"As for this reclusiveness - I think of it as profoundly helpful to my work. Darkness, silence and solitude, by throwing their heavy cloaks over my shoulders, have forced me to recreate all the light, all the music and the joys of nature and society in myself. My spiritual being no longer comes up against the barriers of the visible world and nothing hampers its freedom.
When by chance a thin ray of sunlight manages to slip in here, my whole being, like the ancient statue of Memnon, that gave out harmonious sounds when the rays of the rising sun struck it, bursts with joy, and I feel myself transported into realms of radiant light.
I have tried to follow life itself, in which unsuspected aspects of a person suddenly reveal themselves to our eyes. We live alongside people, thinking we know them. All that's missing is the incident that will make them suddenly appear other than we knew them to be.
Throughout our lives we have alongside us like a fellow prisoner shackled by the same chain, a man who is different from our physical self. You see, when you think of yourself, you create a certain idea of yourself. And when one looks in a glass, the mirror reflects our real image. The other was a stranger. It was the spiritual self. Well, it is this one alone that matters to me.
I only consider my objective self (take this word in the sense meant by philosophers) as an experimental instrument which has no inherent interest but that links me to my spiritual side so that I can penetrate certain realities and especially the shadowy areas of consciousness on which I try to throw light."
- Marcel Proust
as told to André Arnyvelde (the pseudonym of French journalist, playwright and author André Lévy)
in an interview with Proust in 1913
a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of shimmering deserts."
- Vladimir Nabokov
