Proust and the Real, Transcendent Reality

   Looking at this photo of Marcel Proust,  I remember, from his angelic expression, Iris Murdoch saying that  Proust writes like an angel. 

Not only does Proust write like an angel, but he uses  frequent metaphors about the angelic nature in his poetic descriptions about what he sees. The delicacy and purity of the passage in which he mentions the pear trees in flower he saw in the "accursed" city, while waiting for Saint- Loup and the latter's maitresse,  even led him to wonder whether those were not really angels!
This alternation of a higher reality with what is in front of our eyes happens often throughout The Search, and makes some of the highest peaks of it. I say amen to flowers being angels, after I read Proust's angelic description of them.
Note that, in this passage, he mentions Mary Magdalene's mistaking Jesus for a gardener, her confusing  the  resurrected one for a mere mortal man. By this, Proust makes a parallelism between our usual, commonsensical view of flowers as mere plants, and our overlooking their angelic nature.
The  passage I am referring to was supposed to be happening around Easter, which certainly contributed to Proust's  mention  of Jesus resurrected. 
Resurrection is another frequent theme through The Search, whether taken metaphorically- as death of an old self and rebirth into a new one- or botanically, like in the passage Proust writes, when thinking about his work to be written, that he, as a seed, must die so that the fruit can grow out of "him", what actually did happen. Proust is essentially Christian because he is self-sacrificial, and he is an angel because he channeled the angelic nature.

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 ways through which  the surface of the Earth changes. But he says that the pleasure of a trip is not that of getting out of the vehicle one is in and stoping whenever one wants, but of rendering the spatial diversity between one's departure and arrival  imperceptible,  so as it can be felt intact in its totality. 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. 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 out the distance between them; 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 causality, utility, and transiency- the main categories of reality. Our awareness of them spring from our respect, our 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, and not successively. 

The Proustian trip of transporting oneself in imagination from the place one lives to the heart of a desired destination by keeping intact the distance  between them, by traveling from one essence to another,  imagination is identified as the seat of essences.

 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, 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 .