About a year ago, I read and reviewed Swann’s Way, which is the first volume of Proust’s (in)famous Remembrance of Things Past. In the first book, the narrator is a young boy, trying to make sense of the world of adults. Surprisingly, a lot of that book is about Swann, an adult socialite a neighbor of the narrator’s family. Swann makes some rather unorthodox choices in his love life, and the narrator’s family feels the ripples of those choice. 
Within a Budding Grove is the second volume of Remembrance. In Budding Grove, our young narrator has hit adolescence. Or rather, adolescence has hit him, like the spray of a cold shower. Like Swann before him, our narrator is now READY FOR LOVE. The narrator is ready and willing to obsess about any and all aspects of the opposite sex. He develops crushes, he strategizes about how to appear appealing to his crushes, and he is exhilarated/mortified by his run-ins with his crushes.
“There can be no peace of mind in love,” he thinks, “since what one has obtained is never anything but a new starting-point for further desires…In reality, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralizes, makes potential only, postpones, but which may at any moment become, what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted…”
Much of the book takes place in the seaside town of Balbec, where the narrator is spending the summer with his fancy grandma living in a resort hotel. The narrator (like Proust) is somewhat sickly, so the fresh air is good for him. And, apparently, it is good for his love life. A gaggle of summer regulars frequents the beach and the social scene of Balbec, offering the narrator plenty of opportunities to pursue love.
Proust captures well the earnestness of young love, and the fondness with which we remember that time in our lives: “Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand, when some trivial incident becomes a springboard for romance.”
He also captures the confusion, regret, and how we learn from the wounds we give and take:
“There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man…unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded.”
I’m excited to read volume three. I’ll check in in 2025!
