Thursday 18 August 2005

Some mystery-loving minds maintain that objects retain something of the eyes that have looked at them

Some mystery-loving minds maintain that objects retain something of the eyes that have looked at them, that we can see monuments and pictures only through an almost tangible veil woven over them through the centuries by the love and contemplation of so many admirers. This fantasy would become truth if they transposed it into the realm of the only reality each person, knows, into the domain of their own sensitivity. Yes, in that sense and that sense only (but it is much the more important one), a thing which we have looked at long ago, if we see it again, brings back to us, along with our original gaze, all the images which that gaze contained.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"Finding Time Again" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 6)
p. 193, Penguin Classics, 2003

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