From the first paragraph of Proust’s Combray, the author’s intrinsic, attentive, and stunning control over language is evident. The manner in which he captures the disorientation of hovering listlessly in the place between sleep and awake–that long moment of disequilibrium as we return to ourselves following a dream (“it seemed to me that I myself was what the book was talking about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francois I and Charles V” (3).)–is so vivid, it successfully pulls readers into the narrative right off the bat.

Proust’s work is one of my first forays into the world of modernist novels. I often enjoy writing that presents itself as long streams of consciousness, and while it was this style that initially hooked me in the opening paragraph, by the end of the first chapter, I was honestly hitting a wall and ready for him to stop talking. Nonetheless, there remains an achingly beautiful air of loneliness between the margins of Proust’s writing, as can be seen in the passage, “The rest of humanity seemed very remote compared with this woman I had left scarcely a few moments before; my cheek was still warm from her kiss, my body aching from the weight of hers. If, as sometimes happened, she had the features of a woman I had known in my life” (5). The narrator’s attachment to a woman from a dream leaves room for the reader to infer that this is a man living a life of solitude, yearning for touch of any sort.

Later, the narrator’s relationship with his parents respectively render this loneliness emanating from early paragraphs much clearer. If I were to attempt to psychoanalyse the protagonist, I would say his serious attachment to his mother (eg. his focus on receiving his bedtime kiss; “I would […] choose with my eyes the place on her cheek that I would kiss, prepare my thoughts so as to be able […] to devote the whole of the minute Mama would grant me to feeling her cheek against my lips” (27)), coupled with his fear of his father (“terrified as I saw the gleam from my father’s candle already rising up the wall” (36)), paint a picture of a small child desperate for maternal affection (or any affection really), yet afraid to speak to his needs due to having been ridiculed and shut down in the past. It made me very sad for the protagonist, and his unfulfilled longing for connection.

The overall theme, or rather feeling, I think Proust wanted readers to take from this narrative, is that of growing into adulthood, and the difficulties that come with letting go of childhood and learning to be alone with yourself. I don’t believe that loneliness is always tied to love, but I think it often is. And it is both this love and this loneliness that emerges in the narrator’s recall of his aunt Leonie upon tasting the madeleine in his tea. Sometimes a taste, a sight, a scent, can bring us back to the person we were before adulthood and its expectations/burdens shackled us to the present. In this regard, my question for you is; to what degree do our early senses and memories determine who we’ll one day become?