From Imagination to Contemplation to Absoluteness

     Right at the start of reporting his train trip to Balbec, Proust says that it would then be made by car, (on le ferait sans doute aujourd'hui en automobile).  He explains that a car can make the voyage more realistic, because it allows the traveller to be closer to the path and intimately follow the several ways through which  the surface of the Earth changes. However, the pleasure of a trip, according to him,  is not that of getting out of the vehicle one is traveling in and stoping whenever one wants, but of rendering the spatial diversity between one's departure and arrival  imperceptible,  so as to be able to feel it in its totality and intact. Just as it was in our thought, when our imagination took us from the place where we live to the heart of our destination.  This leap in space, for Proust,  felt less miraculous when covering a distance between two cities step by step, than when directly uniting two distinct, individual places on Earth. He points out that the individuality of each is represented by the train stations, which are not part of the cities but contain the essence of their personality. 

Preferring to go from one essence to the other, by leaving "intact" the distance between them, that is, by being removed from the diversity one experiences when covering this distance inside a car, Proust expresses his search for absoluteness, that which is whole independently from what led to it. 

Essences, or absolutes, cannot be relative to anything. They are "truths" in themselves and can only be accessed by contemplation, a mode of mind that is alien to considerations of causality, utility, and transiency- the main categories of reality. Our awareness of them spring from our respect, or reverence, to their endlessness. 
   Each train station, as the essence of a city, is everything one could possibly think and expect of this city at once, that is, regardless of temporality. Essences, the source of awe, are above ordinary thought and its sole concern for material reality. 

By conveying that when one transports oneself in imagination from the place one lives to the heart of a desired destination and keeping intact the distance  between them, one travels from one essence to the other, Proust identifies imagination, as the seat of essences, and contemplation, as a recognition of what is above reality.

 He expresses the same search for absoluteness,  when criticizing the showing of a painting along with trivial objects surrounding it. According to him,  such display, unlike what happens in museums, detracts the artist's act of mind that precisely isolated  his work from the real, and eradicates the uniqueness of such work. Making relative, in other words, that which should be absolute.

  Like Kant, Proust does not believe that what is objectively considered reality is ultimately real. But, unlike Kant's giving transcendence to practical reason by admitting free will in the realm of ethics, that is, freedom of choice to obey the categorical imperative against all one's possible inclinations and above all determinism, the Proustian mind finds this same freedom in accessing  the transcendence of essences, by imaginative and contemplative thought .