Sweet New England

My worldly possessions are ready to be loaded into a truck tomorrow morning, including a lot of my pictures. I still have them all on my computer, however, so here are some images of my final summer in New England.

The first few images are from a walk around my neighborhood

Love

Strawberry-picking in New Hampshire

And baseball in Rhode Island

Boston on Independence Day

A garden in Harvard

One last trip to my alma mater

My friend's mad tea party birthday

And a goodbye cake

Movin' Out

My life is slowly being packed away into cardboard boxes, stuffed and crammed into impossibly tight corners, waiting to explode into a new space.



(I have four boxes packed like that, nothing but books.)



This is my final week of living in my parents' house, which has been home for my entire life. This inspires certain thoughts.


I remember what it was like in the days before my older sisters left home. I was eleven when my eldest sister got married. Just a few days before the wedding, my father, my sister's fiance, and the best man stood around a huge map unfolded across my kitchen table and traced the route from Massachusetts to Kansas with their fingers. I was enthralled by the idea of driving hundreds and hundreds of miles away to a place that would instantly be their new home. I foolishly imagined my sister making the entire journey in her white wedding dress, and failed to comprehend why my mother was crying in the other room. There was a wedding and an adventure, and this was the best time of all because of the pleasure of anticipation; none of it had happened yet, but it was so close, just brushing the fingertips of the grand event. To the eleven year old mind, it was like 10 PM on Christmas Eve, and called for excited impatience for a day when everything would be different.

I expected great change-- my sister was now going to be a bride and immediately transform into a wife. The entire day would be filled with romantic magic. But we got up the morning of the wedding and Laurie's maid of honor and bridesmaid came over to watch a few episodes of Friends, and I sat on the swing outside until I was made to come in and put on my yellow dress. My hair was braided and sprayed stiff and had flowers woven into the twists, and then it was time to go to the church. The church did not look any different than it ever did; I genuflected and sat in the pew between Katie and our mom, as always. Then I watched my sister and her husband have their pictures taken, and we went to the reception hall, where there were no mysterious and romantic boys for me to dance with, no glittering aura filling the air or reflecting off the candle centerpieces.

Afterwards, my life went on and we all settled into a new normal. Laurie left and Diet Coke was now excinded from the grocery list. She had been living away at college for the last three years, so her absence wasn't completely foreign. There was an empty room in the house now, and my parents moved their bedroom downstairs to give my sister Katie and me free reign over the upper level of our house.

We could have had our own rooms then, something that most eleven and fourteen year old sisters would rejoice over-- but Katie and I were unusual girls. We decided to stay together in the same room we had shared our entire lives. Little changed, even when Katie graduated high school and began college; I was her only college roommate, since she commuted to school from home.

I was 18 when she married Eric, and much more comprehending of the significance of the event. The night before the wedding, Katie and I sat on our beds in our pajamas and talked, like we always had, the conversation ranging from the wedding to her moving to Maine (and how I was going to buy her a big ugly flannel nightgown for the cold Maine winters), to random childhood memories. I wasn't sad, though I was wistfully aware that this was the final night of us being the two Jaworek girls and that, from tomorrow onward, things would be different. It would never be like this again, and that was sadly sweet; childhood never lasts, and the final vestiges of ours were falling away. The next morning, we woke up early and padded downstairs to a breakfast of muffins (I took a cranberry one, Katie went for the double chocolate muffin), and talked with our parents at the table like always. Then it was time for Katie to change into her white dress, me into my pink one, and we headed to the church.

After the wedding, I returned to my half-empty room and for the first time, I was Jen Alone.

That room gradually metamorphosized into my own; my twin bed's twin was dissembled and stowed away in the attic, my desk and bookshelves eventually took the bed's place, our old stuffed animals were donated or passed down to Katie's daughters, and my own twin bed joined its counterpart in the attic when I upgraded to a queen-sized bed.

And now I sort through it all and decide what to bring with me, what to keep here in my parents' house, what to throw away. This room will soon be vacant. Before, it was Laurie's and then it was passed into my and Katie's hands, and then left solely to me, and there is no one to take my place. Already, it feels like it's not fully mine, like my college was no longer mine during my final week on campus; I walked about by myself in those last days, remembering the places and people and felt that I was already absent. I was a ghost.

