Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us. The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable. We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill the gap. We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take us or spare us. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust
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