The heart changes . . . but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination

Proust, on the essential unknowability of other people, and the way literature compensates for that by allowing us to inhabit the inner life of imaginary others (because they are really ourselves, while we read).

I love his insight at the end that all the changes of our heart are invisible to us because they happen so slowly (most of them). The most intense of all our joys and sorrows “would never have been revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops our perception of them.”

We learn about those changes only from reading and from imagination. Otherwise we would progress from childhood to old age in a kind of fog, constantly changing but mostly unaware of those changes, and seldom surprised by realizations such as “I was such a different person then” or “I can hardly believe that I used to think and feel that way; it seems unthinkable now.”

A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either. The novelist's happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself.

After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall, while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to that state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied tenfold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid, and of a more lasting impression than those which come to us in sleep; why, then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which, only, we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the keenest, the most intense of which would never have been revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops our perception of them.

It is the same in life; the heart changes, and that is our worst misfortune; but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.

Proust, Swann’s Way