It took me approximately seven months to complete this book. Seven long months, because each time I endeavored to race through it, the sheer intensity of the prose would soak into my skin to the point of near dissolution. This wasn't the kind of dissolution where one gracefully vanishes into thin air, or even crumbles into glittering sand, if only "pulverized" weren't such a terrifying term. It was more like an acid pool of melting crystal being poured onto one's body. Too much of this Proustian acid, and the skin gradually dissolves. I had to take breaks. After all, who enjoys walking around with overly ripe skin that bruises at the slightest encounter with the most delicate of emotions? It simply isn't practical.

However, one cannot halt this sensual excess, this power of the Erotic pulsating through the world-flesh. Proust wields a carnivalesque knife, for Truth, in his eyes, resides within the body. The chunks of one's intestines are bound to end up on its tip. Nobody has yet determined what the body is capable of. Nobody has yet determined the violence of affective knowing. Proust attempts it. His narrator seems to stand still, a static body at the center of life's kinetic activity swirling around him. He appears still because he hails from a place outside of time. It's violent. It's visceral. The molecular events of the unnoticed, the ordinary, and the extraordinary are prickling his skin like pins and needles. He is bleeding, but I suspect he relishes it. His monomaniacal phenomenology is a response to the overwhelming surplus of jouissance that stems from immersing oneself, body first, in a wiggling world of muddy affects. His obsessive dissection of memory, magnification of subliminal viscera, are all attempts to escape this mentally devastating corporeal tension.

Sometimes I feel my flesh is on the verge of erupting within the damning stamp of linear time. Perhaps the fragmentary nature of memories, their dreaminess, is born out of a human necessity. To be human is to be compartmentalized, to be butchered, to be wounded. Fragmentation itself has a shape, carried by time. Wholeness too. What occurs when we attempt to flee the compartments? A fever-dream of thresholds and tensions, blends and blurs. A budding polyphonic dissonance. What becomes of language? An echolaliac rupture of images and colors that Proust captures by stretching every single sentence to its outer limits. Not a single word is wasted. It made me want to shed my skin as this book made modes of shapelessness writhe on my body. Everything about this book, his words... it's simply too much. Now I am one of those irritating idiots who unironically claims that reading Proust completely alters the way one approaches literature thereafter. He taught me the true meaning of boredom as an art form, and what it truly means to slow down and be utterly still. Reading it once is nowhere near sufficient. I don't even know what I'm going to do next.

What if I told you that the reason I started reading this was because I had a craving for some of the madeleine cookies that Starbucks sells at the counter? Would you believe me? Well, take my word for it. I'm not joking. I went through the whole routine. I got some tea, grabbed the three-per-package madeleines, sat down, and began. This was a while ago. But here's the thing, I quickly realized that I had essentially walked right up to the sign-up booth for a marathon and signed up for one! Now I'm "doing" the marathon, and I've been sprinting my butt off towards the finish line, only to realize that I'm probably around 15% of the way there. Coolio. Marathon! Yay. Also, there was only one scene with the madeleines – although I'm led to believe that it will make a comeback. If the madeleine doesn't come back, I might just riot. How else am I supposed to justify my multiple trips to Starbucks?

Jokes aside, this has been a pleasure. It was delightful from the very first page. The sentences are right up my alley – I have no problem with the winding mazes and pages filled with commas after commas. In my opinion, it's not difficult to keep track of. I've read people like Jung, who does something similar but throws in lists in the middle of a sentence and then refers to the concepts within the same sentence using "the former", "the latter", "penultimate". You find yourself two pages in, reading about a concept that he's introduced (say the collective unconscious), and he seriously expects you to synthesize all his concepts by tossing in a "the third most point" into the sentence. No way, man. No. Write it out again and then we can talk. Proust is different. There's a natural flow to each sentence. It begins with a certain energy and is capped off at the perfect moment.

The most compelling part was "Swann In Love", which fits with the patterns I've seen in myself and what I enjoy in literature. It offers deep character analysis but also touches on those niche yet oh-so-common dynamics between people. We've all been at a Madame Verdurin gathering, unwillingly part of the sycophantic "nucleus" that hangs on her every word. Society rules. We've all known some form of an Odette, whether we've gone the path of Swann or not. Because I was nodding along so often, I forgot to mark and flag all the sentences that I loved. It was just too much work! I'll get it the second time around. Reading this work just once is not an option.

I did some reading into Nabokov's thoughts on this first volume (and the whole work in general). But I didn't read too many pages because I saw that he started going off on tangents about the other volumes. I don't want anything spoiled just yet. Two quotes stood out in particular:

“The transmutation of sensation into sentiment, the ebb and tide of memory, waves of emotions such as desire, jealousy, and artistic euphoria – this is the material of the enormous and yet singularly light and translucid work.”

And

“Proust’s fundamental ideas regarding the flow of time concern the constant evolution of personality in terms of duration, the unsuspected riches of our subliminal minds which we can retrieve only by an act of intuition, of memory, of involuntary associations; also the subordination of mere reason to the genius of inner inspiration and the consideration of art as the only reality in the world.”

"Paintings in Proust" by Eric Karpeles has been a faithful companion. For so long, I've wanted to expand my taste in art and open up what I know, not in an academic way, but from the bottom up, diving into the work of art and seeing what it stirs inside of me. This book shows one the paintings and works of art mentioned by the narrator (or any other character) across all of the volumes, so I'll be including those that made any sort of impression on me and try to give some sort of an explanation as to why. I was so glad to be killing two birds with one stone.

