then to another again

Reading Swann in Love again in the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation and arriving at the line about Swann's jealousy resembling an octopus "which throws out a first, then a second, and finally a third tentacle, fasten[ing] itself irremovably first to that moment, five o’clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to another again" I'm struck by the stated absence of unification between the person and the memory (since the octopus that touches something could easily have been an amoeba that absorbs it, but no: an octopus retains its separateness from a thing it holds) , thinking that memory and human being in this book are like a pair of lovers under the same author, meaning they exist at a distance and cannot approach one another without some kind of mistake, trick, accident, or bit of good or bad luck. (Here it is Odette writing a letter to Forcheville). The conceptual movements of lovers and memories are governed by an unplanned set of rules. They cannot be consciously tricked. And the same frustration sits behind Proust's recollection of both phenomena: the lover or memorist has no control; they grope, they are gripless.