Proust and Mysticism

    One cannot ignore  Proust's mysticism in his assertion that the book one should write has already been written for one within oneself, and one's task should be that of looking inside and bring it to light.  This would be, for Proust, not just the discovery of one's real life, but a work of art. To talk about the implications of identifying this task to a work of art, and to something that has an ethical/religious dimension, I will begin by emphasizing how Proust viewed art.

   "Art for art's sake", the principle he believed in, following Ruskin, implies the transcendent quality of what values in itself and not in relation to anything else. Hence, Oscar Wilde, another adept of  this principle, proudly declares, "All art is quite useless."  

   A work of art is useless in the sense of finding its validity by being what it is and not by serving a function ahead of itself.  Usefulness is bondage to time: an object of use is only a means through which something else is accomplished down the line.  Meant for the fulfillment of a goal, what is useful has no intrinsic value. 

   Those who do not accept that art exists for its own sake only see it as contextual, transitional, and relative. The value of it from this angle would be purely historic. But although a work of art is made in a historical context, its cohesion, coherence, and uniqueness, account for a wholeness that transcends any context. 
   There can be no enslavement nor relativizing of what is whole; of the in itself, to use Kantian language. "Art for art's sake" means art as noumena, something beyond the limits of time and, in this sense, preexisting the artist- like Proust's "already written" book inside of him- and post existing him, that is, maintaining, throughout time, its same, transcendent quality.
   To fulfill the task of bringing this book, which is hidden deep inside one, to light,  means, for Proust, to make the work of art that expresses one's timeless and individual truth.  

   And he not only equates the genesis of it to an act of artistic creation, but  gives this genesis, or this bringing  of it to light, the ethical/religious quality of obliging that which is one's transcending truth- like a heavenly design-  when concluding that art is the real final judgment.  That is, the judgment based on who obliged his/her transcendent truth vs who didn't. 

   The miracle of art is to bring transcendence to the order of time; to link temporality and eternity, materiality and spirit.  By unveiling what is for one, and yet preexists one, art unveils what has always been; what can only have been willed by God.