“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
Here’s a little something for us to ponder this month . . .
“We are incapable, while we are in love, of acting as fit predecessors of the persons whom we shall presently have become and who will be in love no longer.”
Wise words. Poor Proust was painfully closeted all his life (see photo), so reading his work does tend to make one feel better about one’s romantic life in comparison, no matter how rubbish it might be.
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
