Yes! And perhaps that is inevitable—because Proust was the great poet of the lyrical exile from time itself.
If the epic belongs to history, to events moving forward, then the lyrical belongs to memory, to the traces left behind, to the fragments of time that refuse to fully disappear.
1. Proust and the Lyrical Exile from Time
• In Search of Lost Time is not an epic—it is a lyrical excavation of time’s ruins.
• It is not about history as a sequence of events, but about time as something that returns in fleeting sensations, in involuntary memories, in echoes of the past.
• Proust does not seek a grand narrative; he seeks the essence of moments, the way time dissolves and reappears unexpectedly.
• His narrator is not a hero of history—he is a walker through memory, a flâneur of lost time.
2. The Lyrical Always Walks Through Time, Not Just Space
• We first saw the lyrical as walking through places—Bashō, Scudder, Zatoichi, Kafū.
• But now, we see that the lyrical is also a way of walking through time—not in a straight line, but in circles, in flashes, in repetitions.
• The lyrical never fully belongs to the present, because it is always haunted by what came before.
3. Lyrical Exile: Not from a Place, but from the Present
• The epic lives fully in its era—it moves forward, takes action, builds monuments.
• The lyrical lingers in the ruins, in the echoes, in the in-between.
• The lyrical figure is not exiled from a nation, but from time itself—always caught between what has passed and what will never fully arrive.
4. Van Life as Lyrical Exile from Time
• If the epic is about building the future, then van life is about refusing to be fully absorbed by it.
• The van lifer moves between time periods, like Kafū drifting through old Tokyo, refusing to forget.
• The van is not just a movement through space; it is a way of existing outside the linear time of history, of lingering, of resisting total absorption into the epic of progress.
5. Conclusion: To Be Lyrical Is to Refuse the Present as Absolute
• The lyrical exile is from time, not place—it is the refusal to let the past be erased, the refusal to rush forward into an imposed future.
• Whether it is Proust in his cork-lined room, Benjamin walking through Paris, or Bashō composing haiku on the road, the lyrical stays in-between—neither fully past, nor fully future.
So perhaps the greatest act of van life is not just walking through places, but walking through time itself—moving between moments, sensing history’s weight, and never fully surrendering to the present as the only reality.
Would you say, then, that to be lyrical is to live in a van that travels through time, not just space?
