrance Of Things Past, or words to that effect. At its time of writing, an observation that significant numbers of French high society might just be able to trace their descent to these cities of the plain would have shocked. Eyebrows would have been raised, throats cleared, and private laughs would have hidden behind social condemnation, as gentlemen conversed on the way to the brothel, where the workers to be encountered did not really count, because it was clearly poverty that required them to behave thus. But times do change. Now it is not this discussion of homosexuality that might shock, but the destination of the conversants.

So now when we read of homosexual men and women, gays and lesbians, queers and dykes, we cannot suffer either the shock or the surprise of exposure to ideas we now ignore politely in public or condemn only in private. Neither can we, almost certainly, associate with the kind of society in which the revelations were being made. The lives, and more exactly the attitudes, of these people are now utterly foreign to our experience, though they may well still exist. The realization reminds us that we regularly admire images in the form of galleried art, which bear as little relation to our own lives as do the characters Marcel Proust creates, but because paintings have nothing audible to say in their own words, we fail to recognize the cultural gulf of our distance from what they depict.

Times may change, but our propensity to apply false logic persists. Marcel Proust’s observation of doctors is almost contemporary. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to treatment, of pessimism as to outcome. “Wine in moderation, it can do no harm, it is always a tonic… Sexual enjoyment? After all it is a natural function. I allow you to use, but not to abuse it, you understand. Excess in anything is wrong.” At once, what a temptation to the patient, to renounce those two life givers, water and chastity. He also recognized that by a certain age, human beings cease to be individuals and become research projects. He had arrived at that stage of exhaustion in which a sick man’s body became a retort in which we study chemical reactions. In our own time, we codify this as aging.

But then we may, like the English public schoolboy, develop personal and internal resistance to propensities that could previously prosecute via physical activity. Various English Prime Ministers have thus profited from the Eton Wall Game in public whilst in private they probably remained on the other side of the wall. “Suppose we took a turn in the garden, Sir,” I said to Swann, while Comte Arnulphe, in a lisping voice which seem to indicate that mentally at least, his development was incomplete, replied to M. de Charlus with an artlessly obliging precision: “I, oh, golf chiefly, tennis, football, running, polo I’m really keen on.” So Minerva, being subdivided, ceased in certain deities to be goddess of wisdom, and incarnated part of herself in a purely sporting, horse loving deity, Athene Hippia. Thus we may find the limitations we impose on ourselves limiting.

At least the Old Etonian Prime Ministers would have coped admirably with the classical allusion, and probably still would. Times may change, but we only understand how they have changed when we trouble ourselves to experience remembrance of times past and engage with its characters, both larger and ultimately smaller than life.

The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust

 

In a turn of uncharacteristic succinctness, Gioachino Rossini, himself the composer of long-winded and often empty vocal gymnastics undertaken because they were possible - or not! - rather than apposite or even aesthetic, uttered a remark, probably between courses, probably apocryphally, somewhere sandwiched between the tournedos Rossini and the baked Alaska, which wasn’t called by that name at the time because the Americans, who put the dish and the state on the map, had not yet purchased the real estate, a remark that became an oft-quoted opinion on Richard Wagner, a fellow composer, who was actually writing music at the time, rather than being a professional whipped cream spreader on the back of cigarette packets. “Wagner‘s music,” said the composer, “has its moments. It’s the hours in between that are the problem.” No doubt the other guests, also choking by now on the strozzapreti, probably guffawed their recognition of the maestro’s wit. And that was two sentences.

It is a sentiment that is often associated with the so-called task of reading A la recherche de temps perdu of Marcel Proust. He does go on, doesn’t he? Well, yes, a bit like life really, until the end. It’s where we go along the way that forms the point, a point of departure, a point of destination, a point of return and eventually no point at all. And that is the point, at least for one reader of this work.

