Proust could not be more explicit on this matter, writing in the first book: ‘Reality is formed only by memory.’13 And memory, in its turn, is a collection of traces, an indirect product of the disordering of the world, of that small equation written earlier, ΔS ≥ 0, the one that tells us the state of the world was in a ‘particular’ configuration in the past and therefore has left (and leaves) traces. ‘Particular’, that is, perhaps only in relation to rare subsystems – ourselves included.
Proust
