Time I slept in the shadows

“If I even gave myself enough time to do my work, the first thing I would do would be to describe in it men occupying an extremely large place (although for that they would have to appear monstrous beings), compared to the very restricted one assigned to them in space, a place, on the contrary, prolonged without limit in Time, since, like giants submerged in the years, they simultaneously adjoin such different epochs, between which so many days came to be situated.”

Marcel Proust

That of the “wise virtue of knowing the time” falls short. That all past time was better, too. But that that there is no time that is not fulfilled is still true. Because it has arrived, it is here, the exact day on which one hundred years have passed since the death of Marcel Proust.

French writer. The son of Adrien Proust, a prestigious traditional Catholic family doctor, and Jeanne Weil, an Alsatian of Jewish origin, he was born in 1871. Like any genius who commemorates an anniversary, it is said that he showed signs of intelligence and sensitivity from an early age. He studied at the Condorcet Lyceum, where he obtained brilliant grades, did military service in 1889, attended classes at the Sorbonne University and also at the École Livre de Sciences Politiques. However, he very soon succumbed to the pleasures of worldly life; Hiding, with pleasure and debauchery, the doubts he harbored about his literary vocation, he did not stop writing: In 1896 he published “Les placeres y las días”, a collection of stories and essays with a foreword by Anatole France; in 1904 he worked on the autobiographical work Jean Santeuil, in which he proposed to recount his spiritual journey, and made French translations of “The Amiens Bible” and “Sesame and the Lilies” by John Ruskin. But another fateful time came: after the death of his mother, in 1905, a very different concept of “the life of an artist” crept into his conviction. The life of the artist and true art could only be the fruit of “the darkness and silence”. And it was then, that he decided to undertake the writing of his narrative cycle ‘In search of lost time’ (which some say he conceived as the story of his vocation, so long postponed and others, as the culpable imposition of a personal obligation).

Sleeping light in the shadows, a snake that bites its tail, the perfect circle, a philosophical treatise that finally explains the difference between Aristotle’s “time” and Bergson’s “duration”, a “river novel” due to its length, flow and flow, are just some of the phrases that have been said -and written- about the million two hundred and thirty-one thousand nine hundred and seventy words that Marcel Proust wrote in the most magnificent of his works.

Written between 1908 and 1922, In Search of Lost Time consists of seven parts:

• By the way of Swann (in French: Du côté de chez Swann; edited by the Grasset publishing house in 1913, at the author’s own expense, and then in a modified version by the Gallimard publishing house in 1919)
• In the shadow of the girls in flower (in French: À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs; 1919, Gallimard publishing house; awarded the Goncourt that same year)
• The world of Guermantes (in French: Le Côté de Guermantes; in two volumes, Gallimard publishing house 1921–1922)
• Sodom and Gomorrah (in French: Sodome et Gomorrhe I et II; in two volumes, Gallimard publishing house, 1922–1923)
• La prisonera (in French: The prisoner; 1925)
• Missing Albertine (in French: Albertine disparue; 1925, and also translated into Spanish as La fugitive, responding to another version in French called: La fugitive)
• Time Regained (French: Le temps retrouvé; published until 1927).

The project, which Proust himself compared to the complex structure of a Gothic cathedral, is the reconstruction of a life through what he called “involuntary memory”, a tool capable of returning the past to us, both in its physical and sensitive presence, as well as in a strict invention towards the sense of memory. Or an exploration never made about the fame, fortune and misfortune that accompanied him, all his characters and readers (and even those who quote him without reading him) for more than a hundred years.

Wasted time because it’s wasted time? Or that lost time that was forgotten in the past?

A process symbolized by the famous passage of the protagonist inhaling the aroma of tea and biting into a cupcake, whose combination of flavors and smells causes the rebirth in his mind of a past time in his life. Crucial moment. Where it no longer matters if the work is past, present or a magnificent invention of memory, because it is simply what it is: the moment. The infinitesimal fragment of time that unleashed the creation of a masterpiece that would change the history of literature forever.

Today, one hundred years old. There is still time. The adventure of reading Proust is one of the most interesting and challenging that anyone can undertake: and even the task of a lifetime. Above all because -say the specialists- it may be that when you reach the last page you feel like starting over. (And if he does, dear reader, maybe even find out where the snippet at the top of this page appears.)