This aesthetic which neutralizes duration and force as the difference between the acorn and the oak, is not autonomously Proust’s or Claudel’s. It translates a metaphysics. Proust also calls “time in its pure state” the “atemporal” or the “eternal.” The truth of time is not tem- poral. Analogously (analogously only), time as irreversible succession, is, according to Claudel, only the phenomenon, the epidermis, the surface image of the essential truth of the universe as it is conceived