Marcel Proust and the Problem of Time and Self

Abstract

Proust conceived the true or permanent self to be a sensitiveness to the essence of things. Across this substratum moves a succession of temporary selves responsive to the accidental and evanescent. Continuity of being is traced to the memory. The true self is activated involuntarily and participates in experiences outside time. We eliminate the dimension of time when in remembering we introduce the past unchanged into the present. It is in the resonance of a former sensation, freshly occurring by chance, and the memorial representation of its prior existence, that we realize the most profound of life's truths. Through examining the past we can better know the true self and so redirect our temporal being.