THE DREYFUS CASEexplode'. And the superiority of this pleasure to all other pleasures
he has known 'is perhaps the token of the superiority of a state
in which we have for our object an eternal essence'; 'our true
r,ature is outside time, born to feed on the eternal'. 'We are
justified in giving first place to the imagination, because we now
realise that it is the organ that serves the eternal.'
Proust had now experienced, as a first reward for leaving the
Guermantes Way, a complete form of 'unconscious memory'; but
he was not yet equipped to understand its true nature. Time
regained is surpassingly valuable not because it restores a frag-
ment of past sensation-for this, since we were then as blinded
by habit as we are now, is worth no more than the present-but
because along with that fragment is released, from the un-
conscious mind in which it was buried and preserved, a vision of
the absolute reality which only the unconscious mind can see.
And further, in this momentary but endless admission to the
world beyond time lies salvation, since there alone is the virtue
we lose when we are born, and the joy which earthly love can
only take away. Proust would not be granted the final revelation
until Time, which so far he had only wasted, was, at last, Time
Lost. He names 'Ie temps perdu' in the last section of his novel,
but it still has only the meaning of time misspent: 'he thought
unceasingly, with irritation and despair, of the time lost ('temps
perdu') in the four years since he left school'.! The very last
sentence of Jean Santeuil, like that of A la Recherche, contains the
word 'time'-'the work of life and death, the work of time,
continued unceasingly'-but here it is still only time the destroyer,
sapping the life of the parents whom Jean, now that he is strong
and they are weak, has at last forgiven. But even Proust's beliefin
the imagination was still misplaced; for in A fa Recherche and
perhaps in all great works of art, the true function of the imagina-
tion is, paradoxically, not to imagine-in the sense of inventing
or transforming-but to see: to see the reality which is concealed
by habit and the phenomenal world. He needed, and providen-
tially found, a prophet who would tell him that 'the artist is only
a scribe'.
1 Jean Santeuil, vol. 3, 284