Proust Moment, May 8, 2003

Remission of Time

And so ends this long night, with Marcel's mother by his side, along with the realization that this mother and child reunion can't last forever. With separation will come the renewal of the agony of being away, and the knowledge that "remission of time will bring me no access of power." For the child Marcel, the scene is destined to replay itself, and the events of this particular night have replayed many times already in the life of his adult self. It's like an old film that keeps repeating in his head; we are back with Marcel's magic lantern, with the roles of Genevieve de Brabant and Golo replaced by Marcel and his mother, by Swann and that "fast" woman Odette. This scene from the past is an illumination in a dark world. Here is Swann, the "unconscious author of my sufferings," and here is the hall, the staircase, and the room upstairs, forming an "irregular pyramid" -- a veritable tomb in a world without time, a world where it is always 7 p.m.

Is there any other scene from childhood besides this one? Marcel thinks not. The past is dead.

"And so it was that, for a long time afterwards, when I lay awake at night and revived old memories of Combray, I saw no more of it than this sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background, like the panels which a Bengal fire or some electric sign will illuminate and dissect from the front of a building the other parts of which remain plunged in darkness: broad enough at its base, the little parlour, the dining-room, the alluring shadows of the path along which would come M. Swann, the unconscious author of my sufferings, the hall through which I would journey to the first step of that staircase, so hard to climb, which constituted, all by itself, the tapering 'elevation' of an irregular pyramid; and, at the summit, my bedroom, with the little passage through whose glazed door Mamma would enter; in a word, seen always at the same evening hour, isolated from all its possible surroundings, detached and solitary against its shadowy background, the bare minimum of scenery necessary (like the setting one sees printed at the head of an old play, for its performance in the provinces) to the drama of my undressing, as though all Combray had consisted of but two floors joined by a slender staircase, and as though there had been no time there but seven o'clock at night. I must own that I could have assured any questioner that Combray did include other scenes and did exist at other hours than these. But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by an exercise of the will, by my intellectual memory, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shews us of the past preserve nothing of the past itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this residue of Combray. To me it was in reality all dead.

"Permanently dead? Very possibly."

--"Overture," Swann's Way

What a difference a little madeleine and tea will make.