In Search of Lost Eternities: Proust and the Life to Come

 

Toward the end of “Within a Budding Grove,” Marcel Proust’s second volume of “In Search of Lost Time,” his narrator speeds toward a hushed bedroom meeting with Albertine Simonet, the young woman who is the object of his present obsession.

The sight of her bare throat and flushed cheeks, he writes, “destroyed the equilibrium between the immense and indestructible life which circulated in my being and the life of the universe, so puny in comparison.”

In a rush of emotion, the character "Marcel" feels the immensity of experience is not enough to encompass all that is happening to him. He feels most like the dramatic self-conception he has assembled throughout his life, up to this point. But curiously, he also becomes conscious of his own mortality in a seaside town:

“I should have smiled pityingly had a philosopher then expressed the idea that some day, even some distant day, I should have to die, that the eternal forces of nature would survive me, the forces of that nature beneath whose godlike feet I was no more than a grain of dust; that, after me, there would still remain those rounded, swelling cliffs, that sea, that moonlight and that sky! How could it have been possible; how could the world have lasted longer than myself, since I was not lost in its vastness, since it was the world that was enclosed in me, in me that it fell far short of filling, in me who, feeling that there was room to store so many other treasures, flung sky and sea and cliffs contemptuously into a corner.”

The feeling, alas, does not last, and his romantic resolve disappears, not at the ceasing of his heartbeat, but at the ring of a bell.

The universe, immense and inscrutable, is only one subject touched on in the more than 4,000 pages of Proust’s seven-volume novel. As its title suggests, he is concerned with time – specifically, lost time. Our lives are eaten up in time, disappearing as quickly as it passes, so that we present two faces to the world – perceiving the past in retreat while in anticipation for what is to come.

Each of the episodes in Proust’s novels – with their long, endlessly winding sentences, digressions, and observations – shows how a life unfolds, with various lives passing back and forth in review, flashing in, retreating, reappearing. Meaning changes, meaning eludes, meaning varies. We form moral judgments on small things and elide them when confronted with larger obstructions. And all of these perceptions are made by a personality; distinctive, opinionated, informed by his own life choices and experiences.

But what of beyond time?

The experience of reading Proust, and specifically his observations about time, have made me think about the Christian conception of eternity, and what his novels can say about it. 

We know a great deal about the life of the writer Proust, but how much do we know about God? For the purposes of this piece, I will say that God can only be known insofar as He has revealed Himself - in the life of Jesus Christ, and through the Scriptures.

From a strictly Biblical sense, God is eternal, as we understand the concept. I say that because, while the word “eternity” exists, the mind reels at the simplest contemplation of something with no beginning and no end. The concept is foreign to our experience. Human beings grow up with the idea of continuous existence – “things have always been this way and always will be” – but life quickly disabuses us of this. Before one concludes this conception of eternity is a residue of the ancient world, it’s worth reminding yourself of the short duration of ancient lifespans and the transitory nature of nomadic people. What distinguishes the God of Abraham is His nature in contrast to the other pagan gods of the era – omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. First and last, without beginning, without ending. “But Israel shall be saved in the Lord with an everlasting salvation: ye shall not be ashamed nor confounded, world without end.” (Isaiah 45:17)

Genesis 1:1 makes no attempt to explain what God did, or where He came from, before the creation of the earth –the “beginning” of the heavens and the earth. John 1:1 describes the Logos, or Christ, as existing with God and being God from the “beginning,” and Jesus later tells His followers (and enemies) that He existed before Abraham. Eternity past, in other words, is a long corridor of unknowable experience and incalculable antiquity. Past and future wind in, out and around each other. Again, just considering the question beggars the imagination.

Furthermore, in the final two chapters of Revelation, Jesus says of his followers, “They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” Those with God will reign, we are told, “for ever and ever.” Just the simple explanation of this in the church of my boyhood was enough to send me into tears. I couldn’t comprehend it, and actively kept myself from trying.

What does this have to do with Proust? As Proust demonstrates, time and again, memory makes up much of who we are. We are shaped by the events of our lives and the people we encounter, and the memory of those events, and how those people affected us, leave their marks on us – “remembering again all the places and people I had known, what I had actually seen of them, and what others had told me.” (Swann’s Way)

Proust later says that “many years have passed since” the night that he waited for his mother to come and kiss him. By the time he wrote the lines, the house where it happened was gone. He had seen a finite number of days, as we all do, but the past, in all its tangibility, was gone forever, only to be recalled.

As he writes of the past:

“It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.”

Yet, it all resides sleeping within him. Proust’s narrator provides this insight just before the most famous incident in the novel, when he bites into a piece of madeleine infused with tea, when the past comes flooding back from some hidden corner of the mind, and “the truth that I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself.”

Much of Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu” deals with desire and how it shapes his characters. Desire, and frustrated desire. Some things in life - relationships, careers, goals, people - are unattainable. There is the brave and cowardly struggle of the person we are against who we want to be. Having is not so pleasing as wanting.

“But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical to everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people.”