Will I haunt this room, this house? Katie haunts it still, so does Laurie: I still keep my bed to the left side of the room, perhaps to preserve the space for Katie's phantom bed, there are marks on the ceiling from our old glow-in-the-dark plastic stars, the carpet in my parents' bedroom is the same deep cranberry color that a 15-year-old Laurie chose, my sisters' chairs at the kitchen table remain vacant. Rooms store memories in their corners, even when those corners are empty and dusty.

Soon, I will leave this house and leave part of myself here. I'm just not sure what part will stay behind in these rooms, how much of me is left out in the backyard with the old spoons and plastic toys, long forgotten, rusted and buried and broken, but still there. And other parts of me will emerge in Buffalo from the strange new soil of grad school, my own apartment, Jarrod's presence, my natural mutability.

Everything feels so amorphous and jumbled together, though it's all wrapped in paper, packed away into tidy boxes and labeled neatly. I feel excited, nervous, wistful, hopeful, hopeless, afraid, ambitious, determined, and everything all at once.

You know? I wouldn't change that. I want to feel everything, think everything, and write this all down, as confused and inelegant as it may be.

Resuming the Search

A few months ago, I stated that it was my goal to read all of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time; of course, this is not only a Proust blog, and I've obviously read a lot of other things (and will continue to do so), but the Proust entries are returning! I recently finished the first part of Volume II, Within a Budding Grove.

The narrator's admiration of Gilberte Swann evolves from a simple longing to gain access to her mysterious and forbidden world into romantic and sexual desire. Part One, titled "Madame Swann at Home," details his romantic quest for Gilberte; love is, of course, the major theme of this section, and many of the previous conclusions about love in Proust's work hold true here. Lack of control over the beloved both induces love, sustains it, and makes it a miserable state of being. Like Swann's desire for Odette, the narrator's love for Gilberte is sustained by her unreachability and strangeness from him; his alienation from her spurs his desire to possess her. He is vexed by her unpredictability and his lack of control, but this only deepens and strengthens his attraction. Love originates in difference, even though the experience of alienation from the beloved is painful. The narrator's ability to love depends on his inability to possess Gilberte, just as Swann's jealous love depended on his futlity in stopping Odette's infidelities.

Love originates also in the imagination of the lover, which can simultaneously ease that sense of distance and exacerbate it. Swann sustained his jealous love for Odette through imagining her infidelities, and comforted himself by picturing her innocence. Imagination, however, plays a very different role in the narrator's love of Gilberte. Swann's imagination drifted towards Odette's nefarious activities out of his view because his love depends on jealousy. The narrator, however, tends to imagine only the complete happiness that he could derive from unity with Gilberte, because his love depends on the possibility of possession. He spends his time imagining conversations he might have with her, in which she says all of the things he longs to hear. At times, his happiness is heightened by his imagination: "We are, when we love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving at once to the most apparently simple accident, an accident which may at any moment occur, a seriousness which in itself it would not entails. What makes us so happy is the presence in our hearts of an unstable element which we contrive perpetually to maintain and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced" (Proust 213-214). The increasing acceptance that the Swanns show to the narrator, inviting him to tea with Gilberte and dinners with Bergotte, causes him to view his possession of Gilberte as determined; with her father's approval, the narrator assumes that he has greater influence over her, and so he went to "see Gilberte as often as I chose, with enchantment if not with peace of mind" (Proust 213). That peace of mind, however, was soon disrupted by the same impulse to attach immense importance to insignificant, neutral, or ambiguous events.

Like Swann's jealousy, however, the narrator's desire for complete possession eventually leads to the destruction of love. His imagination first causes him to view reality as deficient, in comparison with his visions of potential happiness with Gilberte. She fails to react in the desired way, and the very quality of otherness that attracted him begins to vex him. He begins to sense that Gilberte is annoyed by his constant presence in her house and views him as an obstruction to her other activities; for example, she wishes to go to a dance with her friends, but her mother requires her to stay at home to entertain the narrator. Like Odette had with Swann, Gilberte rather effortlessly proves her independence from the narrator; both lovers are painfully desirous to do the same and prove their independence from Odette and Gilberte. The narrator eventually succeeeds, although he realizes, too late, that the attainment of that goal necessitates the death of love.

