My most recent dive into In Search of Lost Time began in 2020, when my daughter was reading Swann’s Way for a college class. I picked up her book and started enthusing about the moment when the narrator, world-weary and sad, traces his first taste of the madeleine dipped in lime blossom tea to his Aunt Leonie’s bedroom in childhood. Suddenly, the whole of Combray, where he and his family spent their Easter holidays, rises up like a stage set around him. And while the line quoted at the top of my site—reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life—is actually from one of Proust’s two essays on reading, the world of the Search seems to hover around in that earlier piece: it’s in the bedclothes, the pictures, even the view from the window. In that essay, Proust himself seems to stand on the threshold of claiming his mature voice. But in a larger sense, I think the word “threshold” refers to that moment of recognition that leads us to plunge fully into the work. For me and for so many others, that moment comes when the madeleine calls forth Proust’s theory of involuntary memory. That’s when I said to myself, “I’ve always felt that, but I didn’t know how to express it.” Such moments, for Proust, become a jumping-off place for the reader’s own self-exploration. As for what he actually meant by the spiritual life, perhaps it occurs when something you’re reading prompts in you the kind of deep thought that makes you stare into space, the book and the time and all your devices forgotten.
I finished the book for the third time in our hotel room on a visit to our daughter during the Covid-deformed spring of 2021. She was busy that night, so my husband and son and I had a drink at the bar, where I reminded them that the novel ends with the unsteady old Duc de Guermantes, now in thrall to the former Odette de Crecy, tottering on giant’s legs reaching downward through so many lifetimes. That moment now is encoded for me in the book, which I fully intend to revisit. After all, if I am ever to cross that spiritual threshold, it will be on such tottering legs.
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Joan Elizabeth Bauer 