Reflections (Groucho Marx and the principles of prosody) / fleurs du mal

Memory is made of these decisive moments

                                                                   the thrill of a child's first dead hand-- Ashbery, The Tennis Court Oath

The boy, the youth and the man always experience fundamentally the same things; the meaning of an incident often does not dawn on him until years after he has experienced and endured it; but he can hardly 

ever distinguish the deposit of the years that are past from the experience of the present hour in which he is living. Is one not in every moment of one's life the same child or the same invalid or the same 

lonely stranger with the same wakeful, sensitive, unappeased nerves? Is one not in every situation of life the person capable of experiencing this and that, who possesses, in the recurring features of his 

experience, the one protection against the passage of time? Do not all our experiences take place as it were at the same time? And is this simultaneity not really the negation of time? And this negation, is it not 

a struggle for the recovery of that inwardness of which physical space and time deprive us? 

Arnold Hauser, on Proust, in The Social History of Art: Volume IV (1951)