Back to AtD. Pynchon sidesteps---or sideswipes---Proust? p.870

[Paul Mackin]

On 5/13/2012 5:22 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:
> Premise: Proust's great novel is great---or the first three books are
> [if you like Nabokov's judgment]---
> for, among other reasons, it's insight into the human psychology of
> everhyone in it via "recaptured time" ---
> last volume.
> AtD, p. 870 Is Pynchon alluding to Proust when he writes "Cyprian felt
> the sadness peculiar to the
> contemplation of recent time unrecapturable. Anything earlier,
> childhood, adolescence, they were done
> with, he could get by without any of that---what he wanted back was last
> week, the week before."

I don't remember the exact context of the quote but it does seem like 
what Cyprian wants to recover is Proustian.

In other words, not the type of memory that is recovered by projection 
from the present, but rather something outside of time, something only 
recoverable through involuntary memory.

My best advice for Cyprian is to ask Yashmeen what she fed them for 
dinner the evening in question and let nature take its course.

P


> Proust's 'nostalgia' for the past--unrecoverable and a good thing too?
> P: we live therefore die in time and have to live that death in timeness
> except in moments of timelessness ways.
> [from Blake, Rilke at least, maybe?}
> Cyprian here has become some kind of exemplar, yes, so this judgment
> carries moral weight?
> This reading I FELT the psychological truth of Cyprian's obsevation
> attributing it to getting older faster and
> not being too good on thinking about my past.