I did the impossible, I finished Proust! I finished! I finished Marcel Proust! I am so proud of myself!
Well, as you might have found out by now, I didn’t finish À la recherche du temps perdu, no, of course not, I’m still trapped in one of those extended Guermantes reflections of his, I only finished Jean Santeuil, one might call it Proust for beginners, it should set them at ease as Proust himself didn’t finish that one either, writing, I mean, not just reading it. So, obviously he was a quitter, too. Ha! But I don’t give up that easily, and from now on, I’ll start wearing this Étrivière Double Tour by Hermès to remind me of my literary shortcomings. If ever I succeed in finishing Proust’s masterpiece, all volumes, all of them, all of these three thousand pages, I shall take it off again. Until then, it’s going to serve as a scarlet letter for everybody to see what a quitter I am — damn, I have to finish Hawthorne, too. Damn!
Your exquisitely written post reminds me that despite having managed to read La Recherche, I still haven’t read Jean Santeuil or The Scarlet Letter. I definitely need a thousand lifetimes for all these books. Luckily it’s much easier keeping up with your blog!
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