Swann’s Way

In Search of Lost Time Volume I: Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust

It was a long time coming, but I finally finished the first volume of Proust’s epic. One of the most beautiful writers of all time, once you get used to the pace. Proust’s narrative is incredibly easy going, ambling along – you’ll get all the information, but all in good time. I must admit it took me a little while to get into reading without want of ‘action’ but it was worth the effort. You’ll be turning page after page of atmosphere and memory to all of a sudden be struck by a sentence that is so true to the entirety of human nature, so concise, so evocative and so genuinely brilliant that its like being hit in the face.

This is a novel about love and childhood, time and memory, lost moments and recaptured lives. There is one particular image that will always stick with me when I think about this book: The moment in between sleeping and waking up when you create how you expect the room you are sleeping in to look before you open your eyes. I imagine this like all the pieces of furniture and ornaments whirling about the space and touching down in various scenarios as you think through all the rooms you could be asleep in. As you can see, the tiniest of details are given so much meaning. And the meaning is familiar.

My attitude to reading the rest of Proust is that I have a whole lifetime to do it. I think if you’ve read him, you’ll understand the feeling.

The reality that I had known no longer existed. … The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of an image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
In Search of Lost Time Volume I: Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust

For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.
In Search of Lost Time Volume I: Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust

he would have been glad to learn that she was leaving Paris for ever; he would have had the heart to remain there; but he hadn’t the heart to go.
In Search of Lost Time Volume I: Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust

Proust Quotes

Now are the woods all black, but the sky is blue.

May you see a blue sky overhead, my young friend; and then, even when the time comes, as it has come for me now, when the woods are all black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself, as I do, by looking up at the sky.

In Search of Lost Time Volume I: Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust