From Michele
For tomorrow’s session we will meet on zoom for a live mini lecture and discussion which will look at how we can use and embed thinking and theory into practice. We will also have an introduction to the Contextual Study and Literature Review in the context of this unit’s assessment requirements. In preparation, please select a text that is relevant to your practice and bring this to this session. This may be a writer that you relate to, a paper, a paragraph or a quote.
A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust
I read a lot, always have done. As a teenager I would have at least 4 books on the go constantly. I first became acquainted with Proust’s “A la recherché …” in my twenties. I think there was a TV adaptation, but it wasn’t too exciting, and difficult to follow for a young man looking for his way in the world. Even the title is open to interpretation, and I was looking for direction, for certainties.
Time
I was very interested in the concept of time. I couldn’t get my head round Einstein’s interpretation in his relativity papers. I recall sitting in a park beside Wembley library, watching squirrels and wondering about how they would appear in a time frame travelling at 9/10ths of the speed of light, then going home and listening to Pink Floyd’s Time form ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ , “Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day, You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way”. How do these fit together?
Certainties and Ambiguities
‘Remembrance of things past’, ‘In search of lost time’ and ‘In search of wasted time’ have all been used as titles for the various translations. All versions convey parts of the meaning, but not all, and could be re-interpreted on re-reading. The scientific and younger side of me rejected these uncertainties, but now I’m open to multi-layered interpretations and ambiguous meanings which invite questions and thought, rather than delivered eternal truths. My wife is French, we met in Berlin and we live in Northern Ireland. Our communication is similarly flawed!
Most Relevant part of Proust
The part of “A la recherché ..” that spoke to me in terms of this course was the famous madeleine scene. I have heavily edited his words, not changed any, just deleted some phrase and passages, as this scene is very long:
“Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, when one day in winter, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’. I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place.
The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea.
And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine.
And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, all from my cup of tea.”
Relevance to my Time and Wallet themes
When I first saw the wallet again I was taken back to that time period of its use, but it’s a different me revisiting that time.
“The crumb of madeleine dipped in herbal tea does not return us to the past: rather, and despite what Proust seems to be saying above, we bring the separation with us. It is this double vision that makes the experience so poignant.” [Ref. https://www.readingproust.com/shadow.htm ]
As the title suggests, memory is a major theme of In Search of Lost Time. The author’s understanding of memory is clearly stated in this second volume, in the words of James Grieve for the Penguin Proust:
[T]he greater part of our memory lies outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn’s first fires, things through which we can retrieve … the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears have dried, can make us weep again. Outside us? Inside us, more like, but stored away…. It is only because we have forgotten that we can now and then return to the person we once were, envisage things as that person did, be hurt again, because we are not ourselves anymore, but someone else, who once loved something that we no longer care about.
