Jan
14
“He discovered something about the space of the work that had to carry all the powers of duration at once, that had also to be nothing but the movement of the work toward itself and the authentic search for its origin, that had, finally, to be the place of the imagination; Proust felt little by little that the space of such a work had to come close, if one can settle here for a symbol, to the essence of the sphere; and in fact his entire book, his language, this style of slow curves, of fluid heaviness, of transparent density, always in movement, wonderfully made to express the infinitely varied rhythm of voluminous gyration, symbolizes the mystery and thickness of the sphere, its movement of rotation, with the high and low, its celestial hemisphere (paradise of childhood, paradise of essential instincts) and its infernal hemisphere (Sodom and Gomorrah, the destructive time, the laying bare of all illusion and false human consolations), but a double hemisphere that, at a certain time, reverses itself, so that what was high becomes low and so that hell, and even the nihilism of time, can in turn become beneficial and exalt in pure, joyful flashes of lightning.”
from The Experience of Proust
