IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME

In Search of Lost Time follows the narrator’s recollections of childhood and experiences into adulthood during late 19th century to early 20th century aristocratic France, while reflecting on the loss of time and lack of meaning to the world. The novel began to take shape in 1909. Proust continued to work on it until his final illness in the autumn of 1922 forced him to break off.  Written by Marcel Proust (1871–1922), it is considered to be his most prominent work, known both for its length and its theme of involuntary memory,

The novel also is the essence of the fin-de-secle in Europe and marks the beginning of a new era in Philosophy of time and Sciences. Time and History passed to be understood as a contingency connected to mind. And not as absolute entities and linear and natural paths.  Past became inaccessible because of this. Even the best of historians would not be able to reconstruct the exact moments and events of previous periods. Yesterday turned into a vague representation of the memories of the last day. The last millennia is nothing else that our present projections into a distant dream that could be reconstructed in some parts due to archives and archeological rests.

This implied in freedom and liberation as humanities started not to follow similar methods and “absolute” rules as natural Wissenschaft. But it also meant the loss of historical truths and immutable interpretations. Nostalgia and sensibility started to become as important as intelligence and rationality to inquire about the past. A good balance between them, thus, is necessary for this profession or this hobby.

On the other hand, the novel summarizes the initial act of each person. We born and live in the mundus as we seek for something missing, for something that we already have done (even if we are children). Is the reversal of deja vu, the rescue of something that cannot be found in its interstices.

Maybe this quest for the impossible, for the thing that cannot be found lead me to inquiry the past and converted me in a historian. A historian who questions the future but also believes that the ashes and ruins have something more important to tell us. Somehing beyond the simple aesthetic dimension of palaces and the glory of human endeavors that were/are being buried by time.

Once in Pompey, instead of finding a dead corner amidst the ruins, the amphitheater made me say this:

[…]

In the arena of time, where ages are like the hours of the day

I feel surrounded by thousands of voices and eyes

Yet nobody was there, the city was empty and the night was falling over the sand

Walls and columns told me something that I cannot remember

I know that this kind of places were not made for me, they must not exist

So I struggled against myself to leave

Following the gates of that place that once captured me and crushed me

Is too heavy… the weight of time

Now I also have stones and dust instead fo flesh and blood.