HOW TRUE TO LIFE IS BIOGRAPHY?
37
his own fate, that world has an insidious way of slipping back in. Proust
has made being clumsy or getting caught off guard-call it the Proust–
ian slip-a veritable art form, a privileged moment indeed, because it is
only inadvertently, by slipping, that Marcel encounters the present and,
as he himself knows, life itself-with its pleasures, its dangers, and sor–
rows. And yet, the one thing Marcel wishes desperately
to
learn
to
do is
precisely how
to
filter pleasure from its attendant dangers and sorrows.
He should learn how to distrust more, take his distance, never be so
hasty or so zealous in wanting things now and only now. The lesson he
should learn is simple enough-and he's made it an art form as well:
what is
should always be turned into a
what seems; what seems
must
become
what isn't,
and
what isn't, what was.
This is how things acquire
meaning-not vis-a-vis the real present, but before the higher court of
something I'd like
to
call the imperfect-conditional-anterior-preterit:
what was perhaps and might have been
has more meaning than
what
just is.
This is where Proust wishes
to
lodge all experience, and this is
where
fa vraie vie
occurs. Memory and wishful thinking are filters
through which he registers, processes, and understands present experi–
ence. With temporizers, experience is meaningless-it is not even expe–
rience-unless it comes as the memory of experience, or-which
amounts
to
the same-as the memory of unrealized experience. For
Proust, it is only retrospectively, long after the present has slipped away,
that one finally sees the bigger picture.
It
is only when it's too late that
one comes
to
understand how close one came
to
bliss...or how need–
less our sorrows were when they drove us
to
despair. The following is
by Emily Dickinson:
Except the heaven had come so near,
So seemed to choose my door,
The distance would not haunt me so;
I had not hoped before.
But just to hear the grace depart
I never thought to see,
Afflicts me with a double loss;
'Tis lost, and lost to me.
Proust's job is
to
throw experience back into the past and from
there-let me use a verb
J
introduced earlier-yank it back from the
future,
retro-prospectively.
This is what gives that unmistakable span
to
his sentences. And it's not just a span, it is a spread.
In
that spread, past
and future, and by implication, present exist at the same exact time.
