My Years With Proust - Day 695

  I had arrived then at the conclusion that in fashioning a work of art we are by no means free, that we do  not choose how we shall make it but that it pre-exists us and therefore we are obliged, since it is both necessary and hidden, to do what we should have to do if it were a law of nature, that is to say to discover it. But this discovery which art obliges us to make, is it not, I thought, really the discovery of what, though it ought to be more precious to us than anything in the world, yet remains ordinarily for ever unknown to us, the discovery of our true life, of reality as we have felt it to be, which differs so greatly from what we think it is that when a chance happening brings us an authentic memory of it we are filled with an immense happiness? 

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 915

I've told the story, too often, of the time twenty years ago in Atlanta when I was driving home from teaching a night class, that an entire short story dropped, seemingly from space, on to (in to) my head like a hat.  When I was trying to write I would often think of one moment or one sentence or one look, and essential crux of the story, and then the writing would involve writing out from there, creating the structure to get us to and from that one moment or one sentence or one look.  In that particular instance it was as if the story already existed, maybe in another dimension that I had crossed into on the way home, and it just happened to bump into me.  But maybe the story did already exist, but existed inside of me, and had patiently waited for me for years until I was able to understand it, or at least to write it.  This all sounds a bit ethereal, but isn't this what Proust is getting at, and why we found ourselves in that spiritual discussion a couple posts ago.  If it's not a creation as as much as a discovery, then it is, as Proust opines, "a discovery of our true life."  And if this is true then it speaks to the legitimacy, and the urgency, of Proust's journey - and the journey of every artist.