In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

You know Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is a great book because however hard however many smart people try, no one can explain why.

Most people’s knowledge of ‘Proust’ (the book, not the man, for the novel is more commonly referred to by its author’s surname than its title, as in ‘I’m reading Proust’) extends to one of three things.

There’s something about a boy eating a madeleine, and how entire worlds of memory can be evoked from a passing encounter with a sound, a smell, or, in this case, a taste of a cute little sponge cake dipped in some tea.

There’s some vague knowledge of it being a tale about some sort of boy who becomes some sort of man growing up in high-society France at the turn of the 20th Century.

And, of course, there’s the traditional conversational bait of the needy erudite: someone telling you – almost certainly unsolicited – that they’re reading it, often by subtly-not-subtly plonking one of its volumes (usually the first) down somewhere everyone can see it, and then acting surprised when somebody does.

Assuming that you have no desire to read a million-word-plus metaphor about a small cake, nor feel much resonance with a long-dead, and even-longer decaying, society, nor want to associate with or be that guy, this is as far as most meetings with Proust go.

This is a shame.

Despite it being one of the things it’s most commonly known for, In Search of Lost Time isn’t a book you tell people about. It’s a book that tells you about yourself. Reading In Search of Lost Time isn’t a badge, something to ‘get’, to ‘own’, to show-off to others where you’re at. It’s a barometer… the extent to which you ‘get’ it shows you where you’re going… or how far you’ve gone awry. There’s a line about just this in the book itself: ‘Each reader, when he is reading, is uniquely reading himself.’ In Proust, there’s a line for just about everything it’s worth writing a line about.

But the point of Proust isn’t to point at its parts, to analyse its punctuational adventures, or to try to pull apart its plot by poking your fingers into its sometimes hilariously large holes. And it’s certainly not to extract quotations, to reduce a novel that feels like it lives and breathes beyond its pages and beyond the lifespan of its author, to a necropolis of Insta-optimised ‘lessons’, ‘nuggets’ or god-damn ‘takeaways’.

Proust takes your craving to break down, analyse, and optimise, and it chucks it back in your stupid short-sighted face. These cravings were of course present in Proust’s time, as they’ve been present in every other time. But they’ve never been as voracious as they are in ours.

Contrary to the all-too-easily jumped-to conclusion that a 100-year-old French novel is out of place and out of time in the modern West, Proust is even more a writer for our time and place than he was for his. And because no one would publish Proust today, it’s not only the best thing we’ve got, it’s the best we’re likely to have for a long old while. If you poured a Proustian manuscript into Grammarly, it’d probably confidently exclaim you should give up writing altogether, or recommend a writing course for the defence against the dark art of adverbs.

When the cultural waters in which you’ve spent your ‘life’ nonchalantly swimming (or perhaps drifting) have eroded your beautiful, bonkers, edges and carried you along conveyor-belt-like to a place – to a way of being – unbefitting of a whole-brained human, Proust comes along, like a 1.25-million word incantation that breaks the spell and calls you back to the shore.

Allow yourself to get lost in the unreal world of Proust’s novel and maybe, just maybe, you’ll emerge the other side feeling like you've experienced something more real than what you heretofore took to be reality.

Most reviews of Proust focus on its length. Or that it’s ‘unfinished’. Or that a few characters can die and yet be resurrected later on. Or the sentences that meander from one digression to the next, some taking ‘detours’ that are themselves the lengths of small books.

As if any of that mattered.

It matters very much to a certain type of mind, of course. And that’s the point. It’s that mattering, that mind, where the error lies, not with Proust.

The fact it’s not finished, that had he not died, Proust would no doubt have kept on reading and experiencing stuff that he felt compelled to incorporate into it in some way, is not evidence that the book is some sort of tragic failure. If it’s evidence of anything, it’s evidence of just how alive it is, and remains. It’s a vivacity you can feel when you read it. Like it’s not just a mirror to life, but in some way it is life. At least the sort of life that humans live… an artistic, creative dance, rather than a race for rats.

The length of any package of words is irrelevant. Terrible books tend to be long. But so, too, do great ones. Whether it’s Tweets or tomes, it’s all just time spent reading. Whether it’s six months spent madly reading Proust or six months spent reading a mad menagerie of 280-character coughs, the time doesn’t change… but how each changes you couldn’t be more different. Starting with changing how you see the relevance of quantity of words to quality of worth.

