About time

Today, we celebrate the 138th birthday of Marcel Proust, who invented our understanding of the purpose of memory – to rediscover and reconsider the past in order to better appreciate the present. If you think this is telling you what you already know, you’d be right. (Yet, as Mark E Smith has said: ‘There’s nothing stranger than the things you know but don’t quite realise.’). It’s just that you haven’t done enough of it. You certainly haven’t made an art form out of it, like Marcel did. Today, nobody expects you to read the six volumes of A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu. And few could. It’s a marathon. It’s an ocean. I took my first dip in my early twenties, yet only found the necessary time commitment when commuting for four hours a day about ten years ago. Proust died at the age of 51. He’d spent the previous 15 years writing these volumes. What was he doing, shut up in his cork-lined bedroom, with papers spread all around him? Well, he was making an investigation into the infinity of tiny moments of time, officially gone, but effectively re-happening as he found them, as new psychological events. For most people, it appears that the past is a dead zone, best left unexplored. For some who cannot but help remember, it’s full of creatures, admonitions and warnings. Here be monsters. Yes, life is about moving forward, constantly pushing the boundaries of the present beyond arms’ length, plunging headlong into the future in the hope of catching it by the tail. Yet, within this momentum, is always the opportunity of exploring pockets of experience we call time past. Nobody should believe that Proust was just an aesthete who gave up on life and retreated to his room to contemplate a disappeared world he could not hope to recapture. He did rediscover that world and he continued to live in the now. Alain De Botton said as much in How Proust Can Change Your Life. It’s short. Read that instead. ‘Though we usually assume that seeing an object requires us to have visual contact with it…this may be only the first, and in a sense the inferior, part of seeing, for appreciating an object properly may also require us to recreate it in our mind’s eye…It suggests that having something physically present sets up far from ideal circumstances in which to notice it. Presence may in fact be the very element that encourages us to ignore or neglect it, because we feel we have done all the work simply in securing visual contact.’ For De Botton, Proust and other artists like him, actually bring back to life valuable yet neglected aspects of our experience. When I was growing up, the title was translated as Remembrance of Things Past, which misses the point in a big way. Today, the title is translated literally, as Proust intended, as In Search Of Lost Time. For that is what it is about. Time. And extending the memory muscle in pursuit of it. If I take a moment to consider, all my favourite authors take time as their common subject, in one way or another. James Joyce captures a culture and a lifetime in one Dublin day in Ulysses. Haruki Murakami enters parallel universes through doorways from everyday, mundane life. W G Sebald literally walks through time and illuminates layers of the past. Samuel Beckett watches time drip from a tap and waits. Gabriel Garcia Marquez stretches time until you can feel its sinews snapping. My favourite films and film makers follow suit. Edgar Reitz with his Heimat trilogy and Wim Wenders with Wings Of Desire. And, as I keep saying, music is about time. Well, I would. Like Marcel, I’m a natural born reflectionist.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk