328
PARTISAN
REVIEW
fading and dying away, against the veiling and disintegrating
dis–
tance of time. Time passes and, with its passing, everything changes
its character: the friends we know, the women we love, ourselves
whom we think we know. For we are not what we were yesterday
and what we are going to be tomorrow. Even our sorrows and suf–
ferings are soon forgotten, and the fact that our unhappiness because
of a woman, which all but kills us, will vanish one day, as if we had
never experienced it, is perhaps more distressing than our unhappiness
which leaves us at least with a scrap of reality to cling to.
Still, Proust's philosophy of time is not completely hopeless.
There is a protection against the ravages of time, and a redemption
from its doom: memory. Memory is the interruption of time's devas–
tating work; it is the negation and invalidation of its power and our
means of reconquering, of recovering the past buried under its ruins.
Life is turned into enduring and significant reality in memory, vision,
and the artistic experience which are all essentially one and the same.
We experience the events of our life with the greatest intensity and
penetration not when we go through them in reality-the time and
the presence of these experiences are always "lost"-but when we
"recover" time, when we are no longer the actors but the spectators
of our life, when we remember.
Proust departs hardly further from Flaubert than Bergson, whose
philosophy is at least the indirect source of Proust's interpretation of
time. The main difference between Flaubert's conception of time
and Bergson's is that time is no longer the principle of disintegration
and destruction; it
is,
at least in the form of Bergson's
U
duree,"
the
persistence of the past in the present and its infiltration into the fu–
ture. Our memory
is
the instrument of its preservation, and our per–
sonality the product of present, past, and future incessantly flowing
together. What we are, we become not only against time, not only in
time, but also through time. Weare not the mere sum total of the
individual moments of our life, but the result of the ever-changing
aspects which they acquire through each new moment. For a new
moment
is
not only a moment more to live; it
is
rather the origin
of a new point of view which changes the whole appearance and
meaning of life. Every moment
is
like a phase in the development
of a melody: all the notes already sounded are present in every phase,
but each new note modifies the significance of all the other notes in
the context of the melody.
