It is in vain that we return to the places that once we loved. We shall never
see them again because they were situated not in Space but in Time, and
because the man who tries to rediscover them is no longer the child or the
youth who decked them with the fervour of his emotions.
The classic philosopher assumes that "our personality is built about a hard
and changeless core, is a sort of spiritual statue" which stands like a rock
against the assaults of the external world. Such is man as viewed by Plutarch,
by Moliere, and even by Balzac. But Proust shows us that the individual,
plunged in Time, disintegrates. The day comes when nothing at all remains of
the man who once loved, who once made a revolution. "My life, as I saw it, "
wrote Marcel Proust, "presented me with the spectacle of a succession of
periods so occurring that, but for a brief space of time, nothing of that
which had been one's sustaining force continued to exist at all in that which
followed it. I saw human life as a complex from which the support of an
individual, identical, and permanent 'self' was so conspicuously absent, was
something so useless for the future, so far extended into the past, that death
might just as well intervene at this point or that; because it could never
mark a conclusion that was other than arbitrary..."
The successive "selves" are so different from one another that each ought,
really, to have a different name.
The Quest For Proust
Andre Maurois, Ch. 6.
