Marcel Proust

French novelist who wrote In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) — the longest novel in world literature — a seven-volume meditation on memory, time, social class, and artistic vocation centered on the narrator's effort to recover the past through involuntary memory.

Demonstrated that the deepest form of self-knowledge comes through involuntary memory — the madeleine's taste returning an entire past world — and that the purpose of art is to arrest and examine the flow of time, making the present moment fully available to consciousness.