In Search of Lost Time

"Lots of different things. It’s a book in multiple parts. The first section focuses mostly on a particular episode from the narrator’s childhood, when he was around seven, going to bed and hoping that his mother would come up and kiss him good night. He’s a rather anxious child, and continues to be anxious into adulthood. Then there’s the famous madeleine scene that ends the first part. Then a fairly long section: a description of life in a small country town, where this character spent his summers. In this section there’s an incredible little scene involving three steeples seen from a moving carriage, which is surprisingly important. Then you find an entirely different thing: you flash back twenty years or so—the chronology is a little unclear—to a time before the narrator was born. We get the story of a couple, Charles Swann and Odette de Crécy. They fall in love, or at least, he falls in love with her. So you get the story of that love affair, which includes some lovely stuff about music, then that section ends and you reach a fourth section, the one I mentioned earlier, which is the lovely, lyrical, charming little story of a romance that the narrator has when he is a young man. Overall, what you get in the first volume is a sense of this character gradually coming into focus; it’s part of the reason why that reviewer was so mystified. We start with the character waking from sleep. He’s bleary. It’s a lovely scene. Whatever he’s been reading about he has sort of become in his dream, and so when he wakes up, he is not sure if he’s a musical quartet, a church, or even the rivalry between Charles V and François I, which is delightful. Then: I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself. So his memory rescues him from a feeling of not being anything. Later you get the madeleine scene, which adds another really important component of who he is—what Proust calls the “true self,” this enduring component of personality. Then the steeples passage fills that in a bit more. So over the course of Swann’s Way , this character goes from being almost nothing, barely human—he’s a quartet, a cathedral, a rivalry—to being more or less fully fleshed out as an individual. That’s right. He’d written this and that. He’d published some short stories and translations. But no one could have possibly predicted that the writer of those pieces would ever produce this masterpiece. There had been nothing like it before, and there’s not really been anything like it since. Malcolm Bowie has a lovely line in a review of a biography of Proust—because there are many biographies of Proust, often very long— That a life like that should have produced a novel like this is the miracle of miracles You couldn’t predict this novel on the basis of that life, which was a fairly ordinary life of a rather anxious person who was, you know, already writing—but not like this. One or two of those earlier pieces are really great, but nothing in the same ballpark."

"You have a treat in store – and of course there are many more volumes after Swann’s Way ! There are several girls he’s into. It’s very much about love. It starts out with this beautiful evocation of his mother. It’s talking about parents who die and the weight that has. His whole life is very much in the context of a family. You see the character almost only in context of that significant family. It’s also a wonderful translation by Lydia Davis, who is a terrific writer and a great translator. It’s so much about the role imagination plays in family life. He talks mostly about unrequited love but he’s also writing about the whole world, once he’s retired from life in a way. Proust was asthmatic and famously, in his forties, retired to a cork-lined room and just stopped going out. He received visitors there but stopped going out into the world. He felt that he had lived enough and he just wrote. So it’s suffused with a grandparent-like generosity towards everyone. He’s watching people’s extreme suffering and wishes he could give them his perspective."

