Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Benjamin on Proust


From Walter Benjamin's essay "The Image of Proust":

In the last century there was an inn by the name of "Au Temps Perdu" at Grenoble; I do not know whether it still exists. In Proust, too, we are guests who enter through a door underneath a suspended sign that sways in the breeze, a door behind which eternity and rapture await us.
...... 
The eternity which Proust opens to view is convoluted time, not boundless time. His true interest is in the passage of time in its most real -- that is, space-bound -- form, and this passage nowhere holds sway more openly than in remembrance within and aging without. To observe the interaction of aging and remembering means to penetrate to the heart of Proust's world, to the universe of convolution.
......
A la Recherche du temps perdu is the constant attempt to charge an entire lifetime with the utmost awareness. Proust's method is actualization, not reflection. He is filled with the insight that none of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us -- this and nothing else.  


1 comment:

  1. Small Swarovski crystals, through which we are granted a refracted glimpse of inner worlds and dimensions.

    "He is filled with the insight that none of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for."

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