Complicated principles which seem important right now #131

This is his earliest memory, to which, on waking up, he always returns, not out of morbidity or, for any other pathological reason, but because this awareness of separation is nothing other than the self’s first awareness of itself. The kiss withheld is simply the earliest demonstration of the law that our only consciousness of unity, or of a fullness of being, comes when we no longer possess it; for, possessing it, we are not conscious of it: the only paradise is paradise lost.

Gabriel Josipovici, discussing Proust in The World and the Book