Often, once the lives of characters in any novel I'm reading begin to become "real," insomuch as they are developed sufficiently for me to understand them on a day-to-day, human level as I would someone I encounter in my waking life, I begin to compare and contrast their lives to my own, and to the lives of the people around me. In the case of Swann, Proust develops him (and many other characters, of course) so thoroughly that it is quite easy to forget that Swann was not a real man. There is no historical M. Swann. His life is so vibrant, so real, that it has grown nearly impossible for me to avoid visualizing his world in a way that seems almost as though it is within my own memory.
Such a journey through a "donated memory" as given to me by Proust has illuminated a dichotomy within my own life that I had as yet not noticed. I spent many years working at an automotive repair shop, with between 40 and 50 hours a week spent at the shop. This equated to the hours, the life, spent outside the shop seeming few and far between. Generally, the time I had to myself for pursuits of real importance to myself seemed stolen. The hours whizzed by, without adequate time for many of the things I wanted or needed to do.
When I moved to my current town and found a new job, there were of course many contrasts to my past life as a mechanic / desk person/ all purpose employee at the shop. I am doing vastly different work, I am working fewer hours... And, for the first time, I can relate to a man like M. Swann, who appears to spend the bulk of his time on his personal pursuits. Swann does not appear to have any kind of "day job," as he possesses a vast fortune that allows him to indulge in intellectual pursuits and absorb works of art at his leisure. Pages upon pages are spent detailing his days. It struck me as very odd that at no point could weeks be omitted because "he was just at work."
To spell it out: The dichotomy I have detected is that there are, in fact, two "lives" to live in this life. There is my former, whereupon the entirety of it is spent in an orbit around work, and all other things are simply radiant details of minor importance or weight. Then there is my current. The focus is not "get up, go to work, work all day, come home too exhausted to do anything but sit, go to bed, wake up..." 6 days out of 7. Instead, it is, "get up, go to work, come home, do things you care about, interact with people you care about, go to bed, repeat." While both have been boiled down to their most basic syrups, it is clear, at least to me, that they are fundamentally different by nature. The focus, for me today, is much less narrow. This does not mean that I see things less clearly in my life, but rather, that I can see a wider plane of view. This is a richer life. I was unaware that there was anything but working to exhaustion until very recently.
If there were a novel about the last 7 years of my life, most of it would read, "and you can skip ahead to chapter 11, because Austin just goes to work, comes home, makes dinner, and goes to sleep for the next several weeks without anything really happening that you need to be aware of." On the contrary, daily M. Swann encounters people, things, thoughts, and feelings that are worthy of note. Is it simply that I am not taking note, myself, of the things in my own life that are similar? Or is it that Swann has the time to make observations that, in my past life, I did not?
I'm going to go with the latter. As I now work about half the hours I did at my former job, I can say that I am finding many more things "of note" in my own daily existence. While I am not "doing" more, per say, than I was at that time, noticing the fine details of life has been enabled by the shift in my lifestyle. While I had not caught on to this reality until this very afternoon, it is true and has been since I arrived here and took this new job. Perhaps, Proust has something to teach us all; slow down, notice the small details, and pay attention to things we would otherwise deem inconsequential. There is more to life than our day jobs. We must make as much effort to live as we do to work. After all, aren't we working to live? Or have we somehow become so scrambled that it is now the opposite?
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