Proust's Vision of the Beloved

Living in a land distant from France, a memory of hawthorn blossoms in the month of May is evoked in the mind of the author of this text. The memory is associated with his reading of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust and he finds himself recalling images from the novel. His mind slips into a meditation of Proust’s novel that gradually develops into an elaborate and original reading of the novel. The text that emerges, Proust’s Vision of the Beloved, being a continuous event in the author’s mind, is presented as one flowing stream of words, with pauses for silent contemplation of the emerging ideas. Its author being himself a novelist of the first rank, his text is a new form of critical writing which offers an original reading of Proust’s novel and, while doing so, itself becomes a work of the imagination.