Tag: Marcel Proust

Dear Annie and Lindsay

I was earlier going through a 2016-17 Moleskine commonplace book I kept, and came across the following passages I transcribed from Harold Bloom’s book, How to Read and Why. I hope you may enjoy at…

Look Within

In a sense, everything Proust wrote was a rehearsal for the Search, but the important point—made clear by his many anguished doubts about whether or not he was a novelist—is that until he found the…

Today’s One-Liner (#59)

 De même que les prêtres ayant la plus grande expérience du cœur, peuvent le mieux pardonner aux péchés qu’ils ne commettent pas, de même le génie ayant la plus grande expérience de l’intelligence peut le…

Thank You, Biographers!

Biography is, of the various kinds of narrative writing, that which is most eagerly read, and most easily applied to the purposes of life.  –Samuel Johnson, The Idler, 84 in A Johnson Sampler, edited by…

Today’s One-Liner (#39)

« Dire que j’ai gâché des années de ma vie, que j’ai voulu mourir, que j’ai eu mon plus grand amour, pour une femme qui ne me plaisait pas, qui n’était pas mon genre !…

Invitations and Incitements

I think it’s best to see Walt, and virtually every other imaginative writer of consequence, as issuing not edicts but invitations. Walt asks us to make his words ours, his vision our own….you can respond…

Breakdown Precedes Breakthrough

[Proust] discovered the device, or the design, of what could be called a play outside a play. By seeing his personal situation from outside as if it radiated a larger, more generalized narrative action of…

Regarding the Dreyfus Affair

“It is my duty to speak up; I will not be an accessory to the fact.  If I were, my nights would be haunted by the spectre of that innocent man so far away, suffering…