In Search Of Lost Time, Vol 6: Time Regained and A Guide to Proust: Time Regained AND a Guide to Proust v. 6 (Vintage Classics)

Time Regained opens with Marcel visiting Gilberte, for whom he had entertained an adolescent passion. Realising that the places he loved as a child have lost their charm for him, he also reaffirms that he has a "lack of talent for literature"--the possibility of becoming a writer seems to him to be impossible. The remainder of the first half of the volume details the devastations of the First World War, which transforms Paris and the social world Marcel had known, destroying the distinctions, hierarchies and certainties that had previously existed. Many years later, he returns to Paris, and his speculations on memory--that "the true paradises are the paradises we have lost"--begin to awaken in him a sense of how he might at last answer the calling of being a writer that had first impressed itself upon him as a child. But when he revisits the social circles which had once so entranced him, he is appalled at the changes wrought by the passing of years:

I had made the discovery of this destructive action of Time at the very moment when I had conceived the ambition to make visible, to intellectualise in a work of art, realities that were outside Time.