New Eyes
Marcel Proust’s genius is as widely shared as it is misquoted. One of my favorite observations — of his, or anyone’s — relates to “beholding the universe through the eyes of another” in an act that combines empathy, presence, connection and creativity, all at once. Here’s the story, and why it matters.
The full quote, from Remembrance of Things Past, goes:
“The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess new eyes; to behold the universe through the eyes of another — of a hundred others — to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.”
With that last word — “is” — he intuited over 100 years ago that we each inhabit a different universe, built around no more than our unique perceptions of shared experiences. He understood — long before most — that it is only by suspending our own highly biased, self-protective, narrative interpretations of the world in favor of actual discovery that we can build understanding: of the self, of others, and of the universes we co-habit.
If only every member of the human race understood what Proust did, there would be…
