“Habit weakens everything, so what best reminds us of a person is precisely what we had forgotten. That is why the better part of our memories exist outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room.”
IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME by Marcel Proust
“It is as good a way as any of solving the problem of existence to get near enough to the things and people that have appeared to us beautiful and mysterious from a distance, to be able to satisfy ourselves that they have neither mystery nor beauty. It is one of the systems of mental hygiene among which we are at liberty to choose our own, a system which is perhaps not to be recommended too strongly, but gives us a certain tranquility with which to spend what remains of life, and also – since it enables us to regret nothing, by assuring us that we have attained to the best, and that the best was nothing out of the ordinary – with which to resign ourselves to death.”
Marcel Proust, IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME.
Despite my strict instruction, the days just keep rolling on. Apparently it’s already September 1. So it’s time once again for a little advice from our our man Marcel:
“Habit forms the style of the writer just as much as the character of the man, and the author who has more than once been content to attain, in the expression of his thoughts, to a certain kind of attractiveness, in so doing lays down unalterably the boundaries of his talent, just as, in succumbing too often to pleasure, to laziness, to the fear of being put to trouble, one traces for oneself, on a character which it will finally be impossible to retouch, the lineaments of one’s vices and the limits of one’s virtues.”
Marcel Proust, IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME
It’s a new month, and so time for a new monthly Marcel . . .
“But certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.”
Marcel Proust, IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME
