A Proust Problem

I get lots of grief from my friends because I've read Proust's In Search of Lost Time a few times, and, well, I guess they have a point. That said, I'm not going to delve into the new translation - stacked on the left in the picture - for at least two years. I'm thinking that will be a retirement project. Of course, I'm also two hundred pages into the Proust biography and swore up and down that I was not going to open that book for a couple years as well.

I was thinking of writing a novel the other day about an old man who decides at a certain point that he's simply going to delve back into In Search of Lost Time and never leave it until death. It would serve as a love of beauty and a rejection of the crass external world worthy of Pessoa, but it would also be a mechanism for sharing what a work that is, much like the epics project, I guess, that goes unread because people think, as my excellent friend David Rous elegantly opined, that it is impenetrable.