In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • In Search of Lost Time in Psychological Space
  • Fred L. Griffin (bio)

And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me . . . this new sensation having had the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal . . . Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being? . . . But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

—Proust, Vol. 1, pp. 60–641

[I]t was into my own depths that I had to re-descend.

—Proust, Vol. 6, p. 529

Overture2

David felt lost in time, but found in space. Leaving his psychoanalyst’s office, he felt like he was not walking at all. Rather, he moved in a reoriented world in which he was being pulled along by a disturbing, yet faintly familiar, sense of being both lost and found: lost, because he did not fully feel that he was [End Page 69] himself, had forgotten that it was morning and not afternoon, and could not recall where he had parked his car only an hour earlier; found, for he felt in his body a recognizable and aching commingling of warmth and sadness, of excitement and immobility, of comfort and dread, of hope and grief—these being a set of feelings that he recognized from their repeated appearance over the years, usually when he was alone, most frequently when he listened to music. This moment of feelings that had been raised within him by his encounter with another person—of being found with and by this new analyst—David would later discover had originated in a time more than forty years earlier, living in a space within him, in a room where he sat in a small chair beside his father in his large one, listening to Debussy’s Clare de Lune.

Two hearts beating to the same rhythm.

In time.

The Language of Psychological Space and Time

And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable, so in that moment . . . [they are] taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

—Proust, Vol. 1, p. 64

[T]he sensation common to past and present had sought to re-create the former scene around itself.

—Proust, Vol. 6, p. 267

David had a curious way of talking about certain indelible memories. What he described was a small set of scenes from the ages of four to six years that took place in three-dimensional spaces in his mind, each having its own narrative and mood. The manner in which he felt them to be living, breathing parts of himself—“inside my body . . . much like the living tissue in the peritoneal cavity or uterus”—stretched my capacity [End Page 70] for understanding. (David was a physician and had borrowed from his knowledge of...

pdf

Share