As in Swann's Way, love is presented as a tormented, humiliating experience in Within a Budding Grove, an experience which the narrator can only enjoy in memory. Hurt by Gilberte's perceived indifference, aggrieved that her parents' acceptance of him have failed to win him control over her, and convinced that Gilberte will find his affection for her unforgivably repulsive, the narrator decides to cure himself of his love; he ceases to contact her directly, refuses her invitations, and wallows in the voluptuousness of his melancholy. He succeeds in destroying his love, and the self that loved Gilberte; the self-imposed separation gradually diminishes his desire and he is relieved from the incessant anxiety that, in Proust, is essential of love.

He reflects on his former love for Gilberte and marvels "How infinitely we prefer to any such interview the docile memory, which we can supplement at will with dreams in which she who in reality does not love us seems, on the contrary, to be making protestations of her love, when we are all alone! How infinitely we prefer that memory which, by blending gradually with it a great deal of what we desire, we can contrive to make as sweet as we choose, to the deferred interview in which we would have to deal with a person to whom we could no longer dictate at will the words that we want to hear on her lips, but from whom we can expect to meet with new coldness, unforeseen aggressions!" (Proust 270). Swann does something similar in his approach to Odette; rather than view her only through memory, he chooses to view her through the veil of art. Odette is no longer a human subject, but an artistic object, which Swann can manipulate at his will, convince himself of her aesthetic value, and thereby appreciate. The narrator finally gains control over Gilberte through relegating her to memory; he surrenders the real, present, separate Gilberte for the phantom Gilberte of memory. The separateness of the other, the beloved, creates love, but it also creates the desire to escape the unstable state of being in love.

The narrator's disappointment and humiliation in his love for Gilberte is characteristic of a problem that extends beyond the experience of love; happiness is always deferred to a distant future, in which the internal conditions of the narrator will have changed so much as to render that happiness impotent. The narrator writes that "happiness can never be achieved. If we succeed in overcoming the force of circumstances, nature at once shifts the battle-ground, placing it within ourselves, and effects a gradual change in our hearts until they desire something other than what they are about to possess... Having failed in everything related to the sphere of life and action, it is a final impossibility, the psychological impossibility of happiness, that nature creates. The phenomenon of happiness either fails to appear, or at once gives rise to the bitterest reactions" (Proust 274). The narrator's earlier excursion to see Berma, his favorite actress, perform at the theater is a precursor to his love for Gilberte; he had longed to see Berma and built up impossible expectations of rapture and intellectual enlightenment upon finally seeing her performance, but his anxiety to catch every word she said and his extravagant hopes left him feeling bitterly disappointed. He could not enjoy the performance at all; he recognizes Berma as she appears on stage, "But at the same time all my pleasure had ceased" because he cannot slow down time and dissect the performance as it appeared (Proust 26). Pleasure is only possible in anticipation, and as soon as the anticipated happiness appears, as he wrote later, happiness becomes impossible.

Swann's Way was an account of an awakening of desires, but Within a Budding Grove is a narrative of the inevitable disappointment of those desires. The narrator expects his great hopes to reify, but the materialization of his longings inevitably falls short of his imagination. Although the narrator seems to experience life more deeply than most, he is also perpetually anxious or disappointed; he is as incurable a malcontent as his Aunt Leonie was an invalid, because, like his great aunt, he revels in his accute sense of disappointment, his suffering, his incurable state of discontent. The narrator is something of a youthful Underground Man; Proust mentions Dostoevsky in this volume, so I think a comparison between the narrator and Dostoevsky's Underground Man could be useful. Expect more on this subject in the future... just don't expect too much, because you're bound to be diappointed.

If you never say your name outloud to anyone, they can never ever call you by it

I've returned! The grad school dilemma has been solved, for the most part, so now I'm back to writing these rambling little entries on literature and life.


I've inadvertantly encountered a number of discourses concerning identity and language in the past weeks, from very different sources: Samuel Beckett's novel The Unnamable, an interview on NPR, and the final chapter of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. The essential question at hand is, what is the relationship between narrative and identity? And a subset of that is, what is the function of names in constructing an identity? Can there be a narrative without names?

