"What is Time?"

I really don’t feel any special way in reaction to reading the Proust excerpts. Some of the bits and pieces reminded me of things we’ve discussed or things I’ve thought about in relation to this class, but the writing style itself was not especially challenging. I noticed a significant amount of description which may be considered dense, and the plot doesn’t move very quickly at all. The narrative is in a very self-centered, reflective first-person form.

I suppose the piece to which I connected most personally was when the narrator was describing his (I assume) childhood church, specifically the thought, “…all this made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of the town: an edifice occupying, so to speak, a four-dimensional space — the name of the fourth being Time — extending through the centuries its ancient nave, which, bay after bay, chapel after chapel. seemed to stretch across and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch…” (I just realized that that entire paragraph is approximately two sentences… Perhaps I’m too comfortable with stream-of-consciousness writing.) This idea reminded me of walking into the First Presbyterian Church in Richmond and feeling very at home, as if it were the same sanctuary of the University Presbyterian Church in Chapel Hill. Both churches are very old (FPC-R is celebrating its bicentennial year) and are in a way connected. I think that connection between all houses of worship is very interesting and is what Proust (or the narrator, rather) is addressing here.

I particularly enjoyed the Proust reading.  It was interesting how he found himself waking up in random places and how this made him lose track of past and present.  This made me think of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.  SH-5 is all about a man who has become “unhinged” in time and finds himself waking up in random time periods.  This is like the narrator of the story.  Both begin to question the flow of time.   This narrative also provided another interesting viewpoint on the mix of past and present.  It was also unique and compelling how he looked at how the present and future affect each other through current pleasure or current dissatisfaction can shape our future perspectives just like future expectations can cause our current actions.  This is definitely another article which provides interesting insights on the true nature of time.

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.

As told, I read the Proust article twice. The first time through was solely to become accustomed to the language and the second was for content. I read it the first time and only  seemed to pick up certain words and phrases. I remembered lots of color diction and dreamy phrases that seemed like a fiction story. The subject seemed to change quite rapidly as well much like a music video or a compilation of several consecutive dreams. I also took note of the many instances where the narrator fell asleep and woke up again in a different place. I had no real context initially to connect all these different excerpts of information because I merely skimmed the material, but that would change.

I found the second time reading the article to be much more interesting and thought provoking. I can closely relate to the first few pages because of an observation in my own personal experience. Every time I go to the beach, I have the exact same experience described by Proust of waking up and having no idea where I am. I’ve often thought about why this only happens to me at the beach and no where else. Almost every morning I wake up there, I have to spend a few seconds to remember where I am. It’s not an unpleasant feeling though; I just remain confused until I remember where I am or open my eyes. Then it’s a big relief.

Proust brings up many instances pertaining to our recollection of time that I can easily relate to. For instance, he talks about the concept of déjà vu, though he does not use that name to describe his thoughts. He brings up an instance where he trips on cobble stone and how that very action brings him back in time to being in Venice. Various sensations from Venice start to reoccur in his mind that attracts even more linked sensations. We as humans are all aware of this feeling. Any of our five senses have the ability to attract and replay memories and feelings about events that occurred in our past.

While Proust does bring up many relatable topics, he also has a way of taking familiar ideas and changing them into something very unfamiliar. He talks about the sensation of waking up from a deep sleep and being unaware of our surroundings. For a moment, we cannot remember where we are or how we got there. This is a very familiar idea to me; however, Proust then changes this familiar idea and makes it totally foreign by saying, “the memory—would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being…in a flash I would traverse centuries of civilization, and out of a blurred glimpse of oil-lamps… I would gradually piece together the original components of my ego”(5). I wish Proust would be more simplistic and concise in his explanations of his feelings, because it is rather hard to follow his thought process when he is going off on tangents about concepts that make no sense to me.

