A moment of the past, did I say? Was it not perhaps very much more: something that, common both to the past and to the present, is much more essential than either of them? So often, in the course of my life, reality had disappointed me because at the instant when my senses perceived it my imagination, which was the only organ that I possessed for the enjoyment of beauty, could not apply itself to it, in virtue of that ineluctable law which ordains that we can only imagine what is absent. And now, suddenly, the effect of this harsh law had been neutralised, temporarily annulled, by a marvellous expedient of nature which had caused a sensation - the noise made both by the spoon and by the hammer, for instance - to be mirrored at one and the same time in the past, so that my imagination was permitted to savour it, and in the present, where the actual shock to my senses of the noise, the touch of the linen napkin, or whatever it might be, had added to the dreams of the imagination the concept of "existence" which they usually lack, and through this subterfuge had made it possible for my being to secure, to isolate, to immobilise - for a moment brief as a flash of lightning - what normally it never apprehends: a fragment of time in the pure state. The being which had been reborn in me when with a sudden shudder of happiness I had heard the noise that was common to the spoon touching the plate and the hammer striking the wheel, or had felt, beneath my feet, the unevenness that was common to the paving-stones of the Guermantes courtyard and to those of the baptistery of St Mark's, this being is nourished only by the essences of things, in these along does it find its sustenance and delight. In the observation of the present, where the senses cannot feed it with this food, it languishes, as it does in the consideration of a past made arid by the intellect or in the anticipation of a future which the will constructs with fragments of the present and the past, fragments whose reality still further reduces by preserving of them only what is suitable for the utilitarian, narrowly human purpose for which it intends them. But let a noise of a scent, once heard or once smelt, be heard or smelt again in the present and at the same time in the past, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, and immediately the permanent and habitually concealed essence of things is liberated and our true self which seemed - had perhaps for long years seemed - to be dead but was not altogether dead, is awakened and reanimated as it receives the celestial nourishment that is brought to it. A minute freed from the order of time has re-created us, to feel it, the man freed should have confidence in his joy, even if the simple taste of a madeleine does not seem logically to contained within it the reasons for this joy, one can understand that the word "death" should have no meaning for me; situated outside time, why should he fear the future.?
Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 905-906
Proust tells us, "So often, in the course of my life, reality had disappointed me because at the instant when my senses perceived it my imagination, which was the only organ that I possessed for the enjoyment of beauty, could not apply itself to it, in virtue of that ineluctable law which ordains that we can only imagine what is absent." If it is, as Proust assures us, an "ineluctable law" that we can "only imagine what is absent," then does it mean that we destined also to be unhappy? It is true that we never fantasize about the person who is lying next to us in bed, which, sort of makes sense, since, by definition, she could never match up to the fantasy anyway. Similarly, we seldom sit around on the couch thinking about how incredibly happy we could be if we could only move four inches closer to our present SO, but at the very same moment we romanticize a relationship that ended years earlier (and ended up for a perfectly legitimate reason). So, again, are we just ordained to be unhappy because we are always going to be thinking about someone who is absent? We always hear about living in the moment, and it too often sounds like self-help garbage, but in other ways it makes perfect sense. But here's the thing, we, at this moment, are not simply this moment, and are simply a compilation of every moment we've ever lived. As Proust reminds us, "A moment of the past, did I say? Was it not perhaps very much more: something that, common both to the past and to the present, is much more essential than either of them?"
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