I have asked these questions on this blog before, but these are questions to which I must return, continuously.

Each source provides a very different answer. The scholar on NPR insisted that there is no essential relationship between narrative and reflective consciousness; humans are not naturally narrative, and should not always use narrative as a tool in the process of reflecting on their experiences. He cited Sartre in the claim that narratives distort reality, and that reminded me of a post I had written earlier, in the particular distorting power of names. As soon as a thing is named, its identity pinned down to a consistent signifier, the name fails to address the thing's reality. A name cannot contain the thing itself, and neither can a narrative-- even a six volume narrative consisting of thousands of pages.

This notion of unnamability relates closely to Beckett's The Unnamable. The narrator of this strange novel, which has no real plot to speak of, is constantly beset by many voices, which define him and control him, forcing him to speak through a voice that is not his own, in a language that is not his own. The Unnamable longs and strives to find his own voice in this bewildering narrative, but he also desires silence. He seems to recognize that any narrative will fail to constitute an identity, or worse, will only impose on him a false identity. He yearns to recover his authentic voice, rather than continue to speak through their voices, and say something final about himself so that he may stop speaking altogether, fall into silence, and exist in pure selfhood. The tension between speech and silence is paradoxical; the only way, in the Unnamable's mind, to achieve full selfhood is to speak himself into silence, to recover his voice and then stop. I think that this is because the authentic self is so fleeting, that if he were to speak more than that single, definitive word or phrase, the voice of the other would inevitably resurface and he would have to begin the process of recovering himself again. If he could only identify when he has spoken something true of himself, and then fall silent, he would achieve ontological consistency.

According to Maimaitiming Aila, however, Beckett's characters are unwilling to entirely relinquish narrative because, without it, they sink into irrevokable oblivion. They cease to exist outside of the language that they use, especially the Unnamable, who seems to exist only as a voice. That language, though, is very inconsistent and confusing; names shift and metamorphosize, highlighting the tension between identity and anonymity. Characters have names, but they are temporally influenced; the names change over time, and through different places, suggesting that identity is not stable. Rather than the proper name functioning as "a reliable sign to designate a person, the narrators in the trilogy [of Beckett's novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable] hold it as a sign of the existence of a particular discourse, a moment in the stream of consciousness, and an expression of certain perceptions and ideas" (Aila, "Nothing but Dust: A Philosophical Approach to the Problem of Identity and Anonymity in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy," p. 129). This harkens back to the opening lines of The Unnamable: "Where now? Who now? When now?" These are three questions of identity; the "who" follows "where," is inseparable from "when." Time and space, then, determine identity, and because these are constantly in flux, identity is never stable.

Names are used to designate objects. In Beckett, the object changes, and the subject too, with time and place, with every possible world in which the object exists, and often, so does the name: "Beckett's practice of renaming characters reflects the idea that language obscures the reality it is attempting to depict. A name brings with it a superficial sense of a person's identity" (Rubin Rabinovitz, "Repetition and Underlying Meanings in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy," Rethinking Beckett, p. 52). The commentator on NPR would likely agree with Rabinovitz's assessment here; that language, and narrative in particular, obscures reality and is therefore inessential to the creation of an identity, perhaps even detrimental.

In The Unnamable, the difference between self and other erodes and the two become indistinguishable; the narrator is Mahood, Molloy, Worm, and all of the others who make up the shifting "they," whose voices he cannot stop from blending with, and overpowering, his own. Gradually, all of the distinguishing factors that comprise identity fall away: physical deterioration and uncertainty of the physical characteristics of one's own body (the Unnamable first says, for example, that he feels his hands are stuck to his knees, then later claims that he has no limbs at all), memory, and name, including the pronoun "I." The Unnamable questions his identity so radically that he claims that he can just as easily replace "I" with "they" or any other pronoun, any other word for that matter, and it would make no difference, because it is not he who is speaking.

