I am finding more connections between the Proust and my project than I anticipate, both in my research texts and in In Search of Lost Time, both oblique and direct. For instance, in Within a Budding Grove, the narrator says “adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything” (423), which I might use as an epigraph for my paper/memoir/project/thing. And of course Proust is used as a reference point in all my books on memory, and he’s either cited or should be in the book I’m currently reading, a psychoanalytic perspective on adolescence called Boy Crazy, by Janet Sayers. I didn’t realize how much the novel would focus on the narrator’s adolescence until it was happening. It’s good though. I’m very interested in adolescence (obviously, or I wouldn’t be doing the project I’m doing). I have second-guessed this interest a lot—like when I wanted to be an adolescent therapist, or when I’ve wanted to write about my own adolescence. I worry that I’m stuck in the past, some kind of semi-conscious refusal to grow up, a Peter Pan thing. My memoir is going to be about a moment in high school, a moment with a girl who was really important to me, but now we barely keep in touch. I can imagine her laughing disparagingly at me for still being stuck on this stuff that was so long ago now– seven and a half years, for the moment I’m thinking of. For me, three cities ago, at least a billion lives ago. For her, something similar. But she emailed me the other day, our first contact in ages, so I know I’m not the only one looking back. And Proust gives me real reassurance—that it’s okay to look back, important even, or at least worthwhile. This program gives me reassurance. Of course I still have questions—what is the importance of my own story, what is the importance of a story at all, or should I just give up those lines of inquiry and accept the soothing assumption that they are important for some unknown unknowable but totally valid reason? Should I just let go of thinking about it altogether, and let it be enough that in this program I am invited to read and write stories of time and memory? What else is there to do, really?