"Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees"
About this Quote
Proust argues that we live sealed inside our own subjectivity and that art uniquely unlocks a passage into another mind. Social life and everyday language rarely suffice; people wear masks, words become routine, and habit dulls perception. Art, by contrast, transforms private sensation into form and style, so that the singular way an artist apprehends the world becomes shareable. For Proust, style is not ornament but a revelation of vision. To encounter a genuine style is to borrow another person’s eyes.
His novel In Search of Lost Time builds this case from within: its patient sentences, its microscopic attention to memory, love, jealousy, and time, all work to slow the reader down until familiar scenes become newly strange and vivid. The madeleine episode shows how raw experience erupts from an involuntary memory; the book then performs the hard labor of making that fleeting intensity communicable. Art does not hand us facts about another’s mind; it gives us the texture of their seeing. That texture is a kind of knowledge.
Within the novel, the painter Elstir teaches the narrator to notice what custom erases: masts that seem to tilt because water is not a street, faces that change with light and posture. The composer Vinteuil’s sonata opens an inner landscape that cannot be paraphrased but can be inhabited. These figures embody Proust’s conviction that art is an ethics of attention. By dwelling with an artist’s way of looking, we are coaxed out of our egocentric habits and into empathy.
The claim anticipates modern research showing that narrative fiction can enhance perspective-taking. Yet Proust’s point is deeper: art does not simply depict another consciousness; it reenacts it in us. We emerge from ourselves because the work recruits our senses, memories, and patience, and in completing it we temporarily live inside another person’s vision, returning with our own widened.
His novel In Search of Lost Time builds this case from within: its patient sentences, its microscopic attention to memory, love, jealousy, and time, all work to slow the reader down until familiar scenes become newly strange and vivid. The madeleine episode shows how raw experience erupts from an involuntary memory; the book then performs the hard labor of making that fleeting intensity communicable. Art does not hand us facts about another’s mind; it gives us the texture of their seeing. That texture is a kind of knowledge.
Within the novel, the painter Elstir teaches the narrator to notice what custom erases: masts that seem to tilt because water is not a street, faces that change with light and posture. The composer Vinteuil’s sonata opens an inner landscape that cannot be paraphrased but can be inhabited. These figures embody Proust’s conviction that art is an ethics of attention. By dwelling with an artist’s way of looking, we are coaxed out of our egocentric habits and into empathy.
The claim anticipates modern research showing that narrative fiction can enhance perspective-taking. Yet Proust’s point is deeper: art does not simply depict another consciousness; it reenacts it in us. We emerge from ourselves because the work recruits our senses, memories, and patience, and in completing it we temporarily live inside another person’s vision, returning with our own widened.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|
More Quotes by Marcel
Add to List
