Everyone thinks they're the Memory Man, polishing their childhood experiences by thinking beauty into strangeness from an adult bed. Marcel Proust spends most of this volume breaking the unfortunate news that most of us are Swanns; neurotically taken by impressions and shapes we mistake for real people.

To think that we waste years of our lives, that we want to die, that we feel our deepest love, for men and women who do not appeal to us, who are not our type.