A central concern of this volume is the gap between what a name conveys to us and what the person who bears that name is really like: how the meanings of a name change from one time of our lives to another, and how all those successive meanings may hold little or none of the reality of a person’s existence. (Our narrator has already learned this lesson with regard to place-names, and now he realizes that it applies to the human realm as well.) It’s that same delicious gap in knowledge and perspective: what we know and feel now versus what we felt and knew (or thought we knew) at some point in the past: this gap that comes up over and over again in Proust.
Perhaps my favorite section was that set at Doncières: the cold air of this small town and its streets and hotels, the view from our narrator’s window early in the morning, the warmth of the lighted windows he sees on his way home at night.
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