Why is Proust's work so reassuring and healing?

        Life is faster and faster.  Most of us are constantly running after time in order to do more, to know more, to call more attention, to not be forgotten in the  torrent of information pushed down our throat at every moment.  Besides electronic communication, the progress of technology has also been turning what was new yesterday, into what is obsolete today, like making the world constantly disposable. In the speed to catch up with this inhuman speed, everybody has to be alert and immediately focused, like racers aiming at a finish line. But unlike what happens to racers, no finish line can survive the  ever faster pace of the race itself, and there isn't really anything to arrive at. Running toward elusive, external goals, one runs from oneself, and the inner temple that is the source of creativity and uniqueness becomes more and more ignored.  C.G. Jung was right when he said, almost a century ago, that "modern man" was loosing his soul. Some people don't seem to care or to even realize their inner emptiness. Their distance from themselves is hidden behind propaganda's readymade beliefs that generate prejudice, bigotry, and insane causes.

    To rediscover oneself is to rediscover one's faith. This is where Proust's self-search becomes relevant. Besides the confessional accuracy of his self-analysis, his work ultimately rescues essence from transiency and from the destructive oblivion generated by the passing of time. It returns our technologically kidnapped soul to us by leading us to find, beneath all the layers of learned habits, disposable conventions and behaviors, the truth of our life and of our own person, beyond all change.

    Proust's voice talks to one from within; his readers should be the readers of themselves, as he wanted. His search for incorruptibility, for what is not destructible by time and transiency, is the search for one's soul. Reading his text improves self awareness as well as a deeper awareness of others.

   The greatest generosity of his work lies in allowing us to make his honesty, unabashed questioning, and piercing insight, our own, as we identify with his voice and dive into our own depth. As we reach, through his epiphanies, our own experience of the spiritual dimension and discover within ourselves, an up to then unknown power to face it all.