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If at least, time enough were alloted to me to accomplish my work, I would not fail to mark it with the seal of Time, the idea of which imposed itself upon me with so much force to-day, and I would therein describe men, if need be, as monsters occupying a place in Time infinitely more important than the restricted one reserved for them in space, a place, on the contrary, prolonged immeasurably since, simultaneously touching widely separated years and the distant periods they have lived through — between which so many days have ranged themselves — they stand like giants immersed in Time.
Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured, 1927
Marcel Proust. 1871 to 1922. Fifty-one years, most of them spent indoors.
Asthmatic. Sickly. Spent the last years of his life in a cork-lined bedroom in Paris, writing in bed, sleeping during the day, working at night. Obsessed with memory, with time, with how the past lives inside us whether we want it to or not.
In Search of Lost Time. Seven volumes. 3,000 pages, give or take. One of the longest novels ever written. Took him fourteen years. He died before he finished editing it.
Everyone knows the madeleine. The little cake dipped in tea that unlocks his entire childhood. Taste as time machine. Flavor as memory. That moment, that’s Proust. The idea that the past isn’t gone, it’s just waiting for the right taste, the right smell, the right sensation to bring it all flooding back.
He wrote about aristocratic French society, love, jealousy, art, homosexuality… coded, careful, because this was early 1900s France and you couldn’t just say it. He said it anyway, just in a way that required paying attention.
The first volume? Rejected by publishers. André Gide at Gallimard turned it down without reading it. Proust had to self-publish. Later, Gide admitted it was the biggest mistake of his career.
Now it’s considered one of the greatest novels ever written. Modernist masterpiece. Essential. The kind of book people say they’ve read but haven’t.
The sickly kid who barely left his room wrote 3,000 pages about memory and time and everything that matters.
The madeleine. That fucking madeleine. He understood something the rest of us spend our whole lives trying to figure out.
Shot on infrared film in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Signed Limited Edition 11” x17” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.