The Real You
Marcel Proust — In Search of Lost Time
Rome 2016
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Somewhere in the black and white portion of my mind is a memory that I occasionally question. The picture is a bit dusty and the black curtains at the edges occlude a full view, but the memory does seem genuine—despite my inclination to doubt the reliability of nearly every memory. The picture dates, I believe, from a time when I’m still young enough to count my age with my fingers. I am watching an elderly relative slip into a slow decline, and I am witnessing this slump as a devolution: from expansive and outgoing to constricted and, shockingly, inward. Even with my childhood eyes I remember noticing that this deterioration looked babylike, and that the downward path was somehow more circular than straight—with the babylike stage a mark of both beginnings and endings.
My impulse was to hold this conclusion tight, to guard it like a secret too large to share. Almost certainly there’s a missing aspect to this memory, and I am forgetting an overheard conversation about the relative, but my observation about how perspective diminishes late in life felt original at the time. It arrived as a ripple in my mind, a sudden and rather mysterious understanding that I couldn’t help but relish—here was an idea that I had shaped completely by myself.
Of course my observation wasn’t original. Nor do I believe today that I came to the conclusion independently—I assume that some combination of eavesdropped conversation or stray joke implanted the idea in my mind, and a little childhood swagger, perhaps, claimed it as my own. Unfamiliar ideas do come often when you’re young, you’re always hearing something intriguing or perplexing or alarming, there’s almost a routine of surprise, so the notion that I, while rubbing my eyes and trying to sort out this peculiar world, had come up with an original idea was quite delicious. The potency of this feeling, the rush of a creative thought, is also an explanation for why children are typically powerless whenever they attempt to resist a cheeky grin.
My grandfather’s cousin—by courtesy my great-aunt—with whom we used to stay, was the mother of that aunt Léonie who, since her husband’s (my uncle Octave’s) death, had gradually declined to leave, first Combray, then her house in Combray, then her bedroom, and finally her bed, and now never “came down,” but lay perpetually in a vague state of grief, physical debility, illness, obsession and piety.
Here is a quote from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, where we have the young narrator watching a relative undergo a similar narrowing, a journey of constriction that begins with geography and ends with sensibility. These are certainly commonplace observations, not original to my mind all those years ago, nor original to Proust’s pen. At least Proust published his lines in 1913, so perhaps we can permit them in his novel although, interestingly, in a novel published today these lines might be labeled trite—what we have is a well-worn thought, a banal truth, or, in other words, a cliché.
Explore writing, travel, and literature—with a new issue every Friday.
Wanting to flee clichés is one reason to explore literature, where the fresh or uninhibited or vibrant is what’s valued, which means that literature gives a slight shove to your expectations—a crisp sentence about a stale topic leaves you invigorated, just as my childhood thoughts left me feeling clever. Because there’s a tiresome ease with which you grab the comfortable, humdrum conclusion. Because there’s a tiresome ease with which you fall into cliché during those moments when you’re straining for the right word. Because if you spend a few days listening with extreme care to your words, you might even hear an unknown voice. This voice will indeed come packaged with your intonations and accent and flow past your lips, but, beyond those surface traits, you might consider it unrecognizable. You’ll be unlikely to hear the crispness of articulation and originality that invigorates your mind. To listen carefully to the words you speak is to begin to wonder about their true source, and to wonder about how you’re bombarded by an endless stream of ideas, half-formed thoughts, grand theories, breaking news reports, advertisements and slogans and sales pitches—all of which coalesce, eventually, into the clichés that shape your words. Don’t be shocked to discover a lack of demarkation between what you’ve heard and what you speak. There shouldn’t be much surprise if you discover that you’re almost always regurgitating the language that surrounds you. Knowing what ideas are truly yours, in fact, is a rather tricky endeavor.
We wouldn’t want, however, the extreme of originality: having only original ideas is indistinguishable from insanity. And there’s also a noteworthy sense of consolation whenever you encounter someone with a similar idea. Later in Volume One of Proust’s six part novel, the young narrator begins to read Bergotte, a fictional 19th Century writer, which provokes a tremor of recognition in his young mind:
…upon almost everything in the world his opinion was unknown to me. I had no doubt that it would differ from my own, since his came down from an unknown sphere towards which I was striving to raise myself; convinced that my thoughts would have seemed pure foolishness to that perfected spirit, I had so completely obliterated them all that, if I happened to find in one of his books something which had already occurred to my own mind, my heart would swell as though some deity had, in his infinite bounty, restored it to me, had pronounced it to be beautiful and right.
There’s promise—especially when you’re young—to this glimmer of connection. For the narrator here, the moment occurs when his solitary and obscure internal world finds an author with a similar perception. In the moments before this discovery, nothing at all feels more unlikely. The distance between the internal and external is too vast and mysterious and surely must be insurmountable. Yet that distance collapses in the simple discernment of similarity—a feeling of connection that arrives because what was once private and original is now shared.
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