“Because the intermittences of the heart are linked to the disturbances of memory.”
Les intermittences du cœur is the beating heart of the search for lost time, a short chapter, in its own right, positioned right in the middle of the imposing and daring literary construction of the entire work, the essential keystone for understanding Proustian thought in depth. It is not a coincidence that Proust initially entrusted this title to the entire work.
It was not easy for us to approach this text, in which all the refined syntax of Proust emerges, always rich in neologisms, and his ability to investigate the introspective world.
Proust pushes the reader to reflect on time by losing that it violently involuntarily returns to us, by means of an epiphany, in its truest form. The intermittences of the heart, in fact, are those extraordinary jolts that in the course of a normal life bring us back to events, things or people of the past remained in the shadows, marginal, and which open an elusive and revelatory perspective beyond the irreversible flow of time. They are moments of rupture, change, metamorphosis.
Making the inner life rise, grasping its nuances, helps us to understand and analyze the cracks and emotional transformations that arise in others-from-us. A desecrating truth: each of us is led to remember what he missed.
In his case it is the worried and disappointed face of his grandmother that emerges with violence and deeply upsets the protagonist, who has just arrived in his hotel room in Balbec. And the most intense and poignant pages of love are linked to the memory of the lost grandmother. In the cracks of sensations a memory insinuates itself, revealing the mystery of our past, bringing us back to the origins of our pain and awareness of our incompleteness.
The intermittences of the heart are held by the hand in the Proustian world, they push us to know it to know ourselves, to reveal it to reveal the disturbances that come from afar.
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Marcel Proust, The intermittences of the heart, La vita felice, Milano, 2018
Original edition: A la recherche du temps perdu , Bernard Grasset – Gallimard, Paris, 1913