In contrast to these views questioning the utility of narrativity is Proust. For Proust's narrator, language and narrative, and in the last chapter of the first volume, names are essential to comprehending reality. Language is an important part of reifying internal experience; although speech is part of the life of the mind, it also provides a link to sensual experience and physical reality. Speech is symbolic, but it's inseparable from the physical manipulation of the mouth and vocal chords; when the narrator seeks any opportunity to speak the name Swann, it's to bring Gilberte from the unreachable fantasy world she occupies in his imagination and into the concrete reality of his world. He is aware that saying words associated with her and repeating her name do not impact her at all, but they do bring something of her essence into his sphere and bridge the gap between them.

Proust does not promote the idea that the name is fully stable, however; when the narrator falls in love with Gilberte, every word and name connected with her is endowed suddenly with new meaning. His reaction to the names changes, even if the names themselves do not; the objects themselves also remain constant, uneffected by the referential shift the narrator experiences. The important thing is that the narrator's consciousness has changed, and this is why, in the final pages of Swann's Way, he laments the inability to fully recover the past; the physical relics of the past are insufficient, and so are linguistic re-tellings of past events. What he seeks to recapture is his consciousness at the time. Like the Unnamable and other characters in Beckett, the narrator is not the child whose experiences he recounts, although he remembers them. He cannot return to the consciousness of that particular moment, waiting for Gilberte in the Champs-Elysees, or to catch a glimpse of Madame Swann's carriage passing under the trees in a park. He continues to search for lost time, but he knows that it must remain, at least in part, permanently, irrecoverably lost, because he can never be that boy again. Time and place have changed, and so must he.

On that point, Proust and Beckett appear to agree (keep in mind that Samuel Beckett was a Proust scholar); a past consciousness cannot possibly be recaptured. In Krapp's Last Tape, the titular Krapp bears some resemblance to Proust's narrator; he searches his memory (for Krapp, it's recorded on spools of tape) and attempts to comprehend his past self. At times, Krapp does not recognize the voice on the tape, even though it is his own; there are considerable gaps in his memory. And there are things that he wishes he did not remember and impatiently skips over portions of his former self's narrative. At the end of Swann's Way, Proust's narrator appears to experience a similar kind of alienation from the former self. This narrator's memory is more reliable, perhaps, than Krapp's, but he nevertheless fails in the same task of recovering something of the past: "how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed... The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our convenience. They were only a thin little slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years" (Proust, p. 606).

This is how Swann's Way ends, with a tinge of regret that the years can never be brought back to life, that places changes and the moment that has passed is gone forever. The narrative of memories that the narrator presents, however, seems to be at least a partial remedy for the impossibility of recapturing moments in the senses; he can, it seems, recapture these moments, even his former consciousness, through the act of constructing a narrative. This is where the debate arises; the NPR guest would claim that the narrative is falsifying and that he is never recapturing anything of the past, but only imposing a pseudo-reality onto his experiences. For the characters in Beckett's Trilogy, narrative adds to confusion and the oblivion of self, not the establishment of an identity. The characters' identities gradually disintegrate, and in The Unnamable, the monologue also deteriorates, slipping into contradiction and tormented uncertainty, culminating in the final words, "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." While Proust's narrator can revisit and experience the entirety of his consciousness, "Beckett implies that our consciousness at its most fundamental level is elusive and anonymous, and that there will always remain an unthematic, unreflective, and opaque spot in the life of the subject" (Aila, p. 138).

Yet the narrative continues; the characters are not completely anonymous, not even the Unnamable. There is a measure of self-awareness that allows for narrative and prevents them from slipping away entirely into opaqueness. Language is an essential component of retaining a sense of self; Aila writes that "there is no point outside of language from which we come to express ourselves... the power of language becomes more and more a case of excess to such a degree that it anonymously speaks in the void: It speaks solitarily with itself in the end" (Aila, p. 141). Later, it is claimed that "Beckett thinks there is no 'I' prior to stories, to narrative, and, above all, to language. The self is a mere abstraction and fictional entity created in and through the effect of language, narrative, and self-perception" (Aila, p. 143). I'm not sure that I agree with that interpretation; language is important in Beckett, but silence, I think, is infinitely more important. On a metatheatrical level, as soon as the words end, the characters meet their demise; the curtain falls after they lapse into silence. But throughout the plays, from Hamm to Vladimir and Estragon to Krapp, the characters feel that there is something essential and authentic in silence, and so they strive toward it. It may be the end of this fabricated self created through narrative, but there could be a more genuine self, a pure experience of being without the falsifications of language, in the silence.

