Other authors who (like Proust) have tried to tackle the concept of time

I thought we should have a separate thread on this so as not to dilute our "Proustian" discussion of time too much but still highlight other concepts/passages about time.

From Memories of My Melancholy Whores:

From then on I began to measure my life not by years but by decades. The decade of my fifties had been decisive because I became aware that almost everybody was younger than I. The decade of my sixties was the most intense because of the suspicion that I no longer had the time to make mistakes. My seventies were frightening because of a certain possibility that the decade might be the last. Still, when I woke alive on the first morning of my nineties in the happy bed of Delgadina, I was transfixed by the agreeable idea that life was not something that passes by like Heraclitus’ ever-changing river but a unique opportunity to turn over on the grill and keep broiling on the other side for another ninety years. (p108)

Happy thought, that - another 90?!

But here is the second great love of my life, Nabokov in his Speak, Memory:

"I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. "

this recalls the origami of Proust - in which we (readers) are so intent on the beauty of the pattern that we may neglect to see what has been done with physical dimension of time itself.

And, if anyone is up for it, we could discuss Van Veen's "texture of time" from Ada part four... any takers?

We shall come back, no doubt, to walk down the Row and watch young people on the tennis courts by the clump of mimosas and walk down the beach by the bay, where the diving floats lift gently in the sun, and out to the pine grove, where the needles thick on the ground will deaden the footfall so that we shall move among the trees as soundlessly as smoke. But that will be a long time from now, and soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, and out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.

(duplicate post - something's really slow today!)

(triplicate post - ah, the viscitudes of time and the computer!)

RPW's All the King's Men which points back, much further back, to Milton's Paradise Lost - certainly about time and transcendence, fall and redemption - which brings us right back to Proust, and his true paradise - the one that is lost.

Vicissitudes. Or three degrees of separation?

(I need to re-read the Warren, it has been ages, but what a well written book that was).

Who has another one?

Yes - the spelling is dyslexia, and thus I'm reading Proust and the Squid -- see, it comes, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, back to Proust.

(the touchstones don't work for that one - newly out from Maryanne Wolf).

Must make for an interesting place, there, inside your head. I think dyslexics are at an advantage: our brain works in every direction.

One book that deals with time in such away that you are always aware of it is
Martin Amis's Times Arrow. The book also messes with your mind in a big way. The book is writen in reverse and it deals with the holocust.

David

Oh, and it is in at my local branch library. Thanks, David.

Yes, Nabokov is a favorite of mine as well. And Speak, Memory is a thrilling memoir. Ada's treatment of time is certainly a bit mind boggling. There is much that I really really love about that book, and in many ways, it's Nabokov's attempt at a crowning achievement. Opinions vary greatly on its merits, and I have to say, I think it's a bit too self-indulgent to be in the same league as his greatest works (Lolita, Pale Fire), but that's a pretty high bar to reach. But I do think there are moments -- stretches -- in which I've felt it was the greatest writing I've ever had the pleasure to read. The discussion of "towers," "bridges," and "fogs," is one of my favorite passages:

An individual's life consisted of certain classified things: "real things" which were unfrequent and priceless, simply "things" which formed the routine stuff of life; and "ghost things," also called "fogs," such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a "tower," or if they came in immediate succession, they made a "bridge." "Real towers" and "real bridges" were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though.

Proust is recognized as a significant influence on Gene Wolfe, imho the best of the literary speculative fiction (science fiction that aims for/deserves loftier literary status) writers. Wolfe's Book of the New Sun tells the story of a man who literally travels through time and sifts through the remains of his history for clues to life's meaning. He has an infallible memory, but he lies to us, a fascinating combination that requires some attention to discover.

Look's good. I am a firm believer that the wormhole in space that will allow for time travel will be found - in fact, I've given the task to my son, boy genius, with the stipulation that he be sure to come back for me. I'm not sure if he actually will, but I am pretty sure he'll be back for the dog.

As to the Wolfe character: why would he look through the remains of his own history? If you had the opportunity wouldn't you choose to rummage through someone else's history? Someone more interesting and exotic? Oh, I'd be in Nabokov's closet in a nano-second, tearing through the place.

enevad,

"tear" as noun or verb ?

David

Verb - did I misspell it? I meant rummaging through his private life, where I have no business being.

Enevada,

I was being cute (at least in my mind)

I know what you meant, but consider it as a noun.

David

Come to think of it Nabokov has never made me cry. (Well, perhaps with laughter...) Neither has Proust - they are too wicked, too grown-up for that nonsense.

Perhaps, that is why I like them so much.

1 Corinthians 13:11:

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that I am become a man, I have put away childish things."

there is also tears of awh!

david

Or perhaps the tears when I close the books for the last time, but I hope to be oblivious to this fact when the time comes.

A Proustian exercise that I have done repeatedly is try to remember specifically the very last time I played with a favorite toy, or stroked a beloved pet, or spoke with a soon-to-be-lost friend. I am never successful and I think it is because we are not aware that we are just about to lose something precious and if we were aware we would hold on too tight and ruin it.

I also watch my children and think: will this be the last time she dresses that doll? the last time he reads that old favorite? Happily, I haven't witnessed any 'lasts' yet - the children keep returning to the things that bring them joy.

This is only a guess, because I haven't read Proust:

Eliot in The Four Quartets
St. Augustine in the Confessions

Conrad's Lord Jim plays around with the contrast between secular and mythical time. Hard to escape the former, no matter how attractive the latter.

#21 Good guess, deniro. Eliot's poem could be read as A La Recherche.. in verse. Certainly the collapse of time, as Eliot writes it:

Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

is remarkably similar to Proust's vision, although Eliot believed time to be "irredeemable" and Proust devoted his energy to the re-capture of it. Although Proust's effort resulted in what Eliot might call an abstraction, (which Proust called a cathedral) both men made a monumental effort to stand outside of time, to escape its perceived dimension.

This is from an older article by J. Bottum found in First Things, and I think it a very good articulation of the orientation and outcome of both men (the novelist vs. the poet) when addressing the concept of time:

"In certain moments and in certain places, however, and without explanation, time opens up for us in a flood of associations from history and memory. For all that it is temporal, this experience seems not so much an experience of being in time as an experience of being outside time-of being in a Now in which great stretches of time are simultaneously present. Like Proust, Eliot is careful and precise in his descriptions of such experiences. But unlike Proust, Eliot is careful to remain outside them, for his purpose is not to invest these "spots of time" (as Wordsworth called them) with mystical significance but to develop in them a metaphor for what the mystical enfolding of all time in God’s Eternal Now would be like."

Proust dives in and emerges with an elaborate, massive edifice - a facsimile or replica of the experience, while Eliot remains out side and extracts a crystalline reduction of the experience.

Here is a link to the entire (long but worth it) article:

http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=4074

A recent read that has some wonderful ruminations on time (AND space) is Cees Nooteboom's Lost Paradise. Again, obvious Milton references as well.

It's a continual conflict between the internalized and the social/eternal aspects of time and place.