The author analyses the role of modern pieces of machinery whose purpose in Marcel Proust's novel cycle À la recherche du temps perdu becomes aesthetic. Railroad, phonography, telegraphy, telephony, cinematography, x-ray technology, automobiles, airplanes - all that passes forward in front of the reader's eyes, reinforcing the cycle's grand theme: The lost time'. Modernity, as Ms. Danius argues, brings about an emancipation of the senses in that the latter are no more merely an instrument of cognition but are transferred to the sphere of aesthetics.