Enchantment is Possible

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Past seasons have focused on Finnegans Wake, 1,001 Nights, the Hebrew Bible, Journey to the West, the American short story, and The Brothers Karamazov. This season: Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

In Time Regained, the concluding volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, an older version of the narrator gloomily decides to attend a gathering at the Guermantes’ mansion. He’s thinking, as Joshua Landy paraphrases here, “I might as well go and waste my time with these high-society snobs.” But then he experiences a jolt of involuntary memory, prompted by a step onto uneven paving stones. His memory casts him across time, and he begins to think that he could commit himself to writing that might also access something true and enduring, beyond conventional time.

“With Proust,” Hannah Freed-Thall tells us, “chance and contingency are so at the center of his aesthetic and epistemological world.” Involuntary memory, by which the narrator senses a connection to a kind of being apart from the usual passage of time, has to happen by surprise, or it won’t be involuntary. Chance, therefore, leads to a feeling for something kind of magical. “Precisely because nothing is ordering this,” Freed-Thall says, “enchantment is possible.”

When Proust’s narrator joins the party, however, he encounters aging characters, and the unavoidable force of mundane time is made vivid. He and the reader are left with a sense of something enduring along with recognition of the passage of time. Neither time nor timelessness seems to win here. “We can make of music what we will,” Alex Ross said earlier this season, and similarly, readers are free to make of this conclusion—and all of In Search of Lost Time—what they will.

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Guests for this season of The Cosmic Library:

Hannah Freed-Thall, author of Modernism at the Beach

Joshua Landy, author of The World According to Proust

Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm

Alex Ross, writer at The New Yorker—see especially “Imaginary Concerts”

Christine Smallwood, author of La Captive

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