New Course: 100 Great Books (Book 7: Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time)
Is love ever real, or only the reflection of our own longing?
This is the seventh book of our new course on 100 Great Books. You can read the brief about why the course exists and check out previous editions. Before we dive in, explore this debate between moral ambition and political realism.
Who was Marcel Proust?
Born into a prosperous Parisian family during the Belle Époque, he lived through the collapse of that gilded world into the mechanized, uncertain modernity of the early twentieth century. He suffered from chronic illness, wrote at night in a cork-lined room, and turned inward with each passing year.
Proust wrote in a France transformed by science, psychoanalysis, and war. Freud was mapping the unconscious; Einstein was redefining time; Bergson was describing duration as lived time rather than measured time. Proust absorbed all of this.
À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), written between 1908 and 1922 and published in seven volumes, is a social chronicle of France and an inquiry into how time, memory, and desire shape what it means to live.
The Big Questions Proust Tackles
What is time?
How do memory and art flirt with each other?
Is love ever real, or only the reflection of our own longing?