Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time Vol. II - Within a Budding Grove (evening)

“When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other’s feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.”

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is one of the great mountains of Modernism. We  spent eight weeks reading the first volume of the work, now we turn to Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (recommended edition: Vintage Classics, translators D.J Enright, C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin). This study is designed for people who have already read Volume I.

Here is how one salonista describes the pleasure and work of reading Proust: ”This is a velvet jewel of a book that demands the attention of a lover full of enchantment  and obsession, we need not get impatient as all good lovers perfect their art in taking their time.”

Reading Proust teaches the reader to observe how the world is experienced, to be aware that although humans are tempted to give greater weight to the perceptual universe, it is the entwining of memory, idealized experience (dreams) and relationships with what our senses perceive that moulds our consciousness.

Proust also uses his curious and attentive narrator to uncover the ombre — the part of the self that hides in the shade or shadow. As we come to know the characters in the narrator’s world, each turns out to have aspects that reveal a savagery or laziness or discrepancy that was not what appeared on the surface. Of course, as soon as Proust reflects this to the reader, we recognize this truth of human nature: all carry a shadow, an untoward or simply unmanageable part of the self that we struggle to contain. In Proust’s world, these aspects are equally a part of the coherent self. This has me thinking a great deal about how carefully we construct the social self, and how we temper what simmers beneath the surface.

In Volume II, Proust will continue to explore class structures and awakening sexuality. As we considered in Volume I, the form of love as Proust conceives it is an entity not necessarily shared between the lovers – but may often be a projection from one onto the love object – and therefore limited in how much that love depends on the actuality of the other in its conception.

STUDY DETAILS:

• 11 meeting study, 21 January – 8 April 2026 (N.B. within this period there will be one week, date to be confirmed, with no meeting)
• Wednesdays, 5.30-7.30 pm (UK)
• Facilitated by Toby Brothers
• £385 for 11 meetings
• Recommended edition: Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by D.J. Enright, C.K. Scott Moncrieff, T. Kilmartin, Vintage Classics, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0099362319