Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another’s view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which would otherwise have remained unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.

This remark comes from Proust’s long novel-sequence *À la recherche du temps perdu* (*In Search of Lost Time*), in a reflective, essay-like passage where the narrator pauses the story to consider what art uniquely accomplishes. Writing in the years before and during World War I, Proust repeatedly contrasts ordinary perception—confined to habit and the self—with the revelatory power of artistic vision. The passage belongs to his broader argument that great artists do not merely depict the world but disclose previously unseen “landscapes” of experience, enabling readers and viewers to inhabit perspectives otherwise inaccessible to them.

Proust argues that ordinary life traps us inside our own perceptions, so we mistake our personal viewpoint for reality itself. Art breaks that confinement by giving access to another person’s sensibility—another “view of the universe.” The comparison to “landscapes of the moon” stresses how radically unfamiliar these perspectives can be: they are not merely different opinions but different experiential worlds. The final claim—that art multiplies the world into as many worlds as there are original artists—presents artistic originality as the creation of new modes of seeing. Art thus becomes an ethical and epistemic force, enlarging empathy and knowledge by diversifying reality.