Marcel Proust, Remembrance and the Pandemic Apr. 25, 2020

Sitting on the porch today with an old college friend, I was saying that this much isolation and inactivity, coupled with fear and anxiety was taking me back to my childhood.

I didn't spend much time in the past when I was young, I was too busy working, raising a child, keeping a house, going to college part-time, so that my life was reactionary, adrenaline filled, busy in the clamoring present.

Now, I am shut in by the pandemic, rarely seeing another person to talk to, let alone a friend, and I am plunged into the far past of childhood.  Then, I stop and think, don't all old people spend more time in their far past when they get old?   Not the middle years, the hustle and bustle interaction with the wider outside world.  We don't go back to those so much.

The one I had last evening was a sensory memory.  Sitting on the porch, smelling the cool, fresh, grass scented air of happy spring, watching the dazzle of the rain drops still sitting on leaves, I had the sense memory of running on wet new spring grass in my barefeet.  But, then I remembered the time I stepped on a bee amidst the dandelions of our summer lawn.  The fall, the shiver, as the bee's sting toxin spread through my central nervous system, and the instant stinging pain of it in the soft inner part of my foot.  
And, quickly behind came the time I stepped on small shards of broken glass that were in the grass.  One piece remains embedded in my toe, a reminder of the danger of bare feet.

And so, I think that Marcel Proust's isolation and entrapment lead him down that dusty summer dirt road of memory and perhaps as with the hermits and aesthetics of all kinds discovered, if you stay alone and inactive long enough, you reach a different state of mind from your usual contingent one.  We may not be able to write like Proust, we may never choose the life of Proust, but our current situation of isolation and deprivation of former outside stimulations, have certainly given us a ticket to ride back in our lives like Proust.  Or, and I cannot leave him out, Karl Ove Knausgaard.  He didn't write from the far past as a result of imposed isolation by illness, or circumstance.  He sequestered himself and willed himself back.  And then shaped the narrative into art.  

Happy Trails to you, wherever you are traveling,
Jo Ann
wrightj45@yahoo.com