In “Finding Time Again” 🕰️, through a series of recollections that draw on involuntary memory 😳…

In “Finding Time Again” 🕰️, through a series of recollections involving involuntary memory 😳 and numerous memories from his past life, the narrator goes on to set out his view of art and literature:

🖋️ “Real life – life finally discovered and brought to light, and therefore the only life that is truly lived – is literature; this life which, in a sense, dwells at every moment within all people as well as within the artist. But they do not see it, because they do not seek to shed light on it. And so their past is cluttered with countless clichés that remain useless because the intellect has not ‘developed’ them. 🎞️

(…) So, though perhaps less striking than the realisation that had led me to see that a work of art was the only way to recover ‘Time Lost’, a new light dawned within me. And I realised that all these elements of the literary work were my past life; I realised that they had come to me – in frivolous pleasures, in idleness, in tenderness, in pain – stored away by me, without my having any inkling of their purpose, or even their very survival, just as a seed stores up all the nourishment that will sustain the plant. 🌱
‘Like the seed, I might die once the plant had grown, and I found that I had lived for it without realising it, without ever feeling that my life would come into contact with those books I had wanted to write and for which, when I used to sit down at my desk, I could find no subject.’ 🤔

— Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, 1927
Pléiade 1954 (ed. Clarac and Ferré), vol. III, pp. 895 and 899

#MarcelProust #RTP #LeTempsretrouvé #LaVraieVie #proustagram #ÀlaRechercheduTempsperdu #Proust #Artpoétique #1927