Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Ms. Locke, my language tutor, gave me a special present this semester. During the week we would translate Flaubert's Un Coeur Simple at an accelerated pace in order to take Fridays off and read...Proust! It was the first book I had bought that I was not sure I wanted to own, for all other books are those I know from other sources or works of the same author; I'd buy anything of Plato and know I'd love it, for example.

I was nervous. Here I was with $17 worth of book and not at all sure I wanted it. So I read the first assignment, and predictably, was blown away. In Search of Lost Time is undoubtedly one of the greatest works of novel fiction I have ever read. Not only will I keep Swann's Way, but I will buy and read all other volumes of the seven-volume series, waiting until 2018 till the final volume of the new translation is released in the United States. This isn't as bad as it sounds (though copyright extensions truly anger me), since I likely won't read the next three volumes for at least some years.

How can I be the same after reading such beautiful meditations on experience, memory, and names? I will never look at the world the same again, nor underestimate my contribution to the way I experience the way things are.

"The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues, are as fleeting, alas, as the years."