Reading Proust: 7%

Whether it is because the faith which creates has dried up in me, or because reality takes shape only in memory, the flowers I am shown today for the first time do not seem to me to be real flowers...

Thus I would often lie until morning thinking back to the time at Combray, to my sad sleepless evenings, to the many days, too, whose image had been restored to me more recently by the taste — what they would have called at Combray the 'perfume' — of a cup of tea, and, by an association of memories, to what, many years after leaving that little town, I had learned, about a love affair Swann had had before I was born, with that precision of details which is sometimes easier to obtain for the lives of people who died centuries ago than for the lives of our best friends, and which seems as impossible as it once seemed impossible to speak from one town to another — as long as we do not know about the expedient by which that impossibility was circumvented.

— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: The Way by Swann's, tr. Lydia Davis, Penguin (2003), pp 185-186.

I have made it my task this summer to read all 3,500 pages of Proust's seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time (which used to be translated as Remembrance of Things Past and which in the original French is titled A La Recherche du Temps Perdu). I am half way through the first book, The Way by Swann's, and so far Proust has described some of the personalities, events, and scenes from his childhood in Combray, largely structured by the experience of his walks, alone and with his family, along the 'Guermantes way,' the 'way by Swann's,' and the 'Méséglise way.'

So far the book has had the effect upon me that I imagine Proust intended it to have upon its readers: it has led me into a nostalgic childhood world and it has invited me to consider again the sounds, smells, images, people, houses, rituals, meals, walks, seasons, conversations which made up that era. About a hundred pages in, the narrative suddenly started ringing true, and as the characters — Aunt Léonie, M. Legrandin — were built up, I glimpsed what Proust's 'thick description' (a misappropriated Geertzian term) was all about.

This is the weather station in our garden. My dad used to take measurements from it daily and send his forecast for publication in the Leicester Mercury, and sometimes I would go out into the garden with him to help.

Coincidentally, in that my mother and I were travelling down to Salisbury for a family funeral and Leicester was just a stop-off on the way back, I have just spent a few days back at 'home,' where for me, as I think they can for anyone, those Proustian sentiments started to resonate. My life is still structured by the ideals of childhood, I still judge the Here and Now by the expectations of There and Then. But this is not so much an ethical as a natural threshold; we cannot help hearing birdsong, smelling cut grass, experiencing an embrace, and being transported back to a world where every tiniest aspect of the environment was rich with significance and which filled us with the security and force to live. But moving away from this world, as we must and as Proust never truly did, is a necessity, but a highly traumatic one. Here in Stockport most of the streets are still a mystery, and the place is not mine. Looking out of the study window and onto the cobbled alley, row of back yards, regular chimneypots, cannot reassure me one bit, because these are not the alleys and gardens that I played ball games on when I was small, nor the streets around which I walked with my father in his orange coat, nor the houses in which those friends lived — those friends who establish forever the friendly archetype, even if they have long been lost through arguments, space, or death. Even the things which infuriated me about home I miss now, because they all issued from a structured life whose security I miss, and today's infuriations seem all the worse because looking out of the window offers no comfort, and the touch of the brick walls across the street here do not bring back any memories of relationships and encounters that I treasure.

Sewer cover in our back garden. It wobbles slightly from side to side, and I remember standing with one foot on each corner and pretending I was a surfer. I also remember filling the holes in it with mud, because it was fun.

Proust, then, has not yet offered a set of ethics for understanding this childhood world. It is not a rose-tinted nostalgia; for Proust described his tears at being parted from his mother in the evenings; his anger which leads him to strike the trees with his umbrella on one of his walks; the cross purposes at work in ambiguous conversations his family had with friends. It is not a negative outlook either; Proust's account is completely rambling, and at the end of the first part of The Way by Swann's I am left ambivalent, but awakened to Proust's world and mine.

• More photos over on Flickr.

Tagged: proust, marcelproust, insearchoflosttime, remembranceofthingspast, childhood.