Thoughts after Proust

Michael and I finished reading the last volume of À la recherche du temps perdu in the In Search of Lost Time translations the other day. We began in December, and through twice-daily installments of reading together, we finished in May.

I suppose that everyone has their own particular set of responses to the act of reading this novel. For me it was a set of responses that drew upon many memories that I had either forgotten or had repressed. The various characters at various times reminded me of interactions, feelings, obsessions, helplessness, confusion, and blindness that I recall experiencing in the various theaters of my life.

And now in the "aftermath" I am left with a set of pathways into my own unconscious mind that I am forced to explore. I can understand how after finishing the novel it would be very easy to flip to the beginning of Swann's Way and experience the narrator's experience with new eyes, revisit the art (some of which we can now look up at the touch of a button, and some of which we need to paint out of our own imagination, within the guidelines that are being offered), and hear (once again) what we imagine the music to have been. I feel no such inclination to take another trip around the Proust world's sun until I have done a more thorough examination of my own life.

I offer no spoilers, but I can tell you that the narrator often talks about love (and other things) as being driven by habit. I suppose that by having had the twice-daily habit of reading Proust: experiencing the sometimes overwhelming beauty of his sentences as well as the sometimes unbearably long periods of obsessive cluelessness, hating the narrator for his inability to understand how women are "wired," (perhaps it is too much to ask), and then loving the narrator for describing music, sleep, art, light, weather, travel, household sounds, characters I know from literature (from Balzac, in particular), and history as he lived it (the Dreyfus Affair, World War I), I have taken on a new set of habits myself.

Proust's set of characters functioned as a kind of a social life for us during this time of not being able to socialize because of the pandemic. Now that we have closed the book (literally) (please forgive the pun) on that world, I wonder how Michael and I will function in the real social world of later 2021 or 2022. Not that we had a Proust-like social life, with parties, salons, royalty, cads, and louts, but before the pandemic we did have occasions to interact with some interesting people, and we could do it in places other than in the grocery store, where we go double-masked once every three weeks (our only real outing aside from Michael's mother's place of assisted living), with little to talk about with our neighbors except for the fact that we are wearing masks and we are trying to survive in a backward-thinking and science-denying place like Charleston during a pandemic.