In Search of Lost Time

After several years I have decided to once again try to read Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past, as the title was originally translated. I don’t know if I’ll be able to complete such a feat, given that it consists of seven volumes and I have just begun reading the first, Swann’s Way.

This literary work may possibly not appeal very much to the young as it deals at length with a detailed look at the past, whereas youth’s primary and essential aim is to look towards the future. However, when we reach a certain age it is not uncommon for us to let our thoughts wander every once in a while through times and things gone by. Some memories are better than others, but we all carry within us events that we lived in our childhood and youth. Many of us have the recollection of our own “Combray” where we would get together with our grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins… And I’m sure that many of us have, at some time, also experienced “Proust’s madeleine moment”, when upon tasting, feeling or smelling something, we have been immediately transported to a particular event or situation of our past.

And in this process of looking back we cannot avoid asking ourselves if we made the right decisions along the way, if the results of those decisions have made us happy and if we would make the same choices again, knowing what we now know. But there is no going back in time nor can we see into the future, so this turns out to be quite a useless and exhausting exercise.

It is good to remember… memories should not be lost, but it’s more important to look to the future and try each day to build the life we want to live.