Marcel Proust

Paris! The word conjures so many images: sophistication, elegance, romance - it presented endless possibilities to my mind as I prepared for my first visit to the city. It is only when we name something that it becomes real to us, it is a process which mysteriously invests the subject with a soul and personality.

Marcel Proust wrote a lot about the names of places and the amount of significance we attach to them. Before we have seen the object of our desire, its name creates a mental image which becomes a real place. We then confuse this with the physical place "to the point," as Proust says, "where we go off to a city to seek out a soul that it cannot contain but which we no longer have the power to expel from its nature."

And so it was with Paris. I had created the city in my mind long before I ever saw her. Paris became irresistibly feminine to me, like a seductive woman luring me into a feverish pitch of excitement at the very mention of her name. This image in my mind was so powerful that during my first visit to the city I did not see the Paris before my eyes, I saw only the Paris of my dreams.

I remember that first walk along the Champs-Elysees where I waltzed in a state of bliss, my feet barely touching the ground. That wonderful long, wide and spacious avenue leading to the Arc de Triomphe seemed like a red carpet of ascension. The glamour intoxicated me as I drifted past beautiful women, immaculately dressed and open to flirtation. It was a natural place to muse upon an imagined rendezvous and for Proust it was the setting for much love interest.

For the young Marcel the Champs-Elysees became a place of agonizingly delayed bliss. It was his childhood haunt, being minutes away from Boulevard Malesherbes where his parents moved shortly after Marcel's birth in 1871. As a child he would play in the beautiful gardens which run parallel to the famous avenue. Here Marcel met his first love, Marie de Benardaky, the daughter of a Russian diplomat. In Remembrance of Things Past Marie becomes Gilberte who he first becomes infatuated with from a distance, then eventually becomes her play friend. And so began the stings of love as his obsession with Gilberte consumed him, causing him pain when Gilberte was missing, followed by the excruciating frustration of waiting for those days when she did appear in the Champs-Elysees. But when he was once more in her presence he struggled with the intensity of emotion the intimacy produced. It is a sweet torture that is perhaps the story of love for all.

But now here I was in Paris again, three years after that first very special occasion, a little older, more experienced and armed with a new found love of Proust. I was eager to re-experience that first encounter with the city with the added thrill of following the footsteps of the author. From Place de la Concorde and the tall obelisk which Proust described as "a pink nougat" in evening's gleam, I walked into the Champs-Elysees. But it was not quite as enchanting as before and the joy that I had experienced that first time was not so intense. It seemed more ordinary somehow, still glamorous and colorful but something seemed to be missing. The problem was that it did not quite correspond with the prestigious avenue, which was so firmly fixed in my mind.

Proust knew all about keeping the past alive in memory, long after the place so dearly loved has passed away and changed into another place entirely. He described the exquisite joy of his time spent in Combray and how he wished it to carry on forever. He kept hold of these days long after the paths he had trodden were gone and the people who walked there had expired. Through persistent reflection, combined with the perfumed smell of things such as flowers, the exaltation of his past would be relived: "it is the memory of the Meseglise way that make me stand alone in ecstasy, inhaling, through the noise of the falling rain, the lingering scent of invisible lilacs."

Well, the Champs-Elysees was still there, but it was not mine. Time to move on to somewhere I had not been before and create some new memories. Happily I realized there were new joys to be experienced, novel features of my long lost love, Paris, which were previously lost. I walked to the Place de l'Opera, a life enhancing area that is still reminiscent of the era of Proust with its bustling world of cafes and theatres.

Here can be found the huge and magnificent Opera House built around the time of Proust's birth. Entering the building I climbed the impressive Grand Staircase, made of marble and onyx, and into the Grand Foyer with its domed ceiling covered in mosaics. This was a place familiar to Proust and I wondered if he too had been enchanted by the rooms surrounding the actual theatre. Spectacular ceiling paintings and petite sculptured marbles abound in that unique elegant style the French possess, which always seems to have the air of the Rococo about it. Figures drift endlessly upwards, heaven -bound with fingers hanging in the air as if held by invisible angels.

