Imagine a collage, an assemblage of the entire output of august artists, especially those of turn-of-the-century France, those one-time upstarts and latter-day establishment mainstays we’ve since learned to label “impressionists.” Imagine also this vast canvas repeated in multiple tones, so that it not only presents to view a vast, almost limitless expanse of color, of detail, of form, of beautiful ladies in finer clothes, of gardens teeming with flowers of every the season, of the streets of Paris thronged with carriages shining through the murky, humid evenings, of the multi-coloured lilies floating on the surface of still lakes or the quiet streams of rural France, of the dancers performing their ballet or rehearse their slender outlined legs at the bar, but also revisit each view from multiple angles in different colors, at different times, from different perspectives with different impressions. It seems that we see the same things repeated, over and over again, but always different, always changed, always vivid. And imagine this presented not only in the brilliant colors of the original, but also in the hues imposed by vividly recalled memory that knows each scene, but cannot fix the exact date, time, or shape, so that they re-form truly solid living structures. rebuilt. of what the original eyes only partially registered. And then close those eyes, so that the images can be extracted from their memories, those images indelibly, but perhaps poorly archived, that we have collected without realizing it by virtue of the unfinished act of living. And then we share that experience.

And then, in the author’s own words, so it is with our own past. It is a futile job to try to recover it: all the efforts of our intellect must be useless. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of the intellect, in some material object (in the sensation that material object will give us) that we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether or not we find it before we ourselves have to die..

But the imperative is that we must try. We only get one shot at this moving target we call ‘life’ and our target 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 way, that enforced blurring of the edge that inevitably results when we try to focus on a passing image and have only a memory of it. momentary impression in the mind to remember any details that it threw up.

And the result? The result is a passing stream, an ever-changing, ever-varying view that always comprises the same view, the same solid objects that once, or perhaps still, populated its shores. And, from the distance of time, who can be sure of what we feel? Who can be sure of the motive, the consequence, the intention or the stratagem? Who can testify that those remembered words were spoken with love, hate, respect, mockery, criticism, praise, or simply to pass the time we now realize we never had? Is the irony perhaps lasting longer, as in an invitation to dinner with a family acquaintance, M. Legrandin?

Just the day before, I had asked my parents to send me out to dinner with him that same Sunday night. “Come and keep your old friend company,” he had told me. “Like the bouquet that a traveler sends us from a land to which we will never return, come and let me breathe from the distant country of your adolescence the aroma of those spring flowers among which I also wandered, many years ago. Come with the primrose, with the canon’s beard, with the golden cup; come with the stone whip, from which the corsages are 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 they begin to embalm with their fragrance the alleys of your great-aunt’s garden before the last snows of Lent melt from their ground. Solomon, and with the multicolored enamel of thoughts, but come, above all, with the spring breeze, still cooled by the last frosts of winter, which moves away, for the two butterflies that have waited outside all morning, rose the closed gates of the first Jerusalem. “

At home the question arose whether, all things considered, he should still send me to dinner with Mr. 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 recollection of M. Swann’s relationship with Odette, a woman he initially compares to an image in a Botticelli painting in the Sistine Chapel, we share the accelerated euphoria of a man who becomes obsessed with sensuous beauty. of a desirable and available woman, we euphemistically accompany him in the trimming of the flowers that decorate her bodice and then suffer the woodworm, destroying the doubts about her motives that spring from an all-encompassing and almost destroying jealousy.

There is, of course, a lot of socializing. It would not be far from the truth to observe that these people spend more time worrying about who to include and who to specifically and justifiably exclude from a guest list than they do at work, in their beds, or on the road. And decisions are generally based on class, that universal categorization and mark of quality that seems to pervade and suffocate human society in any time and place, the very quality that revolutions may occasionally try but fail to eradicate. And what happens at these gatherings remains primarily social, whatever the focus of the evening.

If the pianist suggests playing the Ride of the Valkyries or the Tristan Prelude, Mme. vegetable he would protest, not because he disliked the music, but, on the contrary, that it made too violent an impression on him. “So you want me to have one of my headaches? You know very well, it’s the same every time he touches that. I know what awaits me. Tomorrow, when I want to get up, nothing to do!” If he wasn’t going to play, they talked, and one of his friends, usually the painter who was in fashion there that year, “wove”, as M. Verdurin said, “a bloody funny tale that made everyone split” . with laughter”, and especially Mrs. Verdurin, for whom so strong was her habit of taking figurative accounts of her emotions literally – Dr. Cottard, then starting in general practice, “would really have to come one day and set his jaw, which had been dislocated from laughing so much.

And this is a place and a time where no one lives life half-heartedly, where no person is really reticent about expressing emotion, even though what is expressed sincerely enough may, at a later date, convey at least a partial sense of excess. . -statement. In his childhood he had been taught to caress and care for those sinuous, long-necked creatures, Chopin’s phrases, so free, so supple, so tactile, that they begin by seeking their final resting place somewhere beyond and far from the earth. address. where they started, the point where you would expect them to arrive, phrases that deviate in those fantastic bypasses to return more deliberately with a more deliberate reaction, with more precision, like in a glass bowl that, if you hit it, will sound and it will throb until you cry aloud in anguish from clutching at your heart.

Gazing at this vast mosaic of stitched art, this mix of people brought together by time and the filter of memory, can sometimes seem like taking a voyage across the ocean in a small boat, rigged with too scanty a sail, a boat that, often calm. seems to be drifting. The real trick, without a doubt, is to relax and let go. Such is life, it seems.