/lit/ - Literature

>>14449387
His prose are more sublime than most poetry. One can open up any random page in the entire multi-volume work and find an breathtaking combination of beautiful prose and very deep understanding of the human mind. He would be the most quoted author ever if his sentences weren’t so fucking long. He’s the ultimate pleb filter in that sense. Everything one would justifiably hate about, say, Rupi Kaur, he is the exact opposite of.

The way he handles the concept of time and memory is beautiful. It kind of fucks me up right in the feels but I love it. You see characters change over time, especially family members, and it confronts you with age/time/death. Entire lifetimes pass instantly. I feel this way a lot at family gatherings, like with family I only see on holidays, funerals and weddings, and I see them change so much. At these gatherings little comments, ticks and things remind me of past gatherings with these people, where I’m instantly transported to a time when maybe I felt more Christmas magic, hope and happiness as a child, then I think of the relatives from that time who have since deceased, and how I changed so much, and the wildly unpredictable journey between that point and now, and think how wildly unpredictable my future might be. I look around and see some of the people who are now very old, maybe they used to help put up some Christmas lights but now are old and just sitting down not moving, and now a younger person like me is asked to do some of those chores, and I think about how I was at that old person’s spouse’s funeral in the last year or so. Then I think about how soon I’ll be old and decrepit while someone else does these chores for me, and I see my spouse who is helping me with a chore and think they’ll be at my funeral soon, then sitting alone at these family gatherings, getting helped out of cars to and from the event. Several times a year at these family gatherings I feel this and gain a deeper appreciation for Proust, because Proust’s way of thinking helps me appreciate moments of my life more, the passage of time, the inevitability of death, and how we will all end up alone. Montaigne’s essays “On Solitude”, “That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die”, and “The Apology of Raymond Sebond” are great pairings with Proust, and I highly recommend downloading Montaigne’s essays’ audiobook and listening to them between the inevitable weeks-to-months-long breaks you take over the course of reading In Search of Lost Time.

It’s literally a life, with all of the ups and downs, and he intensely reflects on feelings that most people aren’t even aware of, and when you think about those feelings in your own life your life feels so much fuller. He’s so good at drawing out profound meaning and emotions in the most arbitrary situations. It’s the perfect book for people who think their lives are boring, which I imagine is most people who come to this board.