You can’t box the interdependent, interconnected, web of the realised relevance of your reality into the linear limits of a digression-less representation of it. If you focus on the futility of doing so, and conclude that attempting to do so was the problem… that you’d have been better off sticking to a topic you could weigh, and measure, and colour with a little anecdote, and evidence with an RCT… then you’re missing the point. ‘If I shortened my sentences,’ wrote Proust, ‘it would make little pieces of sentences, not sentences.’

In Search of Lost Time is long, because it has to be. Because it’s trying to take you through a therapeutic process, via paper, remotely, and without the aid of a trained professional and/or powerful entheogens.

It’s a journey fiction – this type of beautiful, barmy, fiction – is peculiarly well suited to guide you along. Before you can do anything about your untethered ideas-above-its-station craving for compartmentalising and decontextualising everything in misguided attempts to ‘optimise’ the whole, you need to see it. Which means you need to chisel away all the crap that’s caked over your vision… which is kind of tough to do directly, given you cannot see the crap, and probably don’t believe it even exists.

Don’t pay attention to the length, but the fact that you find the length worth paying attention to. Why would you care? Is it because making every book 250-300 pages really makes them better, or is it because your attention, and everyone else’s, has been so unhelpfully tilted towards counting stuff that you’ve really started to believe that the page count counts?

There are, in truth, not all that many abnormally long sentences in Proust, relatively speaking. The fact that those that are there catch us, possibly even confuse us, is telling. Forget what that says about the book. What does that say about us?

What if, too, the detours weren’t detours? What if, when you find yourself screaming ‘get back to the narrative, you crazy bastard, no one can be expected to hold all this in one’s head at one time, haven’t you heard of The Minto Method? How am I supposed to speed towards my goals this way?’... you’re maybe missing something more important than how easy it is to skim in a straight line along the surface of the story?

Everything is either cultivating a relationship, or a distraction from doing so. To accuse Proust of getting distracted from the narrative is to miss the point that the ‘distractions’ are the relationships, and desperately clinging to the narrow certainty of the narrative is the distraction.

‘The past,’ Proust impels us to understand, ‘constantly enters the present, and is changed by it’. Let that, and not the narrative arc, sink under your skin. Memory isn’t about the past, and dreams aren’t about the future. When you click into Proustian time, and look at the lenses you are usually too busy faffing about to do anything but look through, everything is present.

The original French title, À la recherche du temps perdu, is often translated not as ‘In Search of Lost Time’, but as ‘Remembrance of Things Past’. Proust hated this translation. And with damn-good reason. It’s a translation that expresses the exact distorted disposition towards the world he was writing to try to change.

‘Perdu’ carries with it an important connotation of ‘waste’. Wasting time is the ultimate modern disease… especially when we think we’re ‘optimising’ it by narrowly focusing our attention on things, and treating ‘time’ as a series of slices, rather than a flow.

And ‘recherche’ suggests more than mere remembrance, even if you’re ‘remembering’ in terribly reflective fashion as you fill in today’s boxes in your gratitude journal. It’s something more… Socratic. The emphasis is not on reflection, but examination. It’s remembrance as a prompt to live in a more examined way. One shouldn’t read Plato in some crass ‘Here are 7 lessons I learnt from Socrates’ way. One shouldn’t even strive to be Socrates. One should intend to live more Socratically, and attend to doing so. Proust calls us to the same beautiful challenge.

Like Socrates, Proust doesn’t set out to answer (or prompt you to answer) a staccato series of questions. He sets you out on a quest. As the general editor of the Penguin Classics translation tells us, ‘No sentence-type is more typically Proustian than the spiralling structure which contains half a dozen possible answers to a simple question.’

If you’ve just read ‘quest’ and thought: ‘Aha, like a hero’s journey… I wonder what his call to action is?’ then you’ve missed another point. Any time spent trying to extract a Proustian ‘elixir’ to use to help optimise your business or morning-routine protocols is as wasted as the embarrassing amount of the world’s time already spent trying to work out who the narrator of the book really is… how old they are, how autobiographical it is, and so on. Ugh, stop it.

Astute readers will by this point likely have noted the compartmentalisation, the extraction of takeaways, the time-slicing, etc. etc. and shouted ‘McGilchrist!’ on at least half a dozen occasions. And not (one hopes!) because The Matter with Things is almost as long.

In Search of Lost Time isn’t a ‘model’ novel. It’s a grand right-hemisphere presencing of the relational web of reality, not a left-hemisphere re-presentation of the things related… the relata: the people as things, the ideas as things, and so on. The topics it touches on – love, betrayal, manners, memory, snobbery, and just about anything else that appears, grows, and parties its way around the ocean of relationships – are not there to be defined, but explored.

It’s a novel that can, if you’re remotely receptive to it, and set out on your multi-month swim through it with the right intention and attention, bring you that little bit more in touch with reality too.

Not everybody can, of course. In rejecting Proust’s manuscript, one half-brained publisher wrote: ‘My dear friend, perhaps I am dense, but I just don’t understand why a man should take thirty pages to describe how he turns over in his bed before he goes to sleep. It made my head swim.’ I wonder if he also wonders why anyone would take longer than strictly necessary to eat, rest, or have sex. If this is likely to be you too, if you’re likely to be unavoidably looking for things Proust is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ about, or things that can be tested with trials, and instant feedback loops, then pop off for now, sort your living out, and come back and try again. Proust will be waiting.

To read Proust in order to acquire a robotic knowledge, to ‘learn’ ‘things’ you can ‘use’ would be a mistake. You can, of course. Plenty do, and not entirely pointlessly. But to do so is to sacrifice a rare opportunity to cultivate a deeper, more magical sort of knowledge. A participatory, wiser, more beautiful knowledge. It’s the same sad sacrifice people make when they go to university to ‘learn’ or even to ‘learn how to learn’, rather than to bum around among some bars and some books for three years and somehow get magically spat out the other end as a better human being.

In Search of Lost Time is a work of the imagination, and the imaginal. It’s one of the most beautiful works of literature in any language – French, English, and, indeed, whatever you call a language beyond language. As Proust wrote: ‘Beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language’. That is how they can inhabit you, and you them, in a way that dissolves and transcends linguistic boundaries.

Proust is a great book because it is a greatly human book. The sort that embeds you more deeply in your world, by getting you fabulously lost in another… that enriches your relationship with reality not despite being fiction, but because of being fiction. There is, of course, a long line (or two) about that too:

After this central belief, which moved incessantly during my reading from inside to outside, toward the discovery of the truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in which I was taking part, for those afternoons contained more dramatic events than does, often, an entire lifetime. These were the events taking place in the book I was reading; it is true that the people affected by them were not “real”, as Francoise said. But all the feelings we are made to experience by the joy or the misfortune of a real person are produced in us only through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist consisted in understanding that in the apparatus of our emotions, the image being the only essential element, the simplification that would consist in purely and simply abolishing real people would be a decisive improvement. A real human being, however profoundly we sympathise with him, is in large part perceived by our senses, that is to say, remains opaque to us, presents a dead weight which our sensibility cannot lift. If a calamity should strike him, it is only in a small part of the total notion we have of him that we will be able to be moved by this; even more, it is only in a part of the total notion he has of himself that he will be able to be moved himself. The novelist’s happy discovery was to have the idea of replacing these parts, impenetrable to the soul, by an equal quantity of immaterial parts, that is to say, parts which our souls can assimilate. What does it matter thenceforth if the actions, and the emotions, of this new order of creatures seems to us true, since we have made them ours, since it is within us that they occur, that they hold within their control, as we feverishly turn the pages of the book, the rapidity of our breathing and the intensity of our gaze. And once the novelist has put us in that state, in which, as in all purely internal states, every emotion is multiplied tenfold, in which his book will disturb us as might a dream but a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer, then see how he provokes in us within one hour all possible happiness and all possible unhappiness just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them (thus our heart changes, in life, and it is the worst pain; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality it changes, as certain natural phenomena occur, slowly enough so that, if we were able to observe successively each of its different states, in return we are spared the actual sensation of change).

Read it. You’ll maybe emerge a better person, and you won’t know how, or why. Then read it again, and you’ll maybe come to see that that is the point.