Once the terms of a problem are precisely known, the problem is resolved; or then it’s impossible. So the solution is nothing else than the problem well clarified. When I know seven and five together precisely, I know twelve. The object hasn’t changed, but I know it better. Nothing has moved. This kind of change is not movement.
I look at a landscape in the morning. The rising sun will change it from moment to moment. But my gaze throws light upon it in another way; I awaken to it; I notice, I make things out, I place them; I recognize. I recognize myself in it. This is another dawn. That first contact, or first vision is something I shall not recover; as soon as it’s first, it’s second. I can’t hold on to the inexpressible confusion of awakening, or even of that first look. I open the blinds. The outside world comes to me; I immediately return it; attention bites like an acid; the object takes on a meaning, the object stands out. What is a turning of the road on that distant hillside? It’s only a clear patch; no, it’s a road. Naiveté is lost. That’s how all my thoughts ripen and age. Quickly or slowly? One can’t say. For nothing here is in movement. Whether the object moves or not, this ageing always goes on. Farewell to my first thought; it is no longer, it will never be; for it’s always the same object. Everything participates; it’s through other things that a thing comes to light. That hard shadow seems a thing; but I see no more than a shadow, because I’m also thinking of the sun. My universe moves from chaos to order as soon as I think about it. So each moment slides into the past. I believed, but now I know. I confused things, now I make them out. If all things were halted through magic, time would not stop flowing.
The novelist’s art is no doubt to paint time and the ages anew. Everything in this art should be awakening and discovery, but in the same object. This is why a change of object breaks up the fictional. And journeys are not at all the subject of the novel; no, only the returns. This is the source of the boundless interest attached to childhood memories. And in the same village, the same garden, the same house. It’s at Combray that Proust develops his treasures. Think also of the valley in Balzac’s The Lily of the Valley; always the same valley, but the gaze has aged. So, in a true novel, we set out on a certain journey, which is a journey in time. The movement here is only accidental and incidental. And above all, nothing is more foreign to the novel than the painting of things as they are. Not as they are, but as we discover them and always in setting out from their first appearance. The same for faces and characters; first in their youth, not in their own youth, but rather in the youth of the first idea that we make of them, and which can’t stay the same; hence the marvellous departure and this journey without movement.
(22/3/24; PII)