In many ways it seems fitting that the first and last volumes of In Search of Lost Time would be my favorite, since they serve to introduce and summarize many of Proust's main themes. It's not to say that the middle volumes are unimportant, but I would agree with the various takes advising those not undertaking the whole set to read the first and last books.

I started reading Proust in 2020 with delusions of finishing in 6 to 12 months. That probably wasn't unrealistic if I had been willing to spend all my time on Proust, but taking a break in between volumes and reading slower and longer durations (say ~30 pages at a time) seemed to work much better. Having spent so much time together with Proust he now feels like a member of my family ... Which is to say: I love him but I don't alway like him. I was much fonder of the young Marcel whose innocence and wide-eyed approach to life was both enlightening and endearing thanks to Proust's ability to blend of-the-moment observation and immersion with omniscient, mature analysis/synthesis. He pulls this off throughout the span of volumes, but his of-the-moment narrator becomes a bit of an asshole as he grows up.

“...loving is like an evil spell in a fairy-story against which one is powerless until the enchantment has passed.”

A ridiculous range of Proust's insights into human nature and social dynamics feel incredibly insightful and accurate, yet two things chafed me consistently that may just be my own different worldview: 1) Yes, I believe in romantic love and "falling in love" but I also don't believe one has to chase every whim and desire. Choice exists but for Proust it often feels like he's completely led by his heart, which is really his prick and his ego, because his notion of loving another person seems to consist almost entirely of attraction and possession/control (or lack thereof, which provides him with the torture needed to create art, which in turn, regains time/recreates the past---this sounds somewhat like a Zoomer quote I came across recently that said "I'm borrowing money I don't have so I can go to school to get a job I don't want so I can pay back this loan.); and, 2) His notion of what love is or how it functions (it felt mostly relegated to passionate love at the beginning of relationships with a fixation on jealousy and possession; his observations and conclusions on these subjects are vast and brilliant, but it's such a limited view of love in my opinion).

[As an aside, I found my knowing that Proust was gay in real life colored my reading quite a bit as I was perplexed by the lack of physical intimacy he seems to have with each female love despite his passionate rhetoric ,and I marveled how one could wax so elegantly about art and truth and yet completely bury such a central part of one's self---easy for me to say having not lived in that time and place and had to disguise or protect the true nature of my sexuality.]

Age and the war itself seem to bring a worldlier more mature Marcel to book 7, with an interesting acceptance of time's changes/effects and almost a revulsion at the physical manifestations to the bodies around him, although he's not without a certain amount of respect, and, as ever, lyricism... Here he describes the Duc de Guermantes:

“He was no more than a ruin now, a magnificent ruin—or perhaps not even a ruin but a beautiful and romantic natural object, a rock in a tempest. Lashed on all sides by the surrounding waves—waves of suffering, of wrath at being made to suffer, of the rising tide of death—his face, like a crumbling block of marble, preserved the style and the poise which I had always admired; it might have been one of those fine antique heads, eaten away and hopelessly damaged, which you are proud nevertheless to have as an ornament for your study.”

In earlier books, memory is triggered by scent, sight, or sound. Here, we move on to actual position/motion of the body. All of these in their fashion trigger a kind of déjà vu---not just memory, but a temporal shift where the past is brought into the present. These type of serendipitous blessings manifest as lucky moments but it is art that facilitates the willful recapturing of time, memory brought back to life. A type of emotional and psychological time travel. According to Proust, a rare few geniuses can tap into this at any time---they can see and communicate the hidden and the divine. But most artists need suffering to reveal what is hidden and bring us closer to the divine. In this sense, I could understand, but perhaps not justify, his virtual imprisonment of Albertine---he needs her to make him suffer so that he may make art. He takes this even further by valuing happiness as the necessary foundation for unhappiness.

A monumental work of hubris? The most elegantly written society tabloid sprinkled with bon mots ever? Certainly, a genre-defying, auto-fiction-fueled encyclopedic exploration into the human soul.
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15 More New-to-Me Words Out of the Series' 1,267,069 Words
infusoria | calumniated | exordium | rachitic | morganatic | seigniorial | ventripotent | Shylock (not new, but one whose origin I've never sought out) | mujishun | nautinal | Erechtheum | obloquy | raillery | aposiopeses | copiators