By Moristotle
Our friend Mark, the Man of Montmartre, wrote recently that he was “back from you-know-where...and currently exhibiting a primo case of PDS (Paris Deprivation Syndrome).” He reported that a main bus that serves Montmartre “passes in front of the building where Marcel Proust used to live...,” which led him to ask how I’m doing with my reading of In Search of Lost Time.
I told him that I was a bit embarrassed by his question, for I had bogged down somewhere during the character Marcel’s girl-watching in Balbec, and my attempt to rationalize that, in the end, Proust’s opus was unreadable rang hollow, for I had on more than one occasion sincerely lauded the book on Moristotle & Co., and I suspected (hoped, anyway) that the story would improve if I could ever get out of Balbec. I told him that his question had prompted me to take it up again, “dogged and determined.”
So, today Mark sends me this New Yorker cartoon of a man addressing a wall of books, “Look alive, Proust, you’re next.”
I told him that when it comes to reading Proust, it is I who needs to “look alive” – if that means staying awake....
| Copyright © 2018 by Moristotle |
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