And what about the actor in Catastrophe? Like The Unnamable, the actor is bombarded with commands and manipulated by words, he is molded into something he is not; but then, he defies the narrative. He raises his face when he was told to keep it bowed. This is an act of self-assertion, I think, and it is wholly non-linguistic.

This post has rambled on to excessive lengths, so I think that I must lapse into silence and let this monologue end. I won't go on here, but I will be back to speak more of other things.

Hand-Me-Down Memories

I just finished the nearly 300-page first "chapter" of Swann's Way, which details the routines, rituals, and discoveries of the narrator's childhood in the titular town of Combray. The final paragraphs of Combray point ahead to the next chapter, Swann In Love, as the narrator describes the process of absorbing and recalling the memories of another person, memories of experiences that were never his, but which apparently had a significant impact on the narrator, to the point that he includes them with memories of his own direct experiences:

"All these memories, superimposed upon one another, now formed a single mass, but had not so far coalesced that I could not discern between them-- between my oldest, my instinctive memories, and those others, inspired more recently by a taste or "perfume," and finally, those which were actually the memories of another person from whom I had acquired them at second hand-- if not real fissures, real geological faults, at least that veining, that variegation of colouring, which in certain rocks, in certain blocks of marble, points to differences of origin, age, and formation."
Marcel Proust, p. 262-263

This particular quote brought to light the communal aspect of memory and remembering. As much as memory is a private recollection of direct, personal experiences, another part of memory and the history of an individual is attributable to second-hand memories. Although, I'm not entirely certain that I agree with Proust that it is so easy to discern the origin, age, and formation of memories. Try this for an example.

What was your first word?

How do you remember what that first word was? You were probably about a year old, give or take a few months. You probably remember nothing else until you were two or three years old. I know that, for me, my "memory" of my first word is not truly mine. My earliest memory is of being in a grocery store when I was about two years old, and I cannot be certain whether it's wholly my own receollection or if it was influenced by the perceptions of others, or perhaps entirely fabricated. Nevertheless, I have obtained these memories and countless others from my parents, sisters, family members, and neighbors. These stories of my infancy and early childhood have been repeated so often that I have absorbed them into my sense of self; although they are hand-me-downs, they have become mine. They have become me.

In one of my college classes, on 20th century American drama, I suggested that selfhood begins with the first memory. In some ways, I stand by that assertion, because identity is constructed, in part, through narratives; in order to have a sense of self, a person must have a sense of personal history and be able to reflect on past experiences. I mostly connected this sense of history to national identity and post-colonial readings (e.g., the insomnia motif in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez illustrates the loss of memory and subsequent loss of self among a colonized people), but I think it also works on the personal level. Character is constructed through a series of actions, which are all supposedly guided by internal qualities-- the character's nature, so to speak. A person has to have access to (selected) events of his or her past in order to construct a cohesive identity.

Identity's dependence on memory is a theme of Proust's In Search of Lost Time; the narrator claims that "reality takes shape in memory alone" (p. 260). I read that sentence as an assertion that narratives are necessary to make things real, to gives things existence. Naming also serves a similar function in the Combray chapter; for example, the mysterious woman in the church takes on a completely different meaning once the narrator learns her name and that she is a descendent of the medieval, fantastic Guermantes family. At the moment of hearing her name, she becomes real to the narrator, and thus loses some of her mystique and appeal (if only for a moment). In Proust, art, in addition to reality, takes shape in memory; as Mosher's article details, memory transforms life into art. This frustrates the barriers between fact and fiction; art creates something new, something outside of material reality, and yet it is reality.

I think that Proust is referring to the reality of the mind, or consciousness, when he writes that reality takes shape in memory alone. This reality begins with sensory information, but it finds hidden depths, it goes beyond the world of the senses and creates meaning. The meaning consciousness creates may be fictional and imposed upon a physical world devoid of intrinsic meaning, but Proust certainly is not one to disparage the veracity of this inner reality; even if it is constructed, if it is art rather than bare fact, the world of the mind is real. In fact, Proust suggests that this internal world of the mind (and, intimately connected to this, the realm of art) is the most real of all.