There were two sections that particularly caught my attention. First, Proust offers a question for us to think about. Phrased as i understood it: is the immobility through time of both objects and thoughts in our life created by our conception that they only exist as their present selves? This got me thinking about the Augustine reading and our discussion about the existence of the past, present and future. As I have said before, I believe although the moment that has become the past does not physically exist, it does exist in our memories. Later in the reading, Proust discusses how taking a bite of some kind of cake provoked a memory in his head. To me, this proved that the past does, in fact, exist in our memories.
One question that always comes to mind when i think about the past vs. the present is: how long does the present exist for? If there is no such thing as the present, and everything exists in our past (as it is nearly impossible to talk about “right now”), how do we live at all? As much as i would like to talk more specifically about the Proust reading, I find this discussion incredibly intriguing.