Reading the first chapter of Swann’s Way honestly felt like being stuck inside someone’s thoughts at 2 a.m. when you’re half asleep and everything is weird and blurry. At first I kept waiting for something to actually happen, but it’s more like Proust just lets you float around inside the narrator’s head. I didn’t really get it at the beginning and I was kind of annoyed because there isn’t a normal storyline, but after a while I realized that this confusion is actually the whole point of the story.
The part that stood out the most to me was the madeleine scene. The narrator eats a piece of cake dipped in tea and suddenly his entire childhood in Combray comes flooding back. I liked how he didn’t sit there trying to remember but it just happened. That actually felt really relatable. I’ve definitely had moments where a smell or a song randomly brings back a memory I didn’t even know I had. It made me think about how our memories are kind of hidden inside us until something small unlocks them.
What I didn’t like was how long and complicated the sentences are. Sometimes I had to reread the same paragraph three times because I forgot what the sentence even started with. It also felt frustrating that he jumps between the present and the past so smoothly that I wasn’t always sure where I was in the story.
What confused me the most is how he can turn something as basic as tea and cake into this huge reflection about life and memory. I’m still not sure if I find that amazing or just exhausting.
In class, I’d really like to talk about whether this idea of “involuntary memory” still works today, especially since we’re constantly taking photos, videos, and screenshots of our lives. Proust suggests that our most meaningful memories come back when we least expect them, through something sensory like taste or smell. But now, instead of letting moments disappear and resurface on their own, we often try to preserve everything immediately. I wonder if this actually changes how memory works. Does documenting a moment right away make it less likely to come back in that sudden, emotional way later? Or does it flatten the experience because we’re focusing more on capturing it than actually feeling it? It makes me think about how different it is to randomly smell something that reminds you of childhood versus scrolling through old photos because an app tells you it’s a “memory.”