Proust & Jonas Mekas — Light as the Return of Lost Time

Jonas Mekas once wrote:
“Light is time itself. Through the changes of light, I try to relive the time that has been lost.”

This single sentence stands at the crossroads of literature, philosophy, and cinema.

• Proustian Memory
  Just as Proust’s narrator tasted a madeleine dipped in tea and suddenly recovered an entire world of childhood, light too becomes a trigger that awakens what seemed irretrievably lost.

• Bergsonian Duration
  Time does not flow as a flat, mechanical sequence. Instead, it thickens and overlaps, appearing in the qualitative shifts of light, in the felt continuity of lived experience.

• The Poetics of the Film Diary
  For Mekas, the film diary does more than preserve fleeting moments. Each time the footage is projected, those moments return as something newly alive, newly poetic.

In this way, Mekas’s words may be read as:
“Recording light = the trigger of memory”
“Changes of light = the lived experience of duration”
“Film diary = the poetic rebirth of lost time”

What Proust sought in literature—the rediscovery of lost time—Mekas continued in cinema, through the shimmering poetics of light.
Each flicker on the screen reminds us that time does not merely pass; it begins again.