“Certainly, if only our hearts were in question, the poet was right when he spoke of the mysterious threads which life breaks. But it is still truer that life is ceaselessly weaving them between beings.”
Proust Curious is a podcast miniseries about the experience of reading À la recherche du temps perdu in its entirety.
Hosts Emma Claussen and Hannah Weaver join the narrator for one last search for lost time, rejoicing with him as he finds it by stumbling on a paving stone in the courtyard of the Princesse de Guermantes’s house, and dreams about the book he finally knows he can write—if he can only live long enough. The shadow of mortality is cast not only by the Great War, which ends some time before this “regaining” of lost time, but in the iconic “bal des têtes” scene in which the narrator suddenly notices that he and everyone else he knows has gotten older as time has passed. We giddily discuss Proust’s vision of art and his theory of time, and how he brings his “unfinished” novel to a virtuosic conclusion. Plus, we answer the question, “Who is your favorite heroine?” Join us as we search for lost time and remember things Proust.
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View a transcript of the episode here.
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Featured image: Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) by Édouard Manet / Wikimedia Commons