42. It’s at the very same party, where the sound of the bell echoes through time...
The forty-second and final instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero becomes the writer he's always longed to be and starts work on the book you've just read.
Welcome to 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow', a novel I’ve published as a serial. If you’re new here, you can start at the beginning, or use the links below to navigate to other chapters.
It’s at the very same party, where the sound of the bell echoes through time, that the Narrator experiences several more attacks of involuntary memory, each recalling the effect of dipping the famous madeleine cake in tea…
A surge of the past into the present, certainly, but also, the past and present distinct in themselves. Distinct but congruous. ‘If owing to the work of oblivion, the returning memory can throw no bridge, form no connecting link between itself and the present moment, if it remains in the context of its own place and date, if it keeps its distance, its isolation in the hollow of a valley or upon the highest peak of a mountain summit, for this very reason it causes us suddenly to breathe new air, an air which is new precisely because we have breathed it in the past, that purer air which the poets have vainly tried to situate in paradise and which could only induce so profound a sensation of renewal only if it had been breathed before, since true paradises are the paradises we have lost.’
Almost in an instant the Narrator finds his vocation, which is to recapture lost time through the orchestration of the impressions given to him through involuntary memory, to decipher the text which is already buried within him and transcribe it. ‘I had arrived then at the conclusion that in fashioning a work of art we are by no means free, that we do not choose how we shall make it but that it is pre-existent to us and therefore we are obliged, since it is both necessary and hidden, to do what we should have to do if it were a law of nature, that is to say to discover it.’ At every moment, he says, ‘the artist must listen to his instinct, and it is this that makes art the most real of things, the most austere school of life, the true last judgement.’
It’s here that we can sense Proust’s own voice, of the author acknowledging his own instinct, placing in the hands of his creation the obligation to which he himself had committed his life. The book the Narrator must write is the book the reader holds in her hand. The work and the life are formed of the same material. All that remains for the Narrator (as it had for Proust) is the work. ‘How much more worth living did it appear to me now, now that I seemed to see that this life that we live in half-darkness can be illumined, this life that at every moment we distort can be restored to its true pristine shape, that a life, in short, can be realised within the confines of a book! How happy would he be, I thought, the man who had the power to write such a book! What a task awaited him!’
In Search of Lost Time asserts the sovereignty of creation and extends its possibilities to the world and its readers beyond. For Proust, art is born of two things: suffering and the obliteration of habit. The book is the crucible in which this admixture is distilled, revealing those elusive ideas that lie behind the objects which populate our universe, via the mechanism of involuntary memory, which as Beckett explains, restores to us ‘not merely the past object, but the Lazarus it has charmed or tortured, not merely Lazarus and the object, but more because less, more because it abstracts the useful, the opportune, the accidental, because in its flame it has consumed Habit and all its works, and in its brightness revealed what the mock reality of experience never can and never will reveal – the real.’
Within this new reality lies what Beckett calls our ‘fugitive salvation’. I think of its corollaries as Dante’s divine light, Rose’s ethical love, or Pinter’s workaday stoicism; as Mann’s triumph of love over death, or Niebhur’s sublime madness. It’s connected to the idea that evil necessarily crumbles in the face of good. To the Jungian concept of individuation. And I’m sure it’s the greatest weapon we have against the destruction and terror that might at any moment overwhelm us. In a corrupted, cynical and brutal world, love and empathy are insurgent forces.
In Proust we find a guide who can help us draw such a truth out of ourselves if we dare to try, a truth which ‘life communicates to us against our will in an impression which is material because it enters through the senses yet has spiritual meaning which it is possible for us to extract.’ His great novel is ultimately emblematic of our own search for the things that once spoke to us, for the people, parish churches, and country paths lost to us, for time wasted and time well spent, for time embodied, for time immemorial.
In his hands, we become the narrator of our own story; we become ‘readers of our own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician at Combray used to offer his customers – it would be my book, but with its help I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves.’ And the only example of this that I can offer the world before it’s too late is the slim volume you’re reading right now, as ill-formed, incomplete, and insubstantial as the life that bequeathed it – the story of a man reading a story, which is its own beginning, its own end, and everything in between.
Completing the novel felt like it required some sort of grand gesture, so I took my battered copy of Time Regained to the top of the Empire State Building to read the final few pages. Tacky I know. But squeezed between the troupes of tourists taking panoramic pictures of the city on their phones, I realised that finishing the book was simply the start of something else. A further adventure with words. That said, I don’t think you ever really ‘finish’ Proust. A year or so later, I read the whole thing again, and now I just perpetually read it, like a picayune planet orbiting a giant star.
There’s a moment in the story – as the Narrator travels by train along the Normandy coast one afternoon to dine at the Verdurins – where we come across this most Proustian of passages:
‘After the toll-house, where the carriage had stopped for a moment at such a height above the sea that, as from a mountain-top, the sight of the blue gulf beneath almost made one dizzy, I opened the window; the sound, distinctly caught, of each wave breaking in turn had something sublime in its softness and clarity. Was it not like an index of measurement which, upsetting all our ordinary impressions, shows us that vertical distances may be compared with horizontal ones, contrary to the idea that our mind generally forms of them; and that, though they bring the sky nearer to us in this way, they are not great; that they are indeed lass great for a sound which traverses them, as did the sound of those little waves, because the medium through which it must pass is purer? And in fact, if one drew back only a couple of yards behind the toll-house, one could no longer distinguish that sound of waves which six hundred feet of cliff had not robbed of its delicate, minute and soft precision.’
Like the proximity of the individual to the source of the sound, we as readers exist in relation to Proust’s novel. Stood back from the cliff, we may be totally oblivious to what stirs beyond its edge, but once we’ve taken just a few steps forward and looked down from that Gulliver height into the waters below, we’re suddenly aware of the magnificent noise being made. Once heard, this sweet and strange sound stays with us, even when we’re busy at work, or eating dinner, or watching television, so that we’re always longing to return to hear the delightful crashing of those waves.
I remain on that cliff-top, caught between the sea and the sky, forever listening. And if what we call happiness or satisfaction or solace has eluded me, I like to think I’m far more sanguine and far less crazy at least. That’s if you can call someone who reads Proust on a loop sane. In any case, the voices are stilled, the ghosts seem content behind the cemetery walls, and I’ve resolved not to join them for as long as possible, which is really no time at all.
New York, 2019
Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.
A delicate delivery of tightrope, and, when I have fallen… there has always been a safety net of existential explanation, so much needed in high-wire writing like this.
This is a beautiful mixture of fight club meets nick cave in novelistic form.
Just as a note to leave, here - a thank you. Hoping to leaf through a paper copy some day soon.