LE TEMPS RETROUVE

Yet this complete absorption in the flux of sensations, and abstention from all judgments about their causes or their relative values, leads Proust in the end to a very remarkable perception: that the flux of phenomena is after all accidental to them, and that the positive reality in each is not the fact that it appears or disappears, but rather the intrinsic quality which it manifests, an eternal essence which may appear and disappear a thousand times. Such an essence, when it is talked about, may seem mysterious and needlessly invented, but when noticed it is the clearest and least doubtful of things--the only sort of thing, indeed, that can ever be observed with direct and exhaustive clearness. An essence is simply the recognisable character of any object or feeling, all of it that can actually be possessed in sensation or recovered in memory, or transcribed in art, or conveyed to an other mind. All that was intrinsically real in past time is accordingly recoverable. The hopeless flux and the temporal order of things are not ultimately interesting; they belong merely to the material occasions on which essences recur, or to the flutterings of attention, hovering like a moth about lights which are eternal.

-from George Santayana; Proust On Essences


The best English translation of In Search of Lost Time is the Modern Library edition, which is a double revision based on C.K. Scott Moncrieff, the first time by Terence Kilmartin, the second time, most recently, by D.J. Enright.

1. Swann's Way (1913)
2. Within a Budding Grove (1919)
3. The Guermantes Way (1921)
4. Sodom and Gomorrah (1922)
5. The Captive (1923)
6. The Fugitive (1925)
7. Time Regained (1927)

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