ABSTRACT
It was Proust who, in his concluding thoughts to À la recherche du temps perdu, while exploring the enigma of time, noted that ‘The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost’ (Proust 1923) and it is this paradox of the imaginary presence of paradise as an experience of a space and time that is also, and simultaneously, a symbol of a world once possessed and now lost, that I want to explore here. In fact it seems that the condition for the existence of paradise is that it has been lost. It is also likely that the loss of a paradise is a prerequisite for the beginning of narrative, and of self-consciousness, an ego or subject-self that exists only in a world of language, divisions, rules, time and frustration. Loss is what opens up a space that allows narrative to move forward. The experience of loss as a precondition for the internalization of a structure that articulates reality through the symbolic representation of space and time is something that can be found not only in Proust and modern reflections on the subjectivity of memory but, more fundamentally, in all origin myths.
