Marcel Stands on Uneven Paving Stones

   How many times in the course of my life had I been disappointed by reality because, at the time I was observing it, my imagination, the only organ with which I could enjoy beauty, was not able to function, by virtue of the inexorable law which decrees that only that which is absent can be imagined. And now suddenly the operation of this harsh law was neutralized, suspended, by a miraculous expedient of nature by which a sensation — the sound of the spoon and that of the hammer, a similar unevenness in two paving stones — was reflected both in the past (which made it possible for my imagination to take pleasure in it) and in the present, the physical stimulus of the sound or the contact with the stones adding to the dreams of the imagination that which they usually lack, the idea of existence — and this subterfuge made it possible for the being within me to seize, isolate, immobilize for the duration of a lightning flash what it never apprehends, namely, a fragment of time in its pure state.