Time Regained by Marcel Proust – The final book in Proust’s masterpiece acts as an extended epilogue, skipping ahead to the miseries of WWI, and further on still to a period where our protagonist, after an extended stay in a sanitarium, briefly returns to Parisian society, finally striking upon the grand understanding of time which will allow for the creation of his epic work. Speaking of the work as a whole, it is at once supremely brilliant and somehow less than the sum of its parts. Proust has a profound grasp of the human mind, as well as the subtleties of social interaction and the role which our subjective perceptions and endlessly shifting memory play in our experience of existence. Indeed, there are insights galore in these pages, complex but valuable. And yet, the peculiarities of Proust’s own character – his obsessive jealousy, his inability to feel genuine friendship, indeed his essential incapacity to love in a true sense – render much of his thinking alien, at least to me, and, I would suspect, to most readers. This would be fine—there is enormous value in elucidating even an aberrant mind state – except that Proust isn’t interested in the subjective, but only in (as he says many times throughout the book) the general laws which can be drawn from it. And Proust definitely seems to believe that the truths he articulates are universal, that all love is simply refined jealousy, that we exist almost exclusively within our own conscious, that social interaction is essentially a barren distraction from one’s own psyche, and that happiness is impossible as our desires, once granted, immediately cease to offer any satisfaction. But I don’t think these things are true, or at least are true only in part, and so much of Proust’s grand summations are somewhat lost on me. That said, this remains one of the seminal works of human letters, a profound and magisterial depiction of the movement of time, nostalgia, love, sex, so on and so forth. In short, it was well worth my December.