I was allowed to view the theatre and peer in at the lovely boxes and rich red velvet seats which evoke bygone days captured in masterpieces by Degas and Renoir (a nuit a l'Opera - what an experience that must have been!). It also reminded me of Proust's wonderful dissection of the Parisian aristocracy on public display. It was here that Princesse de Guermantes was put in the shade by the arrival of her cousin Oriane, shrouded in stunning white chiffon like some exotic bird.

It was near the Opera House, along Boulevard Haussmann, that Proust moved in 1906 after the death of his mother. On the second floor of no 102, he retired from society to write his masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past. The ailing and eccentric genius, concerned about the noise from the boulevard below, lined his bedroom with corks and set to work. He developed an extraordinary creative relationship with the Opera House as he listened to the mysterious music from beyond the walls of his room, imagining opera scenes which were somehow deliriously wedded into the fabric of his writing.

Still brooding over my memories of my previous stay in Paris, salvation came in the most unlikely of situations. Tired from walking all day I took an evening boat trip down the Seine which I initially regretted. That peculiar species "The Tourist" had flocked together into one huge and hideous cluster of wild snappers.

They clicked endless photos of the Eiffel Tower. A tragedy, I thought, because they were behind the lens, instead of fully immersing in the experience. But then I realized that my memories of Paris were as fixed, permanent and inflexible as the tourists' photographs. I could not re-capture what had made the original experience so special and that was my emotional and spiritual state at that point in time.

As I tried to come to terms with this unpalatable reality and accept that the past was gone, another image floated into my mind which lifted me out of the torpor I was falling into. It was the image of Proust dipping a cake into a cup of tea. Of course! Proust had stumbled upon a way of bringing the past into the present completely intact with all the emotions associated with that memory so that it could be genuinely re-experienced. In fact this very endeavor is the cornerstone of his colossal life work Remembrance of Things Past.

Proust needed a trigger to unlock memories that were always some kind of sensory experience, a taste or smell, which would miraculously conjure entire scenes from his past. The most famous example of this in Remembrance is the taste of a Madeleine cake dipped in a cup of tea which suddenly unlocked in Proust the lost memories of his childhood, flooding back into his consciousness and freeing his literary creativity.

But Remembrance is littered with such events: two uneven paving stones outside the Princesse de Guermantes' home unleashes the memory of St Mark's Cathedral in Venice. The touch of a napkin recalls the feel of his bathing towel at Balbec, bringing the beauty of the ocean flowing back to him. These apparent mundane occurrences allowed him to re-experience his past as a living reality.

Proust touched on an eternal truth: that it is faith alone that makes things real, and once an experience is in the past, whatever we perceived as having happened becomes memory. This is reality. But these memories are not dead, they can be eternally relived. Proust had glimpsed our true nature which exists outside time, "born to feed on the eternal."

I realized that I could not lose my first precious experience of Paris. Proust had shown me that we cannot lose anything, for it is all stored away in the eternal library of our soul. He saw these memories as fragments of our life, the raw material from which we create the story of our lives. For Proust this is an artistic process and living is essentially an artistic endeavor. We all have this material within us but for many it remains unprocessed: "And so their past is cluttered with countless photographic negatives, which continue to be useless because their intellect has never 'developed' them." But if we can learn to develop these "negatives," lying strewn upon the floor of our minds, then we too will be able to create a meaningful and beautiful world. Proust was able to bring the past into the present, allowing both to merge, thereby enriching life to create new experiences.

All perception of the external world is an act of imagination. There is no single Paris which can be captured as the definitive, authentic Paris by photographing it.

No.

The reality is far more wonderful and miraculous than that. Instead, there are thousands and thousands of versions of Paris, each one living in the hearts and minds of all those who have walked its streets. We all have our own Paris which we can share with the world to create a million more versions of Paris in the imaginations of those who have never seen the city but dreamt of it.

Eventually I lost interest in the chattering tourists and sank into my own reverie. Those fragments Proust talked of began to meld in my mind to form impressions of the city.

The Paris of Monet, Renoir and Proust, the Paris of romantic encounters with enigmatic women, of lazy walks through cobbled streets, of warm evenings full of sensual delight and the laughter and joy of good company . . .

Photo of Champs-Elysees courtesy of Benh Lieu Song / Creative Commons License.

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