“IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME” > VOLUME 3: “THE GUERMANTES WAY” > PART TWO > CHAPTER TWO > P. 700-730.
A Feast of Snakes. Our narrator has become a regular guest at M. and Mme. de Guermantes’ dinner parties. At one of these parties there is a lengthy discussion about botany, specifically on how the marriage between flowers mirrors marriage between humans – this leads to more gossip about Swann’s marriage. There is an awkward transition in conversation to different styles of furniture and Mme. de Guermantes espouses how the aesthetic of furniture should always be prioritized over comfort. Princess de Parma attempts to follow the discussion but her lack of knowledge around art keeps her from participating fully. Mme. de Guermantes shares her theory on how long it takes for new art, fashions, or trends to take hold of the public’s imagination – 40 years. The great painter Elstir is again a topic of conversation, and how the Kaiser of Germany dislikes his art.
THIS ENTRY WILL DEVIATE FROM THE PAGES REFERENCED ABOVE, BUT AS I AM LEARNING – ALL RIVERS FLOW BACK TO PROUST. There have been a couple of times in the six months that I have been reading Proust where something will strike me to my core – as if a puzzle piece that has been floating in the air above my reading and reflecting suddenly SNAPS! into place. This is one of those experiences.
“Prince d’Agrigente, who like all those people who, lacking in imagination, but not in covetousness.” (p. 703)
I WAS WATCHING THE 1968 MOVIE ‘THE SWIMMER’ WHEN I EXPERIENCED A STRANGE BUT FAMILIAR SENSATION. ‘The Swimmer’ is a talisman movie for me, and what I mean by ‘talisman’ is that there are certain works of art, whether movie, literature, music, drawing, painting, etc. that, while the work may not necessarily be my favorite, holds mystical properties for me. They reach a deeper part of myself, difficult to access otherwise – a part of me that doesn’t have words. It’s as if these talisman art works were created in the murky waters of the cauldron stirred by MacBeth’s witches. ‘The Swimmer’ is one of my uncanny talismans.
“The Swimmer” (1968)
‘The Swimmer’ is the story of a middle-aged suburbanite man who ‘swims’ home. The movie opens with our main character spontaneously appearing at the home of a friend. Barefoot and wearing only his swim trunks, our main character asks to use his friend’s swimming pool, which is graciously granted. After he goes for a dip, our main character stands on the edge of his friend’s backyard which overlooks several miles of suburban terrain. As he surveys the land our main character realizes that there are swimming pools between his friend’s home, where he stood, and his own home, which is where he is ultimately headed. Following this seemingly innocuous realization, our main character has a strange and most spontaneous image – he imagines these pools connected into one long continuous river that flows right up to the front door of his home. Our main character then decides that he will swim in all of these pools – this imaginary river – essentially, he will “swim home.” The movie follows our main character’s ‘swim’ home and the characters he comes upon, as well as those he is forced to confront. This journey challenges his character, as well as forces him to confront his past. Our main character’s life is forever changed during this story, which would not have occurred had he not embarked on this imaginary adventure.
At some point during the movie, I had the strange sensation I referred to earlier. “Either I see the world through an imaginative gaze, or I don’t.” Those are the words that entered my mind at the time. While these words are technically accurate in explaining my sensation, it remains a clunky description. I say clunky because no matter how accurate a sensation is, described words are inadequate in giving justice to the experience of a sensation. Sensations cannot be explained. It is always better to speak of sensations through imagery and metaphor. So, to start over, the sensation I had while watching ‘The Swimmer’ was like a pit in my stomach, the same pit I had at five-years-old when the training wheels came off my bike. I knew at that young age that I would now be able to soar in ways that were impossible under the tyranny of those training wheels, but what was equally true was that my risk of falling and experiencing pain had increased as well. Imagination demands blurred edges and instability. It requires entering into the flow of life via less traveled, and thus riskier channels, be it the literal suburban river of ‘The Swimmer’ or Proust’s rambling run-on sentences.
I think that this is the time in this entry where we return to Proust proper. Proust captured what it means to live an imaginative life perfectly succinct in volume 2: “Within a Budding Grove” of his novel. In that volume we, the reader, are introduced to the great painter named Elstir (whose name continues to elicit strong opinions from Proust’s characters here in volume 4). One of the great themes found within Elstir’s work is the elimination of the lines of demarcation that separate water and land. The term for the blurring of those lines between water and land is called: ‘Terraqueous.’
Terraqueous: Consisting of both land and water.
I have spoken about the word ‘Terraqueous’ in earlier entries. I think it is the image that best demonstrates what it means to live a life leading with imagination on the tip of your sword. When the lines of demarcation are removed and the training wheels are off, it is unknown what you will step into next; a scary prospect. Living a terraqueous life demands that presence of that pit in your stomach.
It’s the same pit in my stomach I had when I stopped drinking, however many years ago.
When we lead with the imagination, blurring those lines between land and water – ala ‘The Swimmer’ – we find secret paths through reality that Proust spends pages describing. Proust lived his life leading with his imagination, so he was constantly discovering these secret pathways to snake through reality which are only available to the imaginative mind. Every time Proust took another imaginative step forward in his terraqueous world he unearthed a new trail. He was so outrageously verbose in part because there just was not enough paper on which to write down all the discoveries he made while living an imaginative life.
Good literature does that – it reveals these imaginative pathways through life. These pathways are not a secret either. You can see them out in the open depicted in all good works of art, where it’s acceptable and encouraged to traverse imaginative paths. It’s acceptable because they are confined, whether confined within the pages of a book, a movie screen, the four sides of a framed canvas, or any other containers where art is housed. It becomes less acceptable to traverse the imaginative byways in one’s daily life. As such, we do not normally think about living in imaginative ways, and when we try, since we are not accustomed to it, we don’t know how.
Proust’s novel – “In Search of Lost Time” – doubles as both a work of fiction and a memoir, with makes it a Terraqueous Work of Art, existing in a world where the lines between reality and imagination are blurred – it becomes a blueprint for how to access the imaginative life.
“Prince d’Agrigente, who like all those people who, lacking in imagination, but not in covetousness.” (p. 703)
I RETURN TO THIS QUOTE. I think that imagination is what makes humans different from all other species in the animal kingdom, so when we don’t lead with our imagination, we are not tapping into that unique thing that sits at the center of our humanity. The times in my life when I have despaired the most, when my anxiety has been at its highest, when my depression has kept me at my lowest, it also when my imagination has been at its lowest ebb. Those are the times when I was also at my angriest. I repeated the above quote when my imagination was at its lowest that I most resented and coveted what others had. Without accessing my imagination reality is cold, hard-edged and narrow, with no options. What I really wanted from those I resented was not what these people had obtained and held, but the ease with which they appeared to live, access to the water source they seemed to float down life on.
I read Marcel Proust because he reminds me that life opens up to us in surprising ways when we lead with imagination on the tip of our sword. He reminds me to blur those lines of separation so that I can see the secret passageways – almost always invisible to the cynical eye – and open all the options that reality has to offer so that I can start to believe that even in the most barren and driest of deserts my imaginative eye will always find a secret river to swim in.