The Fugitive

 Yesterday I had the tremendous pleasure of meeting my friend Sheila Liming for coffee and Proust down in Montpelier. She's closing in on her completion of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and we wanted to get together to discuss The Fugitive (the sixth volume) before I disappeared off the earth. I'll definitely miss her, and not simply because she's the one person I met at Champlain who is happy to get together to discuss Proust. If you're looking for some interesting and thought-provoking books to read, definitely check out some of