One year ago the author and CUNY professor Andre Aciman asked a group of writers to compile their memories of first encountering Proust and to write an essay on the passage from “In Search of Lost Time” closest to their heart. The result is “The Proust Project” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 221 pages, $25), a slim volume bringing together such writers as Richard Howard, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Louis Auchincloss, Daniel Mark Epstein, and Andrew Solomon. Their appreciations, both personal and artistic, demonstrates that Proust’s voluminous examination of his own memories remains one of the key works of literature.

“The Proust Project” is very much in the tradition of “Marcel Proust: An English Tribute” (1923), the volume of tributes that Scott Moncrieff put together after Proust’s death in 1922. (“An English Tribute” was reprinted last year by Helen Marx Books, who are the co-publisher of the new volume.) As we approach the centenary of the 1913 publication of the first volume of the work, we can expect many more celebrations of Proust. But “The Proust Project” will remain one of the finest. Following are excerpts from Andre Aciman’s preface and four of the individual contributors.

That first time.

Most of us remember who we were, where we were, and what we were doing when we came face to face with Proust for the first time. Even passing by the neatly stacked volumes of “In Search of Lost Time” in a bookstore and deciding not to leaf through them, or not to buy any just yet, counts as a first time. Hearing grownups mention the name Proust while we paid him no mind, or thought he was someone else, or guessed his whole vision without so much as knowing a thing about him – these too, over time, go into making that first time when our mind encountered an illuminating consciousness called Proust. Sometimes, however, that undefined, primal moment is lost. We simply do not remember where, how, when.

If only I could scale back in time and recover that first time and pin down its precise coordinates, then, for sure, I’ll finally be able to hold on to my entire Marcel Proust experience, from first to the most recent. We do so with love when we go back to our first glance – why not with books? Besides, going back to nebulous, irretrievable beginnings is integral to the Proustian experience – not just because something pristine and authentic must have happened that first time, or because the book is about beginnings, but because, in retrospect, it seems there was never a time when we weren’t already aware of Marcel Proust.

I do not remember exactly what happened late on a rainy weekday morning years ago in a bookstore called Gibert in the Latin Quarter, but I must have thought something along the following lines: I’m not sure whether I understand what I’m reading or whether I’m making it up. But I am almost certain that this writer, who I am ready to swear knows me better than I know myself and who is strange in just the way I know I am strange, will eventually turn out to be like all the others. All authors get close, sometimes very close, only to remind me that between them and me there had scarcely been a thing in common. Except that I am on page three already and this about-face, which I’ve been dreading all along and which hovers like an unspoken threat while I’m reading this Livre de Poche edition, hasn’t happened yet.

Not exactly this but something like it.

This is why reading Proust must have been quite uncanny the first time: It must have dawned on me – as it dawns on every reader of Proust – that this magical fusion of sensibilities that had so mesmerized me and made me want to hold on to it for fear it might any moment slip away was not incidental to the reading experience but, in Proust’s case, irreducibly central to it. Without this fusion, the “Search” is a total fiasco. The novel is about intimacy, the miracle of intimacy – intimacy with others, intimacy with oneself, intimacy when we’d all but given up believing it existed – because there is also this about Proust that strikes an unmistakable chord: if intimacy is difficult to come by, it is because honesty is just as scarce, honesty with others and, above all, with oneself. One either feels this call to intimacy or one stops reading.

One of the reasons why Proust speaks so intimately is because he desperately sought and, by middle age, had finally developed a style, a vision, something like the “native air of a lost, forgotten, inner homeland” that was uniquely and exclusively his. It took the most painstaking skill and devotion to give his “homeland” its voice and to translate its timbre into everyone’s language. The more exclusive this “native air,” the more intimate it becomes. This is the paradox that underwrites every single sentence of the “Search.” How Proust closed the distance between one person and another person, or how he took his private, thoroughly idiosyncratic world and made us feel at home in it, is really a question of one thing only: art.

[E]very reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity, the contrary also being true.

Discovering Proust is like wandering through a totally unfamiliar land and finding it peopled with kindred spirits and sister souls and fellow countrymen and coreligionists. We grope and fumble awhile, but ultimately we see it: we have actually come home. Our Land manner are all around us, and all we must do is reach out to them. They speak our language, our dialect, share our blind spots, and are awkward in exactly the same way we are, just as their manner of lacing every access of sorrow with slapstick reminds us so much of how we do it when we are sad and wish to hide it, that surely we are not alone and not as strange as we feared we were. The paradox again. So long as a writer tells us what he and only he can see, then surely he speaks our language.

Perhaps we put off coming home to relish coming home. Or to find secret pathways and unforeseen shortcuts – and with them, perhaps, adventure, novelty, excitement. It is because we’ve lost our way and because our habits can no longer come to our rescue that we struggle to put our world back together again – and in the process catch glimpses of an ancillary, adjacent, undisclosed netherworld. The more time is wedged between loss and recovery, the more poignant and more luminous the homecoming. We can forget Ulysses’ return to his homeland after twenty long years. The Phaeacians have no sooner deposited his sleeping body on Ithacan soil than the “great Odysseus woke from sleep on native ground at last – he’d been away for years – but failed to know the land.” [Translation by Robert Fagles]

But failed to know the land. … Perhaps the boy Marcel and the writer Proust enjoy being lost. Perhaps what they love is deferral – not losing time, not recovering time, but opening a space all their own and making time. Or perhaps they wish to invent a new home but don’t have the courage to go all the way and are only too glad to have toyed with the notion and gotten off lightly. Like an author who realizes that the best thing he could have done was to avoid ending his sentence and, on a whim almost, to keep going, he has suddenly entered a thrilling uncharted territory that turns out to be closer to his heart than anything he had previously set down to describe. It came to him by accident. But then the thing about these accidents is that they are intentionally deployed.

And here we’re once again back to the question of art: art propitiates accidental homecomings. It sets up and invokes that privileged moment which the Greeks call anagnorisis: recognition. In the end it is seldom what is revealed that matters for Proust. For all he cares, it could be asparagus or roasted chicken or the metallic chime of a tiny bell or a fallen spoon. It is revelation that matters.