Proust: Swann's Way: Overture

In Proust's words:

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.

Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulder-blades offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept; while the unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirling madly through the darkness.

But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.

I don’t deny it,” answered Swann in some bewilderment. “The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it—oh! I don’t know; shall we say Pascal’s Pensées?”

Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension.

The truth was that she could never make up her mind to purchase anything from which no intellectual profit was to be derived, and, above all, that profit which good things bestowed on us by teaching us to seek our pleasures elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth. Even when she had to make some one a present of the kind called ‘useful,’ when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or a walking-stick, she would choose ‘antiques,’ as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own.

But my grandmother would have thought it sordid to concern herself too closely with the solidity of any piece of furniture in which could still be discerned a flourish, a smile, a brave conceit of the past.

And so it was that, for a long time afterwards, when I lay awake at night and revived old memories of Combray, I saw no more of it than this sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background, like the panels which a Bengal fire or some electric sign will illuminate and dissect from the front of a building the other parts of which remain plunged in darkness...

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.

What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.

Some thoughts:

I'll never have the time to read all of In Search of Lost Time, so perhaps I could create something to read it for me. As it reads, it could develop a memory of its own, using the EEPROM of the chip. The interesting thing is that this EEPROM is limited in size and stability. Only a certain number of details could be stored in the device, and after a certain number of "write" opperations, it will no longer be able to reprogram its own memory. In a way, I'd be designing some kind of memory organism.

This device tackles a number of technical issues I've been meaning to address:
-Preservation of state: if a device is going to have memory, it needs to reprogram itself
-Scales of data: the device could handle huge streams of data, but it can only store a small amount of this. What data is important and how is it encoded?
-Wireless: how does it connect to a large amount of data

Building on Calvino, I need to decide what the motivations of this organism are: what will I reveal to the audience, and what will be a secret of the machine itself. There is a great deal that could be hidden, but enough needs to be displayed to captivate the audience. Further, the more you watch the organism, the more you should be able to understand. It needs to demystify itself, but only to a point.

The act of recording and developing a memory is the mysterious side of this organism. Almost like an alien or spy, it will be examining cultural documents in order to develop an understanding of us.

I think it would be coolest if this had no idea what the english language was. Instead, it was looking at the frequency of asci characters and the average size of sentence, including the length and number of words in order to determine the "average" sentence in "Swann's Way". This is the information it is displaying to the audience and keeping with it.

What it needs to know:
Know the average sentence length
Have an array this size of characters
Have an average character (including a space) for each position in the array
Display this string

Also display the words that is reading ... This is something the audience can follow.
The mystery is the connection between what it is reading and the garbled text that is displayed along with it (The average sentence in Swann's Way).

I can begin by desiging this program in software. I can then debug and optimize it relatively quickly before I load it onto the microcontroller.