We begin with "The Cenotaph of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the Tuileries, Paris" by Hubert Robert (1794). With this one, my eyes are drawn to two things: first, the beautiful, golden lighting on the marble, which is somehow reflected onto the water in the fountain, and second, the moon that is just peaking out from the top left. It's a hauntingly gorgeous scene.

Then there is "The Night Watch" by Rembrandt (1642) which held me captivated. I got chills when I saw this one – I had an intense flashback to a past time, sitting at the dining room table, with 3 or 4 cookies, slightly warmed, a glass of milk, and Stevenson's "Treasure Island" open in front of me as I chomped down. It's not a ship, but the atmosphere makes me feel as though we are looking at the inside of a ship. Why that and not something else? Tintin perhaps? I have no idea.

Finally, from this volume, I was drawn to "Spring" (or "The Earthly Paradise") by Nicolas Poussin (1660). I'm starting to see a pattern in the artwork that I'm drawn to. My goodness. It humbles me to see such a grand scope portrayed in a painting. Look at God peeping down from the clouds, top right. And Eve is enticed by the apple. Adam looks like he's just waking up from a nap. The apples look good. Have a bite, mate. Who cares? I'm sure there won't be any serious ramifications. Go on then.

So there's been a lot of looking back at my own life, pattern recognition, thoughts of times gone by, and a reliving of all the emotions that came with those times. It makes sense, and it's exactly what I was expecting. Again, with some Nabokov: “Proust is a prism. His, or its, sole object is to refract, and by refracting to recreate a world in retrospect.” I'm keenly aware that I'll look back and wish to re-experience my first run through, so I'm taking this in slowly and mindfully.

«Δεν αγαπάς πια κανέναν άλλο μόλις αρχίσεις ν’ αγαπάς.» This sentence holds a profound truth that seems to resonate deeply within us. It implies that once we truly fall in love, our capacity to love others in the same way diminishes.

I don't remember ever having felt a similar emotion when reading a book. It was as if there was a physical pain in being away from it, and reading it created a euphoria that almost scared me. It is not an easy thing for anyone to endure such beauty.

The power of this statement lies in its simplicity and universality. Love has the ability to consume us, to make us see the world in a different light. When we are in love, everything else seems to fade away, and our focus is solely on the object of our affection.

Whether it is a romantic love or a love for something else, such as a book or a passion, the experience can be both overwhelming and life-changing. It can make us feel alive in a way that nothing else can, and it can give us the courage to pursue our dreams and take risks.

In conclusion, the statement «Δεν αγαπάς πια κανέναν άλλο μόλις αρχίσεις ν’ αγαπάς» reminds us of the intensity and power of love. It makes us realize that when we truly love something or someone, it has the potential to transform our lives and make us into better versions of ourselves.

**Phenomenological Recognition**

Phenomenological recognition can be described as a precise understanding of life experiences. Many of the experiences that we simply pass by are actually complex. From common experiences like seeing a chair or reading the time on a clock, to special experiences like moments of forgetfulness and dizziness after waking up or déjà vu. From cognitive experiences to emotional experiences. The phenomenologist wants to know exactly what experience we go through when we see a chair? What emotions do we experience when we feel depressed?

The phenomenologist has no physical, biological or philosophical reason for seeing. He does not want to examine the structure and function of light and its refraction in the eye lens, he does not want to examine the way messages are transmitted in nerve cells to the brain and the way the brain works, he does not want to analyze the relationship between the brain and consciousness, he has no reason at all. When someone looks at the hands of a clock, without being aware of the physical, biological and philosophical reasons, he reads the time. The phenomenologist also only wants to study this experience of reading the time from the perspective of the individual's own gaze, not from the gaze of a researcher who looks for reasons.

In other words, the sciences are looking for a description of phenomena from the perspective of the "third person", in such a way that they place themselves outside the world and deal with the study of the structure and function of the world. But phenomenology is looking for a description of phenomena from the perspective of the "first person", that is, it does not want to place itself outside the world, but wants to place itself inside the mind of the individual and see exactly what feeling the individual has in an experience.

**In Search of Lost Time**

In search of lost time, in other words, phenomenology is the experience of special life experiences. Experiences that create fluctuations in the direct line of life events: love, nostalgia, déjà vu, inspiration and... Experiences that shape the identity of the individual: forgetfulness and memory (the moment when Madeleine's entire childhood appears in front of her eyes with the taste of a sweet), fear and hope (the story of the mother's goodnight kisses, which she needs so much to be able to pass the night), love and hate (swan and ode, and all the moments of them) and... Experiences that are sometimes familiar and sometimes incredibly strange and just as real.

Although there are moments in between that, although they are described with a masterful precision, they are not very special, such as the description of the flowers of the church festival and the autumn leaves of the forest and... But what makes "in search of" a masterpiece is not these parts. But those special experiences that a person has gone through but has never thought about them and has never read about them in any book, and when he reads their precise description in simple language, he is surprised and thinks with delight: I have also had this state!

The novel (at least so far) has no unity. It jumps from one subject to another and puts different characters and places in and out of the scene (although perhaps it will return to them later). But one should not look for unity in this novel. One should forget about unity. This novel is a novel of fragmented vision. Life with all its chaos that exists at the present moment.

**Artistic Influences**

One of the important parts of the novel is the criticisms and analyzes that it sometimes makes of works of art. Some of these works of art (such as paintings of virtues and vices, and Venetian sonnets) sometimes appear regularly in the novel and have an important role in describing the mentalities of the characters. But apart from these, the novel is full of artistic references, for example, to describe the state of one of the characters, he compares him to such and such a statue, or the conversation of the narrator and his friends about such and such a writer's prose. Some of these works can be found by searching the Internet, and their viewing makes the reading experience of this novel more enjoyable and richer.