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.
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 .
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 .
