Tag: Marcel Proust

Endurable

“I was like a pauper who moistens his dry crust with fewer tears if he assures himself that at any moment a total stranger is perhaps going to leave him his entire fortune. We are…

Up to Marcel

I knew that my brain  was like a mountain landscape rich in minerals, wherein lay vast and varied ores of great price.  But should I have time to exploit them?  For two reasons I was…

Today’s One-Liner (#176)

Friends boasted that Proust could declaim whole pages of Balzac by heart. –Josef Czapski, Lost Time:  Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp, trans. Eric Karpeles, p. 33.

Proust Was Obviously before Your Time…

When he wrote— L’artiste qui renonce à une heure de travail pour une heure de causerie avec un ami sait qu’il sacrifie une réalité pour quelque chose qui n’existe pas.—Le temps retrouvé  [The artist who…

Today’s One-Liner (#159)

 They buried [Bergotte], but all through the night of mourning, in the lighted windows, his books arranged three by three kept watch like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more,…

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…