Sunday, 5 April 2015

Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin

“The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die."

– Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past



“We know that in his work Proust did not describe a life as it actually was, but a life as it was remembered by the one who had lived it… For the important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory... an experienced event is finite, – at any rate, confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered event is infinite, because it is only a key to everything that happened before it and after it"

– Walter Benjamin, The Image of Proust



Man Ray, Marcel Proust on His Deathbed, 1922. 


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