A little Proust

I started reading Proust again yesterday afternoon. I have been working my way through In Search of Lost Time for many years. I had not read any of it for a year. However, when I picked up the thread of Sodom and Gomorrah at page 657, an almost random place to begin again, I felt I had never left Proust.

I tried for many years to read Swann’s Way. I would always break off before halfway through it. One time though, a time when I may have become an earnest reader instead of an indolent reader, Proust captured me. Nabokov said a great novel was the novel that described and circumscribed a world we felt we lived in. If that is so, then Proust seems the best novelist of them all. Every nuance of life comes from his pen.

I have read a few of his long paragraphs this morning. Proust makes me feel as though I cannot write and should not try. Indeed, writing this post is a chore after reading a little Proust. Yet one good sentence might reside in me waiting to see the light of day. Yes, strive for one good sentence, Lynn. Then see what happens.