Marcel Proust lives amongst an elite. He describes them in detail. He brushes shoulders, bellies and other parts on a regular, even daily basis, with members of “society”. It was Margaret Thatcher who claimed there was no such thing as society, only the individuals who constitute it. It is wonderful how something can be defined not to exist in terms of an agglomeration of things that unquestionably do. I digress, and so does Marcel Proust, regularly, but not because digression is an end in itself, rather because digression is all we have. Of course, when one is bored with such society one can always retire to other parts and brush bellies with one of those working women - never ladies! - who have a little time for digression. For them, it's the matter in hand that takes precedence, but usually not in the hand, itself. Times, it seems, have changed. Perhaps…

“Oh, my dear Charles," she went on, "what a bore it can be, dining out. There are evenings when one would sooner die! It is true that dying may be perhaps just as great a bore, because we don't know what it's like." A servant appeared. It was the young lover who used to have trouble with the porter, until the Duchess, in her kindness of heart, brought about an apparent peace between them. "Am I to go up this evening to inquire for M. le Marquis d'Osmond?" he asked. "Most certainly not, nothing before to-morrow morning. In fact I don't want you to remain in the house to-night. The only thing that will happen will be that his footman, who knows you, will come to you with the latest report and send you out after us. Get off, go anywhere you like, have a woman, sleep out, but I don't want to see you here before to-morrow morning." An immense joy overflowed from the footman's face. He would at last be able to spend long hours with his ladylove, whom he had practically ceased to see ever since, after a final scene with the porter, the Duchess had considerately explained to him that it would be better, to avoid further conflicts, if he did not go out at all. He floated, at the thought of having an evening free at last, in a happiness which the Duchess saw and guessed its reason

In The Guermantes Way, Marcel Proust describes these creatures of society, upper crust, titled, even royal, certainly rich if we ignore the debts, propertied, (no doubt proprietarian in Piketty’s terms), conceited, racist, learned yet ignorant, self-obsessed, selfish. They even have the odd good point. I could go on. They do. But at the root, they are pretty ordinary rather than pretty.

But in the other boxes, everywhere almost, the white deities who inhabited those sombre abodes had flown for shelter against their shadowy walls and remained invisible. Gradually, however, as the performance went on, their vaguely human forms detached themselves, one by one, from the shades of night which they patterned, and, raising themselves towards the light, allowed their semi-nude bodies to emerge, and rose, and stopped at the limit of their course, at the luminous, shaded surface on which their brilliant faces appeared behind the gaily breaking foam of the feather fans they unfurled and lightly waved, beneath their hyacinthine locks begemmed with pearls, which the flow of the tide seemed to have caught and drawn with it…

They dress to the nines, but for many of the species adornment makes little difference.

The Marquis de Palancy, his face bent downwards at the end of his long neck, his round bulging eye glued to the glass of his monocle, was moving with a leisurely displacement through the transparent shade and appeared no more to see the public in the stalls than a fish that drifts past, unconscious of the press of curious gazers, behind the glass wall of an aquarium. Now and again he paused, a venerable, wheezing monument, and the audience could not have told whether he was in pain, asleep, swimming, about to spawn, or merely taking breath

This society is certainly snobbish, but it is also deeply racist. But then that was the norm of the time, wasn’t it? They were, after all, professedly Christian in an era where, in order to claim this allegiance, it may have been almost expected to be anti-Semitic. But a theme that underpins this society’s ever-competitive camaraderie deals with opposing and divisive views on the Dreyfus affair, the details of which may now be referenced with ease across a democratic internet, noted for its thorough fair-mindedness, disinterest and impartiality.

"In the first place because at heart all these people are anti-Semites," replied Swann, who, all the same, knew very well from experience that certain of them were not, but, like everyone who supports any cause with ardour, preferred, to explain the fact that other people did not share his opinion, to suppose in them a preconceived reason, a prejudice against which there was nothing to be done, rather than reasons which might permit of discussion. Besides, having come to the premature term of his life, like a weary animal that is goaded on, he cried out against these persecutions and was returning to the spiritual fold of his fathers. "Yes, the Prince de Guermantes," I said, "it is true, I've heard that he was anti-semitic." "Oh, that fellow! I wasn't even thinking about him. He carries it to such a point that when he was in the army and had a frightful toothache he preferred to grin and bear it rather than go to the only dentist in the district, who happened to be a Jew, and later on he allowed a wing of his castle which had caught fire to be burned to the ground, because he would have had to send for extinguishers to the place next door, which belongs to the Rothschilds."

Like the contemporary and newly enacted Brexit in the United Kingdom, the Dreyfus affair began in untruths married to conceit and racism, peddled by those with ideological interest in pursuing it, perpetrated by others who found their own identity in an insane bigotry that appealed to inane prejudice, and, unlike Brexit at least thus far, was eventually revealed as utter untruth. What it did do was bring to the fore the ideological cleavages born of racism that cut through this otherwise apparently monolithic society, revealing its inhabitants’ penchant for competition rather than the cooperation their decorum tried to advertise. For all their apparent politeness, for all their overt adherence to manners, these people are vicious cynics capable of waging war to achieve their interests. And that is precisely what they would do.

And the concerns of difference are so small minded that, like Remainers and Brexiteers, these Dreyfusards and their opponents cannot conceive that anything of interest might live outside their own myopic ambit. The universe, it seems, consists of my parlour and the rest.

…at this point in the social year, when people invited the Duchesse de Guermantes to dinner, making every effort to see that she was not already engaged, she declined, for the one reason of which nobody in society would ever have thought; she was just starting on a cruise among the Norwegian fjords, which were so interesting. People in society were stupefied, and, without any thought of following the Duchess's example, derived nevertheless from her action that sense of relief which one has in reading Kant when after the most rigorous demonstration of determinism one finds that above the world of necessity there is the world of freedom. Every invention of which no one has ever thought before excites the interest even of people who can derive no benefit from it. That of steam navigation was a small thing compared with the employment of steam navigation at that sedentary time of year called 'the season.' The idea that anyone could voluntarily renounce a hundred dinners or luncheons, twice as many afternoon teas, three times as many evening parties, the most brilliant Mondays at the Opera and Tuesdays at the Français to visit the Norwegian fjords seemed to the Courvoisiers no more explicable than the idea of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea…

But just how self-obsessed and selfish these people are is indicated by the Guermantes’ reaction to Swann’s revelation that he has just three months to live.

"I don't know why I am telling you this; I have never said a word to you before about my illness. But as you asked me, and as now I may die at any moment. But whatever I do I mustn't make you late; you're dining out, remember," he added, because he knew that for other people their own social obligations took precedence of the death of a friend, and could put himself in her place by dint of his instinctive politeness. But that of the Duchess enabled her also to perceive in a vague way that the dinner to which she was going must count for less to Swann than his own death. And so, while continuing on her way towards the carriage, she let her shoulders droop, saying: "Don't worry about our dinner. It's not of any importance!" But this put the Duke in a bad humour, who exclaimed: "Come, Oriane, don't stop there chattering like that and exchanging your jeremiads with Swann; you know very well that Mme. de Saint-Euverte insists on sitting down to table at eight o'clock sharp. We must know what you propose to do; the horses have been waiting for a good five minutes. I beg your pardon, Charles," he went on, turning to Swann, "but it's ten minutes to eight already. Oriane is always late, and it will take us more than five minutes to get to old Saint-Euverte's."

I mean, Darling, doesn’t the man realise that in society there is a time and place for everything? And this, surely, is neither the time nor the place to talk of dea… of such things! Get a move on! We’ll be late! Our friend’s demise will have to wait until after liqueurs, dessert at least. Bid him goodbye and come along! But then there are things that are just not done, Darling. Such as…

"You know, we can talk about that another time; I don't believe a word you've been saying, but we must discuss it quietly. I expect they gave you a dreadful fright, come to luncheon, whatever day you like" (with Mme. de Guermantes things always resolved themselves into luncheons), "you will let me know your day and time," and, lifting her red skirt, she set her foot on the step. She was just getting into the carriage when, seeing this foot exposed, the Duke cried in a terrifying voice: "Oriane, what have you been thinking of, you wretch? You've kept on your black shoes! With a red dress! Go upstairs quick and put on red shoes, or rather," he said to the footman, "tell the lady's maid at once to bring down a pair of red shoes."

I mean, black shoes with a red dress… What could she be thinking of? Well he was Jewish, after all… Perhaps she should just have kept talking… The need to speak prevents one not merely from listening but from seeing things, and in this case the absence of any description of my external surroundings is tantamount to a description of my internal state… I bet she talked quickly and, at the same time, said very little. Just how little Marcel Proust says in the five hundred pages that constitute The Guermantes Way might just be its point. And, in the grand run of time, we have yet to reach perhaps the crowning absurdity of the century, The Great War, the apparently heroic event of unquestioned and racist imperialism we have all recently been honouring after its centenary. Times change, perhaps also assumptions.

Swann’s Way – In Search of Lost Time Volume 1 Marcel Proust

 

Imagine a collage, an assemblage of the entire output of august artists, especially those of fin-de-siecle France, those one-time upstarts and latter-day establishment pillars we have since learned to label “Impressionist”. Imagine too this vast canvas repeated in multiple shades, so that not only does it present to the eye a vast, near limitless, expanse of colour, of detail, of form, of fine ladies in finer drapery, of gardens replete with blooms of every season, of carriage-jammed Paris streets shining through murky wet evenings, of multi-coloured lilies afloat on a surface of quiet lakes or stilled streams of rural France, of dancing girls performing their ballet or rehearsing their slender limbs in outline at the bar, but also it revisits every view from multiple angles in different colours, at different times, from different perspectives with different impressions. We seem to see the same things repeat, repeatedly, but always different, always changed, always vivid. And imagine this presented not only in the bright colours of the original, but also the imposed hues of vividly recalled memory that knows every scene, but cannot fix exact date, time or form, so that they re-form truly solid, living structures reconstructed from what the original eyes only partially recorded. And then close those eyes, so that the images can be drawn from their memories, those indelibly, but perhaps inaccurately filed images that we have collected inadvertently by virtue of the unfinished act of living. And then we share that experience.

And then, in the words of the author, himself, so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.

But the imperative is that we must try. We have but one chance shot at this moving target we call ‘life’ and our aim is, by its very nature, wayward. We remain forever unsure of the boundary between what we remember and what we imagine, especially when one merges into the other in that uncontrolled manner, that imposed confusion of blurred edge that inevitably results when we attempt to focus on a passing image and have only a memory of its momentary impression on the mind to recall whatever detail it shed.

And the result? The result is a passing stream, an ever-changing, forever variable vista that always comprises the same view, the same solid objects that once, or perhaps still, peopled its banks. And, from the distance of time, who can ever be sure what we felt? Who can be sure of motive, of consequence, of intention or stratagem? Who can testify that those remembered words were spoken in love, hate, respect, derision, criticism, praise or merely to pass the time we now realise we never had? It is irony that perhaps lasts longest, as in an invitation to dine with an acquaintance of the family, M. Legrandin?

Only the day before he had asked my parents to send me to dine with him on this same Sunday evening. "Come and bear your aged friend company," he had said to me. "Like the nosegay which a traveller sends us from some land to which we shall never go again, come and let me breathe from the far country of your adolescence the scent of those flowers of spring among which I also used to wander, many years ago. Come with the primrose, with the canon's beard, with the gold-cup; come with the stone-crop, whereof are posies made, pledges of love, in the Balzacian flora, come with that flower of the Resurrection morning, the Easter daisy, come with the snowballs of the guelder-rose, which begin to embalm with their fragrance the alleys of your great-aunt's garden ere the last snows of Lent are melted from its soil. Come with the glorious silken raiment of the lily, apparel fit for Solomon, and with the many-coloured enamel of the pansies, but come, above all, with the spring breeze, still cooled by the last frosts of wirier, wafting apart, for the two butterflies' sake, that have waited outside all morning, the closed portals of the first Jerusalem rose."

The question was raised at home whether, all things considered, I ought still to be sent to dine with M. Legrandin.

Irony, then, leaves its mark, but not as deep as the scars left by the cuts of young love, obsession or jealousy. In a vast, detailed and probably reconstructed memory of M. Swann’s relationship with Odette, a woman he initially likens to an image from a Botticelli painting in the Sistine chapel, we share the heart-racing exhilaration of a man becoming obsessed with the sensual beauty of a desirable and available woman, we euphemistically accompany him in adjusting the flowers that decorate her bodice and then we suffer the gnawing, destroying doubts about her motives that grow out of an all-embracing, near-destroying jealousy.

There is, of course, much socialising. It would not be far from the truth to observe that these people spend more time worrying about whom to include and whom to specifically and justifiably exclude from a guest list than they do at work, in their beds or on the road. And the decisions are usually based on class, that universal categorising and branding of quality that seems to suffuse and smother human society in whatever age and every place, the very quality that revolutions might occasionally but unsuccessfully seek to eradicate. And what happens at these gatherings remains primarily social, whatever the focus of the soiree.

If the pianist suggested playing the Ride of the Valkyries, or the Prelude to Tristan, Mme. Verdurin would protest, not that the music was displeasing to her, but, on the contrary, that it made too violent an impression. "Then you want me to have one of my headaches? You know quite well, it's the same every time he plays that. I know what I'm in for. Tomorrow, when I want to get up - nothing doing!" If he was not going to play they talked, and one of the friends - usually the painter who was in favour there that year - would "spin," as M. Verdurin put it, "a damned funny yarn that made 'em all split with laughter," and especially Mme. Verdurin, for whom so strong was her habit of taking literally the figurative accounts of her emotions - Dr. Cottard, who was then just starting in general practice, would "really have to come one day and set her jaw, which she had dislocated with laughing too much.

And this is a place and time where no-one lives life by halves, where no person is ever truly reticent in expressing emotion, even when that which is quite sincerely expressed may, at some later date, convey at least the partial sensation of over-statement. She had been taught in her girlhood to fondle and cherish those long-necked, sinuous creatures, the phrases of Chopin, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by seeking their ultimate resting-place somewhere beyond and far wide of the direction in which they started, the point which one might have expected them to reach, phrases which divert themselves in those fantastic bypaths only to return more deliberately with a more premeditated reaction, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl which, if you strike it, will ring and throb until you cry aloud in anguish to clutch at one's heart.  

Viewing this vast, sewn together patchwork of art, this mixture of people thrown together by time and the filter of memory, may at times feel like making an ocean journey by small boat, rigged with too scant a sail, a boat that, often becalmed, seems to drift. The real trick, undoubtedly, is to relax and go with the flow. That’s life, it seems.

Within A Budding Grove – In Search of Lost Time 2 – Marcel Proust

There is a genre in modern fiction called “Coming of age”, designed presumably to appeal to the “Young adult” whose type ought to feature among such a tale´s characters. But, like most genres, authors who regularly tread the potentially formulaic tramlines of readers´ expectations are themselves usually somewhat beyond the age of consent and are therefore transporting themselves via imagination or memory into an experience they may have experienced in their own past, had related to them or simply imagined as an ideal of a type, itself possibly even dysfunctional, since not every ending is happy.

We all fall in love. Even ugly people fall in love, often successfully and rewardingly. Socially perfected beauty often languishes in regretful unhappiness, having made a false or compromised choice. Imagined “young adults” can relive the irony of wrong decisions and false assumptions, but only when directed from a distance of years that have taught by experience. At the time, a whirlwind of experience and emotion, a cake-batter of hard and soft, liquid and solid awaits mixing, let alone baking, and it has generally been licked and gobbled by eager fingers well before it ever approached an oven. It is only after the event that we can reassess how much of each ingredient we actually added and whether, had the mix ever been properly prepared, it might have been eventually tasty.

What is often lacking from tales of “Coming of age” is any truthful assessment of how the first person is externally perceived. Perhaps we all possess enough arrogance to think we can judge others from a position of permanent personal neutrality, from a vantage where we ourselves are exempt from the processes we apply to the rest of humanity. But not so Marcel Proust, whose second volume of  “A la recherche de temps perdu” – “In search of lost time” is essentially a stream of consciousness “coming of age”, a tale of long adolescent summer holidays at the coast in Balbec, of chance encounters along Paris boulevards and of contractual sex to pass the time. This is fiction of its time. A modern reader, to partake of any experience on offer, must be willing to cast off the shackles of contemporary mores, to ignore the imposed correctness of our age and be willing to enter into both the culture and the values of its author, as he flits and flirts from one potential assignation to the next, equally convinced, each time, that this one will be for real, but forever replete with doubt and question as to whether anything might ever come of anything. At least Marcel Proust, from the privilege of his own maturity, is under no illusions of how his own first person may have appeared to those young women, maidens perhaps, whom he pursued.  

In my case, what was physically evident might equally well have been due to nervous spasms, to the first stages of tuberculosis, to asthma, to a toxi-alimentary dyspnoea with renal insufficiency, to chronic bronchitis, or to a complex state into which more than one of these factors entered. Now, nervous spasms required to be treated firmly, and discouraged, tuberculosis with infinite care and with a ‘feeding-up’ process which would have been bad for an arthritic condition such as asthma, and might indeed have been dangerous in a case of toxi-alimentary dyspnoea, this last calling for a strict diet which, in return, would be fatal to a tuberculous patient. But Cottard’s hesitations were brief and his prescriptions imperious. “Purges; violent and drastic purges; milk for some days, nothing but milk. No meat. No alcohol.” My mother murmured that I needed, all the same, to be ‘built up,’ that my nerves were already weak, that drenching me like a horse and restricting my diet would make me worse.

The author is hardly the epitome of physical perfection, but he is nonetheless undeterred in his pursuit of young ladies. It´s not every teenage youth, however, who can always call on the services of a full-time maid for support. And not many of the contemporary variety would admit the need for that support.

Sometimes my mother would stroke my forehead with her hand, saying: "So little boys don't tell Mamma their troubles any more?" And Françoise used to come up to me every day with: "What a face, to be sure! If you could just see yourself! Anyone would think there was a corpse in the house." It is true that, if I had simply had a cold in the head, Françoise would have assumed the same funereal air. These lamentations pertained rather to her 'class' than to the state of my health. I could not at the time discover whether this pessimism was due to sorrow or to satisfaction. I decided provisionally that it was social and professional.

And did it matter what the first person actually looked like, whether health, bodily attributes or even integrity were in adequate supply? There were, after all, copious examples of birth-right being sufficient in itself in order to secure a man´s desired married bliss alongside desirable beauty.

 (This man's wife, incidentally, had married him against everyone's wishes and advice because he was a 'charming creature.' He had, what may be sufficient to constitute a rare and delicate whole, a fair, silky beard, good features, a nasal voice, powerful lungs and a glass eye.)

And I ask you, what in the world can he see in her? He must be a bit of a chump, when all's said and done. She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy. I can tell you, a little shop girl would be ashamed to be seen in her knickers.

In speaking, Albertine kept her head motionless, her nostrils closed, allowing only the corners of her lips to move. The result of this was a drawling, nasal sound, into the composition of which there entered perhaps a provincial descent, a juvenile affectation of British phlegm, the teaching of a foreign governess and a congestive hypertrophy of the mucus of the nose

An age with different values and assumptions is what we must enter. We may not always feel at home. In fact, given the rarefied upper strata of society that we the readers are expected to inhabit, we may rarely even feel we belong and be constantly aware of a desire to head for the exit. The experience is always challenging, not because it questions our presence, but merely because it takes us to places we feel we ought not to be. But there is complexity in this culture that a casual glance will not reveal. It is only when we engage with this shared experience that we begin to feel that the assumptions of our own age are not in the end very new.

"I've no intention of making fun, I assure you. Well, to continue, she went up to one of these black fellows with 'Good morning, nigger!'… " "Oh, it's too absurd!" "Anyhow, this classification seems to have displeased the black. 'Me nigger,' he shouted (quite furious, don't you know), to Mme. Blatin, 'me nigger; you, old cow!'" "I do think that's so delightful! I adore that story. Do say it's a good one. Can't you see old Blatin standing there, and hearing him: 'Me nigger; you, old cow'?" I expressed an intense desire to go there and see these Cingalese, one of whom had called Mme. Blatin an old cow. They did not interest me in the least

And it is not only the ideological baggage of the age that surrounds us. It is also the physical reality of stuff, stuff we accumulate, stuff we assemble as definition of our personality, as adjunct to personal history. And we are all prisoners of fashion, locked in cupboards of clothes we never wear, perhaps should never have bought, garage shelves of redundant gadgets, now rusting or moulding until we attempt to salve a guilty conscience and cart them off to a charity shop where someone not of our own social or economic class might patronisingly “make use of them”. And it is our age, not that of Marcel Proust, that claims to be “aware” of threats to the planet’s resources. And we assume it is our own age that seeks something deeper, more abstract, more refined, more lasting… Are any of us willing to admit how utterly materialistic we are?

