The thing is more present in its representation

Every now and then I heard the sound of a lift coming up, but it was followed by a second sound, not the one I was hoping for, namely its coming to a halt at our landing, but another very different sound which the lift made in continuing its progress to the floors above and which, because it so often meant the desertion of my floor when I was expecting a visitor, remained for me later, even when I had ceased to wish for visitors, a sound lugubrious in itself, in which there echoed, as it were, a sentence of solitary confinement.

(Proust)

> the way emotions seek out ‘representation’ in objects, come to know themselves by fastening onto certain smells, colours, sounds.. of course, there is nothing in the lift’s sound ‘in itself’ which makes it a signifier of melancholy. The relationship builds up through association. Henceforth, the sound of the lift is for Marcel no pure sound, but replete with pathos - a pathos it clarifies and makes present. Its as if emotion learns to fit the sound of the lift – comes, like water in a glass, to fit the shape of its receptacle, so that, even when the emotion’s initial occasion has disappeared (ie the expectation of the visitor), contact with the ‘container’ is enough to drink the melancholy pleasure. And for Proust, the melancholy pleasure is more present in this second contact - it comes into its own after becoming detached from the circumstances that gave rise to it. Or, as the artist realises: The thing is more present in its representation.