PROUST AND THE DOUBLE "I"
1025
However, in order really to embody the essential character of
the work of
art
through which the "revelation" attains its ultimate
and concluding aim, accounting for the flash of grace cast by the
patron-god of genius, that work of art must also be an act of life.
It
heralds the birth of life. Life starts with it and merges into it.
Even though Proust pretends to remember his past as Marcel, or
even believes that he remembers it as Marcel Proust, he cannot re–
capture a time that is lost; he must invent it anew. The past may
seem to have supplied him with memories of places, of individuals,
and of certain perceptions which he later transposed; actually it
supplied him only with landmarks. For there is a difference between
the mechanical memory which does not preserve things and living
beings in their palpable reality but records them in flat images, and
the memory of perceptions, which is our only true and genuine
memory, in as much as our body is the only survivor of the successive
egos which are consumed by time, the only bond between these mortal
egos and the immortal
"I."
Proust breathes new life into these flat
images, a life which is new indeed, and far more intense than the
one they formerly lived. He bestows upon them the three dimensions
they pever had.
Every distinction between past, present, and future is abolished,
and these terms have now lost all meaning. His sensibility, so wonder–
fully disengaged, lends its resources as readily to that sentimental
life which he perhaps actually lived as to the one which he invents,
and whose imaginary objects are more real and more immediate for
him
than the others, because he has created them as focal points of
his sufferings, and he is able to experience, to study, and to describe
them simultaneously and in a single process.
And these resources are immeasurably increased because the
artist from whom they flow experiences their immediate effect and
is aware, at the same time, of their ultimate meaning. He knows, he
feels, he sees, he is transfigured. It is he indeed who feels, because
it is he, and he alone, who lives. He feels with a pain which is real
but fruitful, and with the rapture of a man who knows how to make
good use of his sufferings and to avail himself of
his
misery in order
to further his knowledge.
Neither the loves of Marcel Proust nor the Albertine of Marcel
matter or have ever mattered. Only the Albertine of Proust matters,
