On page 264, Proust defines the elusive, joyous moment brought on by involuntary memories as: “a fragment of time in the pure state.” Further on, “But let a noise or a scent, once heard or smelt, be heard or smelt again in the present and at the same time in the past, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, and immediately the permanent and habitually concealed essence of things is liberated and our true self, which seemed to be dead… is awakened and reanimated… A minute freed from the order of time has re-created in us, to feel it, the man freed from the order of time.” These joyous moments are representative of a successful synthesis between past and present within our minds, ending the painful disparity between the true nature of Things (which is extra-temporal*) and our usual perception of them (which is rooted in a conception of time that is linear and distinct). The experience of Time is described as both liberating and creative, simultaneously birthing and emancipating our true, joyous self. Our true self is joyous because it does not fear death, as death is a result of time and our true self exists outside of time. Perplexingly, the very next passage is a meditation on the necessity of death (or at least the existence of a past (which then necessitates death)) to true enjoyment of life. Proust describes the present and future as distinct and opposed, “Always, when these resurrections took place, the distant scene engendered around the common sensation had for a moment grappled, like a wrestler, with the present scene. Always the present scene had come off victorious, and always the vanquished one had appeared to me the more beautiful of the two.” He goes onto explain that it is impossible to experience both the past and present simultaneously for more than an instant, I suppose it is just a limitation of our biology. For Proust though, it is still “the only genuine and fruitful pleasure,” measured against the bittersweet and ultimately trivial pleasures of society, friendship, and love, and he redoubles his efforts to try and understand it. On pg 271 now, “I knew that Lost Time was not to be found again [in the physical places of my past]… Impressions such as those to which I wished to give permanence could not but vanish at the touch of a direct enjoyment which had been powerless to engender them. The only way to savour them more fully was to try and to get to know them more completely in the medium in which they existed, that is to say within myself…”

God knows if Proust was ever successful at it or not because I lost track of what he was trying to say around this point. The thing about these Proustian ideals of time and death is that it creates a consumptive model for humanity. His entire theory is couched in terms of feeding upon, tasting, savoring, this experience of Time, as if it were some decadent dessert. The reason he wants to understand the phenomenon of time is because he wants to enjoy it more thoroughly, more consistently. When I look a the whole arc of Proust’s argument, I (the humble, pig-headed, undergrad) can clearly see that he is equating truth and pleasure. His perception ‘outside of time’ is exalted and true and the common perception of time as linear is false, but the only real difference he describes between the two is that one causes him joy and one causes him pain. “The unreality of others is indicated clearly enough–is it not?–either by their inability to satisfy us…  or else by the sadness which follows their satisfaction.” What the hell kind of garbage, cop-out, reasoning is that? If it doesn’t make me happy, it’s not real? A young man’s acne may cause him endless torment but that doesn’t make pimples an unreality. Jesus Christ.

*Pg.262, “The truth surely was that the being within me which had enjoyed these impressions because they had in them something that was common to a day long past and to the present, because in some way they were extra-temporal, and this being made its appearance only when… it was likely to find itself in the one and only medium in which it could exist and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say: outside time.