The dark region

What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.


Proust was a 20th-century thinker long before others caught up with him--a pre-post-modern, if that makes sense. For him the mind is always turning onto itself, wondering what it will find, and realizing that it is all one big invention.