Proustian Old Age, or the Key to Time Recaptured

Abstract

Old age, like most realities found within vaguely delineated and often shifting confines, can perhaps best be defined in medical terms-as a weakening of muscle responses, or circulatory impediment, or glandular disfunction. To the naked eye the process of aging depends on individual perception, and objectivity is held in check by personal experience. For a ten-year-old his thirtyyear-old mother may appear venerable, while those who will never see forty again must think differently. The perception in Remembrance of Things Past is of course that of the narrator, whose sense of time is so permeated with emotions as to reside almost totally outside the realm of calendars. Readers do not know how many years have lapsed when Marcel meets again, at the end, all the people whose existence had seemed so important to him in the past. One may account for the intervening war years, but that would not in itself justify the dramatic changes he finds in everyone upon returning to Paris. How long he has remained confined in a nursing home remains unclear. What is unquestionable, however, is the overwhelming shock at that sudden confrontation with time, after several or many years spent away from his circle of acquaintances. Time is visibly reduced to space now, through a kind of satanic masquerade that appears more like a danse macabre than a big festivity. A life span can be measured by the signs of age evident upon all faces-and envisioned like a line, all too brief, that lacks a mere dot or two before completion. The masks that whirl by-for masked they appear to be, all those unrecognizable people with parchment features and staccato movements, and with only retrospective nuances, once their names are announced, reminiscent of the bright smiles of their youths-advance toward Marcel as ineluctable forces. They threaten to upset the orderly world of his memories, the stages that brought him on wings of fantasy along gilded paths of wonderment and adulation. Here are the very people who had set him to dream, with their feet of clay all too visible beneath distorted bodies. Time is suddenly dislocated, lacking for him the harmony necessary to retain his past, his illusions, expectations, and disappointments. The ghosts that now crowd that great hall glide by like accomplices of deeds untold to him. Their hands stretch back and demoniacally try to reach toward his cherished images, to contaminate and reduce them too into mere ghosts. Marcel's shock is not so much linked with old age per se, as with death, with the shadow of nothingness that looms beyond all those figures. His own