A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of the Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do, with great artists; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.
Marcel Proust developed many themes, including the enigma of memory and the necessity of reflection, in his monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu, published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927. In Search of Lost Time was earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past.
Proust’s father, Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist and epidemiologist, studying cholera in Europe and Asia. He was the author of numerous articles and books on medicine and hygiene. Proust’s mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from Alsace. Literate and well read, she demonstrates a well developed sense of humour in her letters, and her command of English was sufficient to help with her son’s translations of John Ruskin.