Proust has no taste for inventions, fakes, unjustified leaps and misleading invocations. He never establishes relations between two things which have none. I know of no finer meditation on absence, death and oblivion than THE SWEET CHEAT GONE: nothing more transparent, patient, supple, sincere and a more careful statement of genuine effects. If it existed, that would be metaphysics: that deepening of real life, that absence of sham, of complacency; that modesty, that calm manner of presenting oneself full face to a certain number of illuminations, where there is a sense of the meaning of life--things which fall to us of their own accord and our only course is not to run away from them.