From the final volume,
*Time Regained*,
[...]
"So many times in my life reality had disappointed me, because at the very moment I perceived it, my imagination—the only instrument through which I could delight in beauty—was unable to communicate with it, in accordance with the inexorable law that one can imagine only what is absent.

And then, all at once, the effect of that cruel law was neutralized by one of nature's marvelous devices, which caused a sensation—the sound of a fork against a plate, the ring of a hammer, the title of a book, and so forth—to exist simultaneously in the past, where my imagination could savor it, and in the present, where the actual stimulation of my senses by the sound, the touch of the fabric, and the like, added to the dreams of imagination what they usually lack: the sense of existence. Through this subtle stratagem, my true self was able to seize, isolate, and hold still—for the brief duration of a flash—what it can never ordinarily grasp: a fragment of pure time.

The being that was reborn within me when, with such a thrill of joy, I heard the sound common both to the spoon resting upon the plate and to the hammer striking the wheel, when I felt the unevenness of my steps upon the paving stones of the Guermantes courtyard and those of the Baptistery of Saint Mark, that being feeds only upon the essence of things; only there does it find its nourishment, its survival, and its delight. It withers in the observation of the present, which the senses alone can offer; in the contemplation of a past drained dry by the intellect; and in the expectation of a future constructed by the will from fragments of the present and the past, stripping them once again of their reality by retaining only what suits the narrowly human, utilitarian purpose it assigns to them.

Yet it is enough for a sound or a fragrance once heard or once breathed long ago to appear again, simultaneously within the present and the past—real without being immediate, ideal without being abstract—for the enduring and usually hidden essence of things to be set free at once, and for our true self, which sometimes seemed long dead though never entirely so, to awaken and come alive, nourished by the divine sustenance thus offered to it. A single moment, liberated from the order of time, recreates within us the person likewise freed from the order of time, so that he may experience it. It is therefore understandable that he should trust in his joy, even if the taste of nothing more than a simple biscuit cannot seem to contain the cause of such happiness; understandable, too, that the word *death* should have no meaning for him. Existing outside time, what has he to fear from the future? It was to this contemplative apprehension of the essence of things that I had now resolved to devote myself, to preserve it—but how? By what means? ...

The greatness of true art lies in recovering, regaining, and enabling us to recognize that reality from which we live at such a distance, from which we drift farther and farther as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it grows ever thicker and more impervious—that reality which we risk dying without ever having truly known, and which is, quite simply, our own life.

Style is for the writer what color is for the painter: not a matter of technique, but of vision. It is the revelation—impossible to achieve by direct or deliberate means—of the qualitative difference in the way the world appears to each one of us, a difference that, without art, would remain each person's eternal secret. Only through art can we step outside ourselves and come to know what another sees of this world—a world unlike our own, whose landscapes would otherwise remain forever as unknown to us as those that may exist upon the moon. Through art, instead of seeing only a single world—our own—we see it multiplied; and as many original artists as there are, so