My Year With Proust - Day 83

"But the chief reason - and one which is applicable to humanity as a whole - was that our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we have made it our duty to exercise them that if we come to engage in an activity of a different kind, it catches us off guard and without the slightest awareness that it might involve the application of those same virtues."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 466

First off, briefly, since I have returned to commenting on Within a Budding Grove it obviously means that I have returned safe and fairly sound from Zanzibar; clearly, much more on this later.  After writing on Proust every day for months it seems strange to have taken off nearly two weeks, and I'm sure it will take me a little while to get back in the routine. And maybe the best proof of being rusty - never mind the fact that I have limited intelligence and perception - is that I've been struggling a little bit with this particular passage.  In the end what I think Proust is talking about here - and it's perfectly possible that I might end up changing my mind entirely and returning for a rewrite - is that our virtues operate as a foundation, almost independent of conscious thought.  My father used to say that in his life as a doctor nineteen out of every twenty cases were pretty routine, but it was the twentieth that made you glad that you had gone to medical school.  One of his points was that life is pretty routine, if not completely mundane and boring, and it's easy to glide through life on auto-pilot.  We face the same problems, and, for that matter, most of them are actually non-problems, every day and deal with them in the same way, which means that our answers are the same and that our thought process is the same.  Ah, but then there's the twentieth issue which may be entirely unique and challenging, but it could well be that we're still tackling while making use of our own same virtues, even if we don't realize that we're doing so.