Take my own example. At this moment, I’m a 52-year-old man. It goes without saying that I am a different person than I was yesterday, or a year ago, or 10 years ago, and so forth. Should I live long enough, it’s also true I will be different tomorrow, next week, next year, and on. There are a host of reasons for this.

Part of who I am is the physical part. When I was younger, I was shorter, less bulky. As I have aged, I’ve put on and shed pounds, my eyesight has gotten worse, I have high blood pressure and diabetes. Some of these conditions can be managed, but they still affect me, and constitute who I am, just as much as my eye color, my hair, my height. I’m also a white man living in the Southern United States, and I carry the historical, social and cultural baggage of that as well. Some aspects of life I perceive rather well. In other areas, I am totally blind.

Any side effects of my medical conditions will change who I am, and not just in a physical sense, but in potentially every other. I am reminded of my aunt and her diabetes, which she did not manage well and resulted eventually in several mini-strokes, which changed her personality. How much different might history have been, for instance, if George Washington had possessed a set of good strong teeth? How might Proust have been a different writer if his health had been better?

There’s also the intellectual part. I am influenced by my education, the people I encounter, the company that I keep, and the decisions I make to either enter a particular sphere of influence or withdraw from others. This is the most interesting realm, to me, of human conduct and development. It feels, many times, that we carry an idea within of who we are, without realizing that we may have made decisions that actually have changed our character. Sometimes the must humbling moments come when we realize we appear older than we actually feel, or that we are not as smart as we think we are, and we feel about ourselves, as Proust wrote, “whether indeed our senses have not been the victims of a hallucination.”

There is also environment. If, tomorrow, I receive a job offer in another country, and am spirited away at a different income and have to familiarize myself with new surroundings, new culture, etc., who I am will change whether I like it or not. Familiar haunts will be gone, and new routines built. This process, though often less radical, plays out over the course of our lives, consciously and unconsciously. And we do not experience it from the cold detachment of our bed in a room lined with cork. “In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we know little peace of mind.”

“…we must bear in mind that the character which a man exhibits in the latter half of his life is not always, though it often is, his original character developed or withered, attenuated or enlarged; it is sometimes the exact reverse, like a garment that has been turned.” (Within a Budding Grove)

 

But what are we when we die? If consciousness survives the end of life, as I believe it does, what do we then become? How much of what we are survives, and is shaped by, the experience of death? It is impossible for us to go through the death of a loved one, or sometimes even the death of a stranger, without being profoundly altered in outlook and aftermath. If the body, for example, is removed from the equation, how does that change who we are? When we visualize life after death, what version of ourselves do we anticipate? And while we may die alone, we are not the only ones to have died. What of others? What will their presence, or absence, do to who we are?

“Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” (I Corinthians 15:51-52)

The limited understanding we might glean just from these verses adds one detail – if we are “incorruptible,” then we will not be changed from the aspect bestowed on us at death. Corporeal life, a series of transitions, learning and unlearning, rise and decline, vitality and entropy, is all we have ever known.

So much of Proust is not just about himself, but what contact with others does to him. His longing for Gilberte, for Albertine, his fascination with the Swann family, the simple folk wisdom of Françoise, his bond with his mother – all of these fire off his writer’s nervous system, producing page after page of observation, rumination, conclusion, transition. It is through his conception that we view everything, mindful that “identical emotions do not spring up simultaneously in the hearts of men in accordance with a preestablished order.”

Proust was a French man living in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, conversant in the dominant philosophies of his time, and therefore suffering from its limitations. Over a lifetime he became a creature of the salon and a machine for creating narrative. I have no wish to make his writing say something it does not.

Yes, I know that Proust was a gay man, and possibly an atheist, from a Jewish background, and possessing of a slightly mystic bent. I realize that to consider these questions may strike some readers as absurd, or in a secular way, blasphemous.

But to lay my cards on the table - I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that He is returning to judge the quick and the dead. That belief is informed by a lifetime of reading the Bible under the direction of the Holy Spirit.

And I believe that the reality of eternal life is true for me and Marcel Proust and you, the reader, as well. And if there is life after death, how we will perceive it will matter to all of us, whether we like it or not. Because the reality of death is uncontestable. And by reading Proust, it makes me more conscious not of this life in all its weird grandeur, but of what it may say about the next one.

So how might we experience eternity, a country we have never seen, in a language we have only heard snippets of, taking our first, endless breath in an atmosphere of incorruptibility?

What would you be in a place where you are not frustrated by a lifetime’s worth of grudges, or nursing a wounded pride, or driven by an inchoate longing, or bearing up under a disability, real or imaged, but fully known and knowing, fully pleased and pleasing?

More importantly, what would you be in the unbroken presence of the one Being in all experience who knows you, your true self, the one buried under all the assumed guises of a lifetime? What would you be in the presence of the One who made you for the specific purpose of glorifying Him?

“See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.” (I John 3:1-3)

Much of our anxiety – my anxiety – about eternity comes from the curiosity of what it is that we’re supposed to do with all of it. How we might fill it up. The potentially endless monotony of stale experience, because that is the conception I have, based on what I have seen within this lifetime. But I won’t be myself – the self that is writing these lines and has spent years contemplating the ideas behind them. I won’t be like a child wondering what it’s like to be a married man, or a young girl contemplating the anguish of childbirth. I will know.

