I remembered - with pleasure because it showed me that already in those days I had seen the same and that this type of experience sprang from a fundamental trait in my character, but with sadness also when I thought that since that time I had never progressed - that already at Combray I used to fix before my mind for its attention some image which had compelled me to look at it, a cloud, a triangle, a church spire, a flower, a stone, because I had the feeling that perhaps beneath these signs there lay something of a quite different kind which I must try to discover, some thought which they translated after the fashion of those hieroglyphic characters which at first one might suppose to represent only material objects. No doubt the process of decipherment was difficult, but only by accomplishing it could one arrive at whatever truth there was to read. For the truths which the intellect apprehends directly in the world of full and unimpeded light have something less profound, less necessary than those which life communicated to us against our will in an impression which is material because it enters us through the senses but yet has a spiritual meaning which it is possible for us to extract. In fact, both in the one case and in the other, whether I was concerned with impressions like the one which I had received from the sight of the steeples of Martinville or with reminiscenses like that of the unevenness of the two steps or the taste of the madeleine, the task was to interpret the given sensations as signs of so many laws and ideas, by trying to think - that is to say, to draw forth from the shadow - what I had merely felt, by trying to convert it into its spiritual equivalent. And this method, which seemed to me the sole method, what was it but the creation of a work of art? Already the consequences came flooding into my mind, whether I considered reminiscenses of the kind evoked by the noise of the spoon or the taste of the madeleine, or those truths written with the aid of shapes for whose meaning I searched in my brain, where - church steeples or wild grass growing in a wall - they composed a magical scrawl, complex and elaborate, their essential character was that I was not free to choose them, that such as they were they were given to me. And I realised that this must be the mark of their authenticity. I had not gone in search of the two uneven paving-stones of the courtyard upon which I had stumbled. But it was precisely the fortuitous and inevitable fashion in which this and the other sensations had been encountered that proved the truness of the past which they brought back to life, of the images which they released, since we feel, with these sensations, the effort that they make to climb back towards the light, feel in ourselves the joy of rediscovering what is real. And here too was the proof of the trueness of the whole picture formed out of those contemporaneous impressions which the first sensation brings back in its train, with those unerring proportions of light and shade, emphasis and omission, memory and forgetfulness to which conscious meditation and conscious observation will never know how to attain.
Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 912-912
"It was He who created the heavens and the earth in all truth. On the day when He says: 'Be,' it shall be. His word is the truth. All sovereignty shall be His on the day when the trumpet is sounded. He has knowledge of the unknown and the manifest. He alone is wise and all-knowing."
Quran 6:73 (Dawood translation)
The "unknown" and the "manifest" are often translated as the "unseen" and the "seen." Essentially, the verse is saying that God alone knows the seen and the unseen, and the rest of us can't, by definition know them, but that we have to believe in what we can't see, which is the very definition of faith. So, why in the hell would I introduce this discussion of Proust with a passage from the Quran? Good question. For some reason as I was reading this paragraph from Remembrance of Things Past I kept thinking about this Quranic passage (there are several like it). Proust has talked a lot about the transcendent, mainly beauty or love, but he hasn't delved much into faith, and even here he's only skirting the issue.
Proust tells us, "For the truths which the intellect apprehends directly in the world of full and unimpeded light have something less profound, less necessary than those which life communicated to us against our will in an impression which is material because it enters us through the senses but yet has a spiritual meaning which it is possible for us to extract." It seems to me that Proust is suggesting that while there is knowledge that we can bring in through the cold light of logic, it pales in comparison to the truths we learn uncontrollably, almost against our will, spiritually. In this way, at least in Proust's opinion, this justifies his trying to express these profound truths through a work of fiction (as much as Remembrance of Things Past is a work of fiction, I suppose): " . . . what I had merely felt, by trying to convert it into its spiritual equivalent. And this method, which seemed to me the sole method, what was it but the creation of a work of art?" So then art could achieve a truth that logic, philosophy, could not. "And here too was the proof of the trueness of the whole picture formed out of those contemporaneous impressions which the first sensation brings back in its train, with those unerring proportions of light and shade, emphasis and omission, memory and forgetfulness to which conscious meditation and conscious observation will never know how to attain." Divorcing ourselves from religion, does the attainment of all knowledge mean that we have to be open to the seen and the unseen?
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