he first time I tried to read Swann’s Way I was, I think, only a sophomore.  I remember being very nervous about the course: “Masters of the Modern Novel.” The title was inherently intimidating (I checked; my alma mater no longer offers courses in the “masters” of anything).  A friend had told me that the instructor, Michael Begnal, a scholar of Joyce, didn’t suffer fools gladly.  “He’ll make you cry if you say something stupid.”  It didn’t help that I was the youngest student in the class, which included several graduate students, and the course was the smallest I’d ever had — just eight of us.  I’d never sat at a seminar table with my professor before, and on the first day I came in last and was forced to sit right next to him.

So when Professor Begnal explained, that first day, that we would not be reading Proust, “arguably,” he said, “the master of the modern novel” because “in order to do him justice, you have to read all seven books, and we would only have time for one” and because “you’re too young anyway to really appreciate Proust” — naturally I went out and found myself a used copy of Swann’s Way.  I thought I could read one volume of Remembrance of Things Past between each assigned novel for the class.  By the end of the semester, I’d be able to stun Begnal by handing him that impossible thing, a brilliant essay on Proust by a mere sophomore.

But Begnal was right.  I couldn’t even get through Swann’s Way.

Mid-way through the semester, in his office hours, I summoned up the courage to mention it to him.  “I’m missing something,” I said.  “It just doesn’t do anything at all for me.  I just have no sympathy for or interest in this narrator and I don’t see what’s supposed to be so great or even modern.  I mean, I see the Freudian stuff going on with his mother, but so what?”

“As I said, you’re too young.  Try again when you’re 35 or 40.”

That’s how I remember the conversation, when I try.  I really do remember it.  I hear myself saying the words I’ve written, and I hear Mike Begnal respond that I should try again later.  But reflecting on it, I doubt this conversation ever happened.  It seems so unlikely, in light of this other memory I have of talking to him, a memory that I’m much more confident is accurate. 

This one I don’t have to work to recall: my inability to complete a phone call to Begnal in his office.  I don’t remember why I needed to call him — some routine class matter — but when he answered I was frozen with terror, literally didn’t feel I could speak, and hung up.  This happened, I’m fairly certain, not just once but twice — the second time after I had waited most of the afternoon, hoping that he would leave the office and I would reach his answering machine.

I’m more confident of this second memory because it’s involuntary — it comes to me even though I don’t want it, and even though it shames me. 

When I finally managed to read Proust last year, in the new Modern Library edition, now retitled In Search of Lost Time, I got the chance to think a lot about memory, both voluntary and involuntary.  I also learned that Mike Begnal was right when he said that I’d appreciate Proust more in middle age (he was right about this even if he never said it). 

I’m glad that the new translation was around by the time I got back to Proust.  The new title (obviously closer to the original) emphasizes the loss that Proust associates with the past, the craving that we call nostalgia, and the remembering subject’s inability to simply bring the past into being through an act of will.   It’s true that Shakespeare’s speaker in the sonnet from which the former English title was taken is lamenting what he’s lost in the past, sighing, weeping, moaning, and grieving, but he starts the whole sob-fest himself, intentionally, through what seems an uncomplicated act of will:  “To the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past.” 

Moreover, Shakespeare’s speaker resolves his grief over what he’s lost merely by thinking of what pleases him in the present:  “If the while I think on thee, dear friend, / All losses are restored and sorrows end.”  The judicial metaphor running through the sonnet is the perfect representation of the subject position Shakespeare creates here:  he is both plaintiff, whose losses will be restored in the end, and judge, who summons up the witness of memory at will.   Just choose to remember what you will, and you can control the emotional turmoil of memory.

For Proust, our inability to be judge and jury, to command memory (and therefore to command our past, which means we can command our dead) is a defining characteristic of the human condition, the battle that must be fought if we are to retain a sense of meaning in our lives.  In the final volume, Time Regained, the narrator achieves a brief victory over the abject state of the one who has lost (time, parents, lovers).  One beautiful thing about this very long novel is that our experience of the narrator’s life has been so rich and detailed, that his achievement, brief though it is, feels like our own. 

When I tried to read Proust as a sophomore, I hadn’t lost very much.  My childhood was still as close as every weekend trip home, all the people I loved were alive and in good health, and everything I’d set my heart on was still apparently in reach.  The losses that make memory so essential to identity come to us all at different times of life, so I don’t think there’s a magic age at which to read Proust.  I do think it’s an experience every thinking person should have, so when you feel the need to confront memory, I’d recommend you start with a stroll down the way by Swann’s.