I really enjoyed reading the selections by Proust. While it was difficult to follow because of the author’s writing style, I thought that it was interesting to read and provided a couple key insights into the study of time. In the selections from “Time Regained,” I found the following quote relevant to our study of time: “…I experienced them at the present moment and at the same time in the context of a distant moment, so that the past was made to encroach upon the present and I was made to doubt whether I was in the one or the other.” This quote reminded me of the scene we watched in class from the Marriage of Figaro. The Count was explaining to Susanna and Basilio what had happened to him the day before, when the Count had discovered Cherubino in a place he wasn’t supposed to be. While the Count was telling this story, he again discovers Cherubino in another place he wasn’t supposed to be. I think this quote from the Proust readings describes that collision of past and present that we witnessed in the movie. I think the other selections from Proust, “Swanns Way,” highlights the importance of memory to the human experience and our perception of time. The madeleine contained a memory for the narrator. Similarly, a material object can contain a memory for us. It doesn’t even have to be a material object; a memory can be contained in a song as well. In this way, time becomes manifested in the material world.

Memories can always bring happiness to people, especially when the situation at this specific moment is worse than the one before. The worse of the situation now, the more expectation we feel to go back to the past. For example, with the increasing of our age, we are learning more and more profound and difficult knowledge in campus; we are getting to know more and more people with different characteristics and background; we are facing more and more responsibilities and pressures not only from the jobs but also from the families. When we are facing these pressures from the daily at this moment, we cannot help recollecting the life in our childhood or teenage time when we do not have such complicated work to do or diverse social circle to handle with or abundant responsibilities to take. We do not need to worried about the subsistence when we are young because that’s the business of our parents and we can only enjoy the ball games or movies. However, when we grow up as adults and step into the society, we have to consider the subsistence of ourselves and then our future generations.

Furthermore, the pleasure and enjoyment at present can help us to forget the annoyance and worry in future. This is a life attitude which called “just live in the present, present is a present we should cherish”. For instance, there will be an accounting test in next week and the knowledge points are harsh to apprehend, and you will not feel good or improve your grades if you just worry about it all the time. What you should do is taking an action and devoting yourself totally into the review and just enjoy it! Living in the present can avoid the hollowness of the life. We should live at this moment but not in the future.

Time is  always magic.

When going into these readings, I did not know what to think.  But when only given the prelude, “It is nothing like you have ever read before”, this can be expected.  My initial reaction to the writers experience was simply YES!  There have been many of these instances in my life when I have had these sudden memories and when they end, all I want to do is find a way back to them.  I cherish and can still remember all of these moments when I have ad these flashbacks in my life.  They are unexpected gifts in life and, being the greedy individuals that we are, when we receive them we only want more.  Reading about how the reader had the same reaction to these types of memories (let’s just use memory to describe them thought they are indescribable) reminded me of the joy I felt when I had the experiences and made me want to have another one.

I thought the narrative format of the reading made it much easier to read than other assignments we have had in class.  I could understand what was trying to be said and the points that Proust was trying to get across because of the first person narrative format.  Another element that made the reading different than the others was the time jumping between the past and the present.  Because it was a narrative, the author could take us back to the past to give us the full affect of the impact on the present.  This did get a bit confusing at times, but I felt it added to the reading enough that it was very readable and helped me relate more to the character in the book.

When I was reading the excerpt from Marcel Proust’s Time Regained, one major point of his work stuck out to me. He stated that we essentially find satisfaction in getting back to where we started after some disadvantageous event occurs. For example, this phenomenon can appear when someone breaks up with a girlfriend, and then gets back together. This may also happen when you boost your grade in a class after getting a D on a term paper. The point that Proust made seemed very relevant to me; this sort of satisfaction that we feel when events like this happen appears to occur nearly every day, whether we realize it or not.

Another point that I found interesting and relatable was his demonstration that present pleasure can cancel out worries about upcoming events in the future. This has happened to me countless times. When I was in Venice this summer, I sat on the roof overlooking a Venetian sunset with my feet kicked back and a cold glass of Coke. Every worry in my mind melted; I was not at all concerned about how early I had to wake up the next day for tours or where I was going to go for dinner that night. Events like this likewise seem to happen to me every day (though I may not always end up watching a Venetian sunset). Even the simple things, like taking a walk across campus or lying down in bed, can make my worries diminish.