My Years With Proust - Day 715

   In spite of Rachel's words I was thinking myself that time, as it passes, does not necessarily bring progress to the arts.  And just as some author of the seventeenth century, who knew nothing of the French Revolution, or the discoveries of science, or the War, may be superior to some writer of to-day,just as perhaps Fagon was as great a doctor as du Boulbon (a superiority in genius compensating in this case for an inferiority in knowledge), so Berma was, as the phrase goes, head and shoulders above Rachel, and Time, when simultaneously it turned Rachel into a star and Elstir into a famous painter, had inflated the reputation of a mediocrity as well as consecrated a genius.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1054-1055

Although Proust's Remembrance of Things Past shaped the modern novel, and, I guess by definition, the modern world in many ways, it seems that Proust had some doubts about that modern world.  As Proust recounts, "In spite of Rachel's words I was thinking myself that time, as it passes, does not necessarily bring progress to the arts."  Essentially, he's saying that simply because it's new that doesn't make it better, which would please my excellent Sanford Zale who assures everyone, with only a glimmer of irony, that everything was better in the past.  To be fair, how could one live through the era of the First World War and not have some, even unconscious, distrust of the modern world.  However, I would argue that anyone that interested in searching down lost Time would also seem some divinity in it lacking from the contemporary world.