Du côté de chez Swann
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Du côté de chez Swann
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The stage is set in Combray

User avatar fallback
Nov 26, 2024

Copied from goodreads:

Funny the ability that our senses have to jettison us back to a different time. A different self. The shocking realization that something has brought you back, not to remembering a moment, but to feeling that moment in its totality. To remembering how it felt in a way so utterly impossible to convey to someone else with words. And with that moment all of the melancholy and longing that tag along.

This book was wonderful. The flowing prose wafting the reader through its world like a Looney Tunes dog floating after the scent of a window-sill-seated pie. The long tangents that plot the cobbled path from the utterly profane and mundane all the way to the gardens of metaphysics.

How fascinating that in his understanding that memory does not lend itself to verbal explanation Proust is able to show us how significant memory can feel. How tragic to walk the same path again and again and only haunt the route because of a desire-to-perceived-loss sort of feedback loop. We only seek the things that we realize after the fact that we won’t achieve and we doom ourselves to wander like ghosts in search of our quarry, projected onto the new subject of our desires time and again.

Looking forward to the rest.

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