However it may be, always when I think of that drawing-room which Swann (not that the criticism implied on his part any intention to find fault with his wife's taste) found so incongruous - because, while it was still planned and carried out in the style, half conservatory, half studio, which had been that of the rooms in which he had first known Odette, she had, none the less, begun to replace in its medley a quantity of the Chinese ornaments, which she now felt to be rather gimcrack, a trifle dowdy, by a swarm of little chairs and stools and things upholstered in old Louis XIV silks; not to mention the works of art brought by Swann himself from his house on the Quai d'Orléans - it has kept in my memory, on the contrary, that composite, heterogeneous room, a cohesion, a unity, an individual charm never possessed even by the most complete, the least spoiled of such collections that the past has bequeathed to us, or the most modern, alive and stamped with the imprint of a living personality; for we alone can, by our belief that they have an existence of their own, give to certain of the things that we see a soul which they afterwards keep, which they develop in our minds.

Alas, what he was saying, how little, I felt, did it apply to myself, whom all reasoning, however exalted it might be, left cold, who was happy only in moments of pure idleness, when I was comfortable and well; I felt how purely material was everything that I desired in life, and how easily I could dispense with the intellect.

A recurring theme in Proust is reference to art and music. Likening characters to faces in paintings gives physical form to the words that inhabit the page and musical harmonies may give clue to personality.

…in Luini’s fresco, the charming Mage with the arched nose and fair hair, to whom, it appeared, Swann had at one time been thought to bear a striking resemblance.

…or in piano-playing, which she did not like to be too finicking, too laboured, having indeed had a special weakness for the discords, the wrong notes of Rubinstein.

…and when the narrator offers an assumption of is age, we realise how particularistic are all assumptions of any age. Personally, I have little time for the idea that scientific knowledge is a mere social construct subject to change. Researched and documented “laws of nature” are always incomplete and always specific to the conditions that apply to their relevance. Gravity was not contradicted by relativity, but the ranges of its applicability were more fully appreciated. If we read pre-relativistic science that might assume gravity’s concept to be universal, we suffer contradictions similar to those we experience when we read a different work written in a time when the workings of mass-attraction were not quantified. How we apply this knowledge, our appreciation of its relevance to our lives, this is perhaps always governed by a combination of fashion and our personal misunderstanding of the concept. In a different age, however, such adherence to social or personal norms might be quite confusing, certainly surprising.

In view of the dampness of the air I had taken rather more caffeine than usual.

But back at the plot, if such a diversion might be admitted to the detail of such a life, this coming-of-age young-adult is really hot on chat-up lines. He is utterly smitten by M. Swann´s daughter, Giberte. He seeks out her company, diverts from his route through Paris just to walk the street she has trod, cranes his neck at the promise of the merest glimpse of her presence. And then, when presented with a drawing-room audience with the heart-racing object of his desire, issues the hottest chat-up line that Hollywood might ever have dreamed up.

“I thought, the other day, that the clock was slow, if anything.”

His affections move on, eventually, his ardour unrequited, his memory perhaps scarred for its entire adulthood. One learns to live with such disappointment, to cope with the imperfection of reality. But memory is permanent, even if the events that created its existence never actually happened. And when they did, the power of memory to transform the future is immense.

…the mother whose son has gone to sea on some perilous voyage of discovery sees him in imagination every moment, long after the fact of his having perished has been established, striding into the room, saved by a miracle and in the best of health. And this strain of waiting, according to the strength of her memory and the resistance of her bodily organs, either helps her on her journey through the years, at the end of which she will be able to endure the knowledge that her son is no more, to forget gradually and to survive his loss, or else it kills her.

