Proust: Beyond Observation

Written alchemy between observation and man's inner-perception births a third point of reality: literature.

"I would amuse myself by watching the glass jars which the boys used to lower into the Vivonne, to catch minnows, and which filled by the current of the stream, in which they themselves also were enclosed, at once 'containers' whose transparent sides were like solidified water and 'contents' plunged into a still larger container of liquid, flowing crystal, suggested an image of coolness more delicious and more provoking than the same water in the same jars would have done, standing upon a table for dinner, by showing it as perpetually in flight between the impalpable water, in which my hands could not arrest it, and the insoluble glass, in which my palate could not enjoy it. I decided that I would come there again with a line and catch fish; I begged for and obtained a morsel of bread from our luncheon basket; and threw into the Vivonne pellets which had the power, it seemed, to bring about a chemical precipitation for the water at once grew solid round about them in oval clusters of emaciated tadpoles, which until then it had no doubt, been holding in solution, invisible but ready and alert to enter the stage of crystallization."

A kind companion

The poet is not the the soothsayer but the companion of the lonely. When the flesh feels the pang of the loss of a lover, or the murderous instinct of the mother remembering an infant's corpse, or the lone indescribable bliss of the warmth of the sun, the poet supplies words of communion. In the recognition, no experience is loss. Recognition. For no tree fell unheard and so no experience is loss.