"He has an enormous talent for building characters and bringing a world to life. In his descriptions of his own experiences you see the role of art in life. Art is not separate from life, it is an element of life. We all have the need and the capacity to impose form upon the flux around us. Now, we can impose a better form or we can impose a worse form. We aren’t all geniuses like Proust. Yet we can try to clarify our thoughts and remember the importance of form when we write. Proust shows us that activity helps give meaning to life and it’s helpful to keep in mind as a judge. I have spent a lot of time with French. I try. It’s work sometimes. But worth it, for the same reason I recommend reading literature. We have only one life, each of us. Through literature and language we can begin to understand the lives of other people and get insight into how others see the world. By reading some French books as originally written, I think I gain a better view of a world that is seen by many people who speak French, which I would be cut off from otherwise because translation is different. So language, like literature, opens windows. The job of being a judge entails spending every day alone in a room with books and a word processor. Yet the words that you write affect other people. Only the most difficult cases get to the Supreme Court, those cases where perfectly good judges come to different conclusions on the meaning of the same words. In those difficult cases, it is very important to imaginatively understand how other people live and how your decisions might affect them, so you can take that into account when you write. Judges have the job of trying to work out what the words written down in a statute actually mean. We have six traditional ways of approaching this job. First, we read the words. Second, we look to the tradition. For instance, the phrase “habeas corpus” has a big legal tradition behind it. Third, we look to the history of the case. Fourth, we look to precedent – what has been said about this in previous cases? Fifth, we look to purposes – somebody wrote this statute, what did they have in mind and what were they trying to accomplish with these words? And sixth, we look to consequences. That is, if we interpret the statute this way are we furthering the statute’s purpose or are we hindering it. Everybody uses those six tools: Text, tradition, history, precedent, purpose and consequence. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Some judges tend to emphasise purposes and consequences. That’s what I do. I often cannot get the answer from the first four things, so I look to purpose – what did the authors of the bill mean? What were they trying to accomplish? Other judges feel that that’s too subjective. They try to find the answer in history, text, language and tradition – the first four. That explains differences among the judges. It’s a question of emphasis. I fear that just looking at text, history, tradition and precedent won’t answer the question. If that’s all you look to, too often you will produce a law that is too rigid to adapt to human circumstances, which are ever-changing. That’s why I look to purposes, but I certainly agree that the first four are relevant. They believe they can find answers in those four factors more often. When you’re interpreting a provision of our constitution, which was written in 1787, ratified in 1789 and the phrases are general, the strict constructionist tends to think he can find the answer by looking back to see what the founders would have thought. All of us, including me, agree that you have to look back to find out the primary value that underlies the provision of the constitution. For example, what was the constitution trying to protect when it protected freedom of speech? Speech is a form of expression. They were trying to protect expression. You have to find the value. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Values don’t change, but circumstances do. The Internet is something that George Washington didn’t envision. George Washington can’t tell us how the First Amendment applies to the Internet. But history can tell us what the framers were trying to achieve when they wrote the First Amendment. Some people think they can answer specific questions today through history. I think you can’t get that much out of it and you must apply, as best you can, unchanging values like free expression to the ever-changing circumstances of modern life. I’ve spent the last four summers writing Making Our Democracy Work . I put a lot of my heart and soul into trying to translate the experience I’m having into a form that is understandable for all readers. So this summer I have a lot of reading I want to catch up on, including some American biographies. Good ones recently came out on George Washington, for example. And I do like French literature, I’ll probably go back and read some Balzac . There are a whole lot of things. I have a large pile. I can’t remember what is in it, but I am looking forward to it."

"Proust’s reflection on the nature of time is deep and spread over his writing. Reflect for a moment: the three thousand pages of his magnificent novel, packed with people, emotions, parfums, reflections, are not presented as happening in reality, but as emerging from the memory of the protagonist. A vast universe hidden among the folds of his brain, in the few inches between his ears. Proust’s art thus brings to life a key intuition that we can find in thinkers ranging from St Augustine to Husserl, and which I think is crucial for understanding our experience: the fact that the time of our experience is only weakly related to the time of physics. Mostly, it is a space, a clearing, opened up by our memories and anticipations. What we call time in our daily life is these memories and anticipations. The main message of my book is that time is a multilayered notion. What we mean when commonly say ‘time’ is a rather stratified concept, most layers of which refer to aspects of reality that have more to do with the specific functioning of our brain than to the simple structure of physical reality. We often make the mistake of forgetting this, and attribute to the external world what is really the emotional coloring that the external world generates in us. So, yes, to some extent the emotion of time is precisely what time is for us."

"This is Marcel Proust’s famous masterpiece which is an excruciatingly detailed chronicle of his life in which every single element and thought is captured and retold. Proust’s book is one of an entire (and well-known) genre: James Joyce’s Ulysses being one and Robert Musil’s A Man without Qualities a further one. These authors aim to capture the entirety of our being and it creates a fascinating and excruciating rollercoaster experience for the reader. Our minds capture a myriad of impressions every minute, but we deal with that deluge of stimuli by forgetting most of them. If one undoes that, like Marcel Proust, one will experience a very acute sense of overload. With the exception of The Woman Who Can’t forget and Daniel Schacter’s scientific analysis, my choices are works of literature. They envision a dystopian world in which we remember too much. Schacter points at cognitive reasons as to why perfect recall is problematic. The woman who cannot forget is suffering in real life what the other authors wrote about. But she may not be alone for much longer. The digital tools around us make it very hard for us to forget and very easy for us to remember. So we might end up being the Funes of the future in an unforgetting, and thus unforgiving, world that is permanently tethering us to the past, inhibiting our ability to act in time."