It was the actor Alec Guinness who once wrote about how people tend to visualize Heaven as a giant cocktail party, hobnobbing with the great figures of history, and tend to view the presence of God as only an occasion event, a random conversation. “Perhaps you know my Son?”

But Proust allows me to contemplate not how I will experience eternity, but how I will experience God Himself throughout eternity.

When Proust’s narrator first encounters Albertine, he tells us, his vision was cloudy. But each image from that time on, each encounter, is superimposed upon the last one. Later, he writes that pleasure is like a photograph; when in the presence of the beloved, we take a “negative” which must be developed later in our inner darkrooms that are barred to us as long as we are with others. 

But to be in the presence of God, for Whom the metaphors, titles, glories, pile up in page after page of Scripture, must be something else entirely. It is, we might suppose, a sensation of being overwhelmed by something else – Someone else - so overpowering, so complete, so awesome, that you don’t want to take your perception anywhere else. An incommunicable experience, beyond language, where one feels totally comprehended by an intelligence that cannot be reciprocated. A gorgeous incandescent presence, a personality that holds the conscience with absolute assurance, an awe-inducing confidence, a limitless and perfect facility, boundless creativity, a perfect moral wholeness unpolluted, a totality that cannot be apprehended – ever. When we encounter even a shadow of one of these qualities in another person, it is a stirring experience. To experience them all simultaneously would be a withering, terrifying catastrophe. Consider when “Marcel” meets the pompous Monsieur de Norpois, who dismisses his writing as well as his favorite writer:

“He has shown me, on the contrary, what an infinitely unimportant place was mine when I was judged from outside, objectively, by the best-disposed and most intelligent of experts.” (Within a Budding Grove)

This is magnified in those moments in the Bible when human beings encounter a vision of the Almighty. One remembers the words of Isaiah: "Woe is me!" I cried. "I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty." (Isaiah 6:5)

Yet all the attributes I listed earlier left out the most important one – love. “God is love,” John writes. God can best be understood as love. God’s most descriptive quality is His perfect love. He is best understood through His love. His love is absolute, complete, perfectly exampled for all time by Jesus Christ. Not transactional, not self-seeking, but complete and total. Perfect, as He is perfect.   

“Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed," says the Lord, who has compassion on you.” (Isaiah 54:10)

“The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing." (Zephaniah 3:17)

“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)

“His faithful love endures forever.” (Psalm 136:1)

We have never, in this life, in all our relationships, experienced an all-knowing, all-forgiving, all-encompassing love such as is described in these and other verses.

When “Marcel” encounters Albertine, they begin the charming and necessary ritual of “playing hard to get.” She gives him suggestions, even luring him to her bedroom, but teasing him. He compares this relationship to his earlier attachment to Gilberte, but each only hints at the other. Every relationship we have ever had on Earth across a lifetime will pale in comparison to an encounter with the Almighty.

The same fathomless personality I described earlier is made even more richer, more welcoming by the kind of love that goes beyond that of mother, father, lover, friend, to comprehend you not as you believe you are, but as you were truly meant to be, known only completely in the mind of the being who made you. No more self-dramatization. No more conformity to a perceived ideal, or an elusive momentary fashion. No more hypocrisies, no more posturing, no more enforced silences, no more cowering sublimation.

And though you share eternity with everyone saved by the grace of God, you are not one number among a multitude. You are not at the back of the crowd, straining on tiptoe for a glimpse. You are not Zacchaeus, climbing a tree limb in hopes of spotting the legendary figure in the crowd. You are Zacchaeus, personally invited to share His presence. You are experiencing no less what everyone else is, because God is large enough to fill every life, every particle of the universe, every moment of eternity. He is inexhaustible. There are no frantic glances at the watch, the pain of an expected parting making more exquisite the passing moments. It is a moment without end. 

"For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known." (I Cor. 13:12)

For many people, it would be easy to write off the possibility of experiencing this as a fantasy. One reason is that concepts like eternity, unconditional love, absolute forgiveness, are foreign to our experience, just as the idea of total peace seems unattainable; an ideal or a hope that is forever beyond reach. For others, the knowledge is sure that if such a personality exists, it would demand something of us that we are unwilling or, we feel, unable to give. Yet denying oneself this would be a tragedy – indeed the worst kind of tragedy. Or as Proust himself expressed, in an 1892 piece on the anti-clerical measures of France, “Not to take sides over God, over the soul…is that not a way, and the worst, of taking a side?”

We approach these ideas as philosophical constructs, or intellectual assents. I choose not to believe, or I prefer to keep my own faith. But as Proust’s narrator writes, “Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chooses the person one loves after endless deliberation and on the strength of diverse qualities and advantages.” We are speaking not of the head, but the heart – our tortured, restless, frustrated hearts, always in search of someone or something to ease them. If you were created to desire God, then to not desire Him is not an act of conscience, but of self-negation.  

 “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matt. 11:28-30)