Marcel Proust

You're not going to read a Jack Reacher novel in a month.

You're going to read it in an afternoon and you're not going to read Proust in the afternoon.

Proust is a five pages a day kind of rhythm

and that's

it.

And there shouldn't be any kind of like pressure to read at a pace that is not what feels right.

For you as the reader, I guess.

Some people might want to read Proust at 50 pages a day or whatever.

But what have you been reading besides that?

Yeah, I think between juggling V and my ongoing Proust book club, where we're still in the Um, I, I had no time, but I did read Sunrise by Taya Obrecht.

So it's her newest book.

Um, we've talked about her before on this podcast.

I'm sure you are.

But for those listening who might not be familiar with Marcel Proust's great work, and this scene specifically, and this phenomenon, the narrator nibbles on a madeleine cookie by which he's magically transported, as though magically transported to a different time.

We have a single sensory trigger, Proust's bite of this cookie.

And it can resurrect an entire world.

Tiffany, I included here in my notes an excerpt from the work.

I mean, on one hand, it's beautiful that that is the passage that sort of represents all of this for all time.

It's sad in the sense that there's not a hundred more like that that we can refer to and say, it's not, and perhaps I'm pronouncing his name wrong.

I thought it was Proust.

Words are the exterior symbols of thought, and it is only by their exact use that the writer can keep on his subject the close and patient hold which fishes the Murex up and steeps his creation in unfading colors.

Style, in this definition, is discipline, and the self-consecration it demands and the bearing it has on the whole of the artist's effort have been admirably summed up by Marcel Proust in that searching chapter of À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, where he analyzes the art of fiction in the person of the great novelist Bergotte.

The severity of his taste, his unwillingness to write anything of which he could not say in his favorite phrase, c'est doux, harmonious, delicious.

This determination, which has caused him to spend so many seemingly fruitless years in the precious carving of trifles, was in reality the secret of his strength.

But he does not quite achieve Jane Austen's success.

His Willoughby pattern is typical before he is individual, while every character in Emma is both, and in degrees always perfectly proportioned.

Still, the two books are preeminent achievements in the field of pure character drawing, and one must turn to the greatest continental novelists, to Balzac again, as always, to Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Marcel Proust, and perhaps to the very occasional best of Trollope, to match with such searching and elaborate studies.

But among the continental novelists, with few exceptions, the delineation of character is inextricably combined with the study of manners, as, for instance, in the novels of Tolstoy, of Balzac, and of Flaubert.

Chekhov had somehow passed beyond all this.

Mr. Gerhardt's instinct is right when he protests against the attitude of those who regard a Marcel Proust or a James Joyce as the advanced outposts of the literary consciousness today.

Chekhov is far in advance of them.

By his side they are curious antiquarian survivals of a superseded past.

Section four of Discoveries: Essays in Literary Criticism by John Middleton Murray.

This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.

Marcel Proust.

The most apparent phases in the evolution of literature are marked by a twofold change, a change in the intelligence and a change in the sensibility that find expression in it.

Chekhov had somehow passed beyond all this.

Mr. Gerhardt's instinct is right when he protests against the attitude of those who regard a Marcel Proust or a James Joyce as the advanced outposts of the literary consciousness today.

Chekhov is far in advance of them.

By his side, they are curious antiquarian survivals of a superseded past.

Section four of Discoveries: Essays in Literary Criticism by John Middleton Murray.

This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.

Marcel Proust.

The most apparent phases in the evolution of literature are marked by a twofold change, a change in the intelligence and a change in the sensibility that find expression in it.

It will motivate you pretty quickly to buy your own servers, to hire the consultants to come in, to turn your data lake that they sold you on 10 years ago, which was a previous hysteria in IT.

You know, all of a sudden, you know, guess what? If you're in any industry, you don't really give a fuck if your AI can talk credibly about Proust or, you know, the, you know, the...

I don't know, like pick up another, you know, or Beethoven's Ninth.

It doesn't matter.

Mickey Mantle lasted nine weeks with his new liver.

Sunday night, his former teammate, the pitcher, author, and sportscaster Jim Bouton observed that Mickey Mantle may have been the last hero.

He hit 536 homers, behind only Babe Ruth and Willie Mays when he retired.

But he missed at least 280 games in his career due to injuries.

There seemed to be little bitterness as the awareness came that he had not taken care.

He had, after all, thought he would not be here to pay that price.

But ultimately, there was in Mickey Mantle's life what the author Marcel Proust so perfectly summarized in the title of his ultimate novel, The Search for

Time Loss.