Paris Before the War

Proust, why not, I'm tired:

Moreover, the name Guermantes existed for me in many forms. If the form which my memory had merely noted down as in an address book was not accompanied by any poetry, older forms, those which dated from the time when I did not know Mme de Guermantes, were liable to renew themselves in me, especially when I had not seen her for some time and the glaring light of the person with human features did not quench the mysterious radiance of the name. THen once again I began to think of Mme de Guermantes's dwelling as of something that was beyond the bounds of reality, in the same way as I began to think again of the misty Balbec of my early day-dreams as though I had not since then made that journey, or of the 1.22 train as though I had never taken it....Then the idea of reality returned as I entered the Duchess's hall. But I consoled myself with the reflexion that in spite of everything she was for me the real intersection between reality and dream.

It's a sign that you are reading a book so long that you have less read it than lived parts of it that I actually felt the way he feels about the name Guermantes, the 1.22 train, Balbec, before I even did the usual readerly solipsistic work of thinking about things that work for me that way. I don't have to think of women I knew of and then knew to feel the way Proust does about the duchess; I just have to think of Oriane de Guermantes, and I get enough of the sense of lost mystique to feel with him.

What is Oriane de Guermantes before we knew her, when all she was was a set of phonemes blobbed together that reminded us of a lantern projecting figures of long-dead nobility on the wall? Nothing, I suppose, the same way in which the people that we haven't met yet are, for us, nothing now. Young Proust, thinking of her at Combray, can't think of anything about her that he can say: this is what the Duchesse de Guermantes is. But there is nothing that he can say she isn't, and so she gets to be, as a name, free-for-him. The name Guermantes is for young Proust freedom, freedom as the condition of uncollapsedness. No possibility in her, in Balbec, in the 1.22 train, has collapsed into its own not-actually-having-been. What that is, I think, is the fullest form of freedom: not the negative freedom, that, say, Kant condemns (the freedom to do whatever one pleases), nor the positive-but-in-practice-soulless freedom that Kant really likes (the freedom to act noumenally in accordance with laws and so verbosely on). Both of those freedoms are actionable senses of freedom -- they sit open to action, and as such, they sit with their collapsability into an accomplished fact -- an unfree fait accompli -- as their most salient feature.

The downside to the fullest freedom we can feel -- Oriane before we knew her, Paris before the War, Williams College just before I graduated-- is that, of course, it can only be recognized after we know Oriane, after the War makes our bullfights and our lives in the brasseries seem so open and wonderful, after I graduate. The Duchesse de Guermantes whom we actually know -- incredibly stylish, sharp witted, more than a little superficial -- is a saturated object of knowing (to slightly alter topographical metaphors), a collection of possibilities filled in, closed off. And so with every damn thing: know more, wonder less, long for the haunting that those names had for us once, that little haunting that is the one proleptic taste of fullest freedom we can get our hands on. And to long for that haunting -- to be full of a yearning for the sensuous notion of the uncollapsability of everything that has gone before -- that is just what it is to be tired.