My clearest memory of reading Swann's Way consists of pouring over one of the large illustrations, softly colored and darkly lit and so much more interesting than the Biomaterials lecture I was sitting in, an aisle-edged seat that necessitated swift cover ups from the professor's gaze as well as ensured a swift getaway at the ring of the bell. Now, I am at the close of eleven months on, more than three hundred miles away from the beginning and likely to never join in on such a high and mighty science lecture ever again. Older, and wiser, I would hope, but as the latter lacks as much concreteness that stuffs the former to a painfully nostalgic brim, I will leave it to others to determine that particular note.

I had been wondering whether I would need two reviews, one for the parcel and one for the whole, but this is Proust. Forty two hundred pages and counting, an author that died before the work had ripened into a fully snipped and spliced together piece, and still it all comes together. The color, the music, the people, the literature, the feverish thralls of machinated society culminating at long last in war, Paris' own Pompeii. And Time. Always Time.

I will still put something down for the megalodon of the complete edition, but later, I think. I think, in that I will leave it to Time to determine whether it is truly necessary or right to an attempt an encompassing of my first experience in Searching for Lost Time, a Time spent alongside my own Time so full of turmoil, temperament, and translation. French and I did not part on the best of terms after so many years of it being just another grindstone for my unwilling youth, but I still remember. And after this work, I begin to wonder, if it would not perhaps be worth it. For Le deuxième sexe, for Les Misérables, for this. That question I will leave to Time as well, for unlike the narrator finally embarking on his composition at the end of so many pages, that I have in plenty.

I didn't used to think so. Decide your career at 17, obtain a career at 21, work at said career for the rest of your life. It wasn't so long ago that books seemed the only future left to my own true volition, and I still find myself speeding ahead into the void if I'm not too careful. The thing about writing is the cultivation of it; a reading here, a friendship there, a life that does not require a filled résumé to be worthy of script. The path I am walking now is slower, but surer, and the beauty found in its natural growth of passionate productivity is all its own. I am not so set in the concept of interchangeability of people and places as Proust, but I do see the wisdom in living for the sake of living, letting the gardens grow without worrying too much about the resulting opus.

If you wish to write: read, watch, listen, think, live. A piece here, a piece there, when the spirit takes you. Look for beauty, look for hypocrisy, look for the intersection of details in reality, memory, and iridescent mist that lies between. Mind your illusions, but also love them, for as long as you are able. Find your niche, pursue your instincts, and no one will be able to say that your Time has been wasted. Every so often, cast your line back, far back into that cloaking brilliance and those soft-edged shadows, and wonder.

Fragments of existence withdrawn from Time: these then were perhaps what the being three times, four times brought back to life within me had just now tasted, but the contemplation, though it was of eternity, had been fugitive. And yet I was vaguely aware that the pleasure which this contemplation had, at rare intervals, given me in my life, was the only genuine and fruitful pleasure that I had known.

I do not agree with everything Proust has said, but what I do is of immense value and phenomenal insight. I do not view my loves the way Proust did, but much of it I recognize in parts of pain and parcels of profundity, and will color my effects forever on. Ever so often I snorted and sneered at his pompous pratfalls, and more times than I can count was I lost in a rapture of sight, of sound, of trains of lines of letters flitting this way and that over coursing streams of thought and form and sometimes, sometimes, the very soul of a name, a place, a pleasure. I have spent a longer length of effort in his pages than I have with any other author, a plunge that was in no way previously prepared for to any practical extent. Fifteen hundred and fifty-six people there are now in '2013: The Year of Reading Proust' group, and the percent I've interacted with is a mere smidgen of a handful of a precious few. I am a poor player in the daily discussion realm, but I do hope that my small contribution of reviews have helped.

Thank you, Proustitute, for your leadership as both coordinator and titular figurehead of the most witty sort. Thank you Kalliope, Aloha, Kris, for your efforts within the group as well as without. Thank you one and all for every like, every comment, every spur onward towards this final conclusion, the culminating finality of the first journey through word, through page, through volume, through Proust. Much has changed since that first library check out of that first ponderous edition, and much remains the same. The entirety of all that is what this reading experience has given me, that which will play out for the rest of my days as both influence and insight and whatever saying that one has read the entirety of ISoLT is worth in the world these days. Not much to most, quite a bit to those who count, and most importantly, however I see fit to me. And I see fit to value it very, very much.

I know that I am far too quick in my finishing for most, so for those in the midst, those in the beginning, those on the cusp of finishing, those who have finished within the last month or so and still bear the flitting of certain pages on the borders of that electric spitfire of the brain, those who made their last way long ago enough to be thinking on another journey. Those who are halted partway, those who view with trepidation, those who have yet to come. Good luck, good reading, good living. Come for the reputation, come for the incentive, come for the love of others past, present, future. Proust is not perfect, but by god he is something special.

Sweet Sunday afternoons, beneath the chestnut-tree in our Combray garden, from which I was careful to eliminate every commonplace incident of my actual life, replacing them by a career of strange adventures and ambitions in a land watered by living streams, you still recall those adventures and ambitions to my mind when I think of you, and you embody and preserve them by virtue of having little by little drawn round and enclosed them (which I went on with my book and the heat of the day declined) in the gradual crystallization, slowly altering in form and dappled with a pattern of chestnut-leaves, of your silent, sonorous, fragrant, limpid hours.

-Swann's Way

Adieu, Marcel Proust, adieu. Till we meet again.