I Was The Shadow Of A Young Girl In Flower When I Met Marcel Proust

It's August in this city and a prologue is being prepared.

And I'm here, seated at this coffee table in this open-air gallery, under a concrete and stone building. 

I saw a snail woman just after buying the first volume of In Search of Lost Time.

Finally, I bought it! 

You might think that I started reading Proust just now, at 37; well, it's never too late, right?

Something that happened twelve years ago made me be here, right now, buying this book. It seems like another person's story, not mine, the story I'm going to tell you. Will it be ok for you if I refer myself as she? Well then, let's start.

She was 25 years old, her eyes were brown as was her hair, she wasn't fat but not skinny too, she used contact lenses, and from time to time glasses, she didn't know exactly what to wear, nothing seemed to fit her well. Still, she always had a thing for basics, although in her mind, she was dressed in clothes of emancipated women at the beginning of the XX century!

One night, at a bar with some friends, she met a girl, more or less her age.

They exchanged emails, not phone numbers, and she returned to work in her hometown village 62 miles from the city. 

In a week, she would receive an email from that girl telling how the chat they had had the other night was pleasant.

She felt excited by receiving that email. Someone had noticed her in a way she was willing to be seen.

Not long after, at her place of work, a bookshop in the middle of a tiny village, where the best sellers were books about sheep or babies or both! The girl appeared from nowhere, with her, also a boy, they came by car, his car.

Out of the blue, they were there to see the bookshop and the surroundings, and also her.

The happening was brief. Soon they needed to go back to the city.

Emails kept exchanging, and in a couple of weeks, she would move to the city. She would start working with that other girl, going out as best friends with her and the boy. 

Everything was so natural, and for the first time in her life, she truly felt at the right place with the right people.

They would do everything together; they would laugh all night long, they would have, what would be, at least for her, her first intellectual discussions.

The drinks and smokes of young adulthood, 

for a couple of months, it felt like heaven on earth!

She was slowly falling for the girl, just like the boy was too.

Although she knew the girl was not exactly her type, she felt that the girl was arrogant sometimes, even manipulative; she couldn't help herself. The girl was also magnetic; just like that, there were always people orbiting around her.

She ended up sharing a house with that girl, and eventually, something would happen in intimacy. 

The girl she was falling for was flirty, though, not just with her, but with whoever she chose to be, living the free love.

But that free love was not what she was expecting; she couldn't stand the plan, she didn't sign to that! 

The girl would always give her a bit to try and taste, not everything because there were more people to share it with, but what? It sure wasn't Love! 

Their time together started to be less pleasant.

The girl would choose her pair to match her mood. 

The girl would compare her to someone else all the time.

She was now addicted and craving attention from that girl, the same attention she somehow had before, or did she live an illusion?

Quicker than she ever expected, that romantic comedy turned into an emotional and physical nightmare. 

She was losing her temper; she would be used and abused by that girl as an object. 

Jealousy and hate started to dominate!

One day, she lost herself in the girl's games, and her hands moved around the girl's neck; before quickly moving back, she was sure that she was losing her mind. 

Violence was consuming her.

And then, suddenly, as a call from heaven, she felt the need to read. 

And so a library came to her sight. She wanderer through shelves till a title grabbed her attention instantaneously! - "In search of lost time."

Was the answer in the past?

She left the library with the first volume - Swann's Way.

Since that first moment, every time she would open the book, she felt drowned into a velvet chaise longue, having the deepest and intimate therapy session. 

Her "thoughts had run into a channel of their own," until she "seemed actually to have become the subject of the book": Combray, Françoise, Swann, the narrator, a paint, a Debussy music, a summer room, a beach, a group of young girls at the beach, a dinner at the Guermantes.

Slowly, questions would find an answer; with dedication, she read herself everywhere.

Her hate started to vanish, and her mind was opening to a vastness of new understanding.

Like diving into a deep state of hypnosis, there, while reading, she was no longer she, but everything, and at the same time just her true self, a new one, the old one, everyone. she could even start to understand why the other girl was acting like that, but that, was no longer a subject. 

He had taken place. 

How could he, Proust, know so much about the things she felt but never thought possible to describe.

That man that she tenderly called Uncle Proust was suddenly her therapist. 

Her confidant and her master, and also just herself floating in that vast ocean of images, through where she would travel, opening doors here and there, to rooms full of psychological explanations, and then somehow, she could breathe deep in a garden or be amused by a dinner. 

She then bought all the remaining six volumes, as the need to highlight phrases was growing. 

The first one, though, because she read the one from the library, was out of her sight for the past twelve years.

While looking back twelve years doesn't look like a lot, time can be multiplied timeless for each small moment of growth when it is profound.

Proust would say, "When a man is asleep, he holds in a circle around him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, and the order of the universe." 

In the I Ching or the Book Of Changes, the first hexagram is called THE CREATIVE. In it, we can read, "Time is no longer a hindrance but the means of making actual what is potential." 

He was sure of that too!

In the first volume, In Search Of Lost Time, published by Yale, you can find the following phrase in the introduction: "prior to the publication he explained to a fellow writer, awed by Proust's talent but fearful that unprecedented length would discourage readers, that the work had to be long because he was intent on "showing the effects of time on a group of characters."

Twelve years have passed since I read the first volume of In Search Of Lost Time, and for sure, I feel like part of that group of characters. I was always part of that group, just like you. 

We are all part of that group because the amazing uncle Proust knew how the human brain worked. On observing and writing about himself and his surroundings, he wrote about all of us.

Proust was a neuroscientist, the title of Johan Lehrer book.

And now, this thing between my writing and your reading is being translated into your emotions by your brain; and as for your emotions, they can or cannot make your feelings. It's up to the time you give to it. But to understand this, we always need time to go back to things.

So, here I am, coming back to In Search Of Lost Time, finally, again with the first volume in my hands, ready for new sights through the same path. Ready to float again in the waters of Proust memories that are also ours. And just like that, prepared to discover more about human psychology.

Thank you so much for your time. Come back whenever you wish love!