Finding Time Again is a wonderfully fitting end to the longest, and one of the most beautiful, of all European novels. Since the whole thing begins with the struggle to remember and write the text that we're reading, it seemed fitting that the last social encounter, back to the Germantes (whose various social threads have now all grown together through marriage, death, and re-marriage), leads the narrator to the revelation regarding age, memory, time, and art, that inspired him to try what he began accomplishing back on the first page of The Way by Swann's. The roads metaphor that I invoked, nearly two years ago now, when I finished reading that first volume, is finally made explicit in the literary essay that crowns the work here in its final pages--the long meandering roads of our life all lead to oblivion. The artist gains some consolation--and something to do with his dotage--if he charts them with words.

I feel like I'm saying the obvious. And yet, Proust's novel is obvious. It's not a part of the Modernist technique, I don't find, despite the first person narrator--not a lot of symbolism, or seriousness, but it speaks through a rather more post-modern (if you will) superficiality and obviousness. The beauty of it lies in how it lays bare the mind at work churning reality through its processes of intake, impression, rumination, constantly at war with itself between raw feeling--jealousy and desire mainly--and the logical demands of thought, action, and propriety. Of course high society is the perfect setting for such a character and theme, but perhaps it's rather the other way around--that high society created such a man, his memory, his struggles, and his book that could only chart the situation that it created inside him. At any rate, there he is, in all his nudity and nuance, a long series of events, interpretations, passions, actions, and the beautifully desperate attempt, through memory and words, to chart them like a series of meandering paths through the countryside that always bring one back, at end of day, home, to the point of departure, to death that is a return to birth.