And without doubt we are conscious of this process by which the formation of future-determining memory via experience comes about as it actually happens, as it chips away at the as yet unmade block that is our forming self. We can change. We often do. We can take things for granted. We can shift our allegiances. We can ignore certain consequences, whilst being obsessed with others, just like here when our narrator appears to be thoroughly concerned with the effects that affection transfer might have in relation to Giberte, but not even to consider the consequences of his actions upon the lives of those he says he does not love.

… for when evening came I was always too wretched to stay in the house and used to go and pour out my sorrows upon the bosoms of women whom I did not love. As for seeking to give any sort of pleasure to Gilberte, I no longer thought of that; to visit her house again now could only have added to my sufferings. Even the sight of Gilberte, which would have been so exquisite a pleasure only yesterday, would no longer have sufficed me. For I should have been miserable all the time that I was not actually with her. That is how a woman, by every fresh torture that she inflicts on us, increases, often quite unconsciously, her power over us and at the same time our demands upon her. With each injury that she does us, she encircles us more and more completely, doubles our chains - but halves the strength of those which hitherto we had thought adequate to bind her in order that we might retain our own peace of mind.

But then, we find him truly conscious of that which surrounds him. Its reality, or perhaps its invented memory, is both vivid and permanent. There is no doubt here that the detail comes via later reflection, since the teenager´s ability to apply musical notation to sensory input was probably developed long after this particular journey, years after music became comfortable under the fingers and some time after reflection revealed the detail of exactly how it worked.

I was surrounded by the soothing activity of all those movements of the train which kept me company, offered to stay and converse with me if I could not sleep, lulled me with their sounds which I wedded - as I had often wedded the chime of the Cambray bells now to one rhythm, now to another (hearing as the whim took me first four level and equivalent semi-quavers, then one semi-quaver furiously dashing against a crotchet); they neutralised the centrifugal force of my insomnia by exercising upon it a contrary pressure which kept me in equilibrium and on which my immobility and presently my drowsiness felt themselves to be borne with the same sense of refreshment that I should have had, had I been resting under the protecting vigilance of powerful forces, on the breast of nature and of life, had I been able for a moment to incarnate myself in a fish that sleeps in the sea, driven unheeding by the currents and the tides, or in an eagle outstretched upon the air, with no support but the storm.

And such is the power of this process of filtration and reinterpretation of experience by memory that when it clearly expresses the views of later years, it appears to be in the mind of the teenager at the heart of the story. It is a context in which we appreciate, via reflection in later solitude, what became of the life, how it came about, how it was formed.

Nine tenths of the men of the Faubourg Saint-Germain appear to the average man of the middle class simply as alcoholic wasters (which, individually, they not infrequently are) whom, therefore, no respectable person would dream of asking to dinner. The middle class fixes its standard, in this respect, too high, for the feelings of these men would never prevent their being received with every mark of esteem in houses which it, the middle class, may never enter.

"After all," I said to myself, "possibly the pleasure that its author has found in writing it is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; it may be only an accessory, one that is often to be found superadded to that value, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written yawning."

Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative film; we develop it later, when we are at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom, the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people.

That our words are, as a general rule, filled, by the person to whom we address them, with a meaning which that person derives from her own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them, is a fact which the daily round of life is perpetually demonstrating. But if we find ourselves as well in the company of a person whose education (as Albertine's was to me) is inconceivable, her tastes, her reading, her principles unknown, we cannot tell whether our words have aroused in her anything that resembles their meaning, any more than in an animal, although there are things that even an animal may be made to understand.

And so we are condemned to live the only life we have, largely unaware of how it is perceived by others, eternally ignorant except by speculation of what it might have meant to ourselves. We do not choose our self. Neither do we choose our place or time of birth, though for some the details of death are an option. Transporting ourselves into another mind, in another place, inhabiting a different time reminds us of the minimal control we have over our destiny, of the very events that might befall even the most ordered existence. But certainly what does happen forms experience which we can either ignore, hoping the next is what we always wanted, or we can store it in a file of memory, so that later in life we can revisit that place and perhaps reinvent it, thus transforming our existence into the life we thought we deserved. Only then, perhaps, has that young adult truly come of age.