I’ve been reading Proust for some time now. Most of what he wrote is just amazing on different levels. I don’t always understand everything, and I haven’t read all the books yet, but not only is his writing style just amazing, but he also gives you a lot of insight in peoples behaviour, character, your own character, time, memories, just life. He describes everything so nicely. Though I don’t agree with completely everything, a lot of what he writes is either recognisable or helps you understand something (better). You even think differently about something which before you didn’t give (much) attention to. He is one of the writers whose books are worth buying.
Right now I’m reading the section ‘Place-names: the place II’ and in each part of his book (Remembrance of things past, there seem to be different translations in English of the title) I find something interesting, some new insight. Here a part I was reading today:
“For alone, at times, I felt surging from the depths of my being one or other of those impressions which gave me a delicious sense of comfort. But as soon as I was with someone else, when I began to talk to a friend, my mind at once ‘turned about’, it was towards the listener and not myself that it directed its thoughts, and when they followed this outward course they brought me no pleasure.”
“Undoubtedly, it is not common sense that is the ‘commonest thing in the world’; but human kindness. (…) Even if this human kindness, paralysed by self-interest, is not exercised, it exists none the less, and whenever any inconstant egoist does not restrain its action, when; for example, he is reading a novel or a newspaper, it will bud, blossom, grow, even in the heart of him who, cold-blooded in real life, has retained a tender heart, as a lover of fiction, for the weak, the righteous and the persecuted. But the variety of our defects is no less remarkable than the similarity of our virtues. Each of us has his own, so much so that to continue loving him we are obliged not to take them into account but to ignore them and look only to the rest of his character. The most perfect person in the world has a certain defect which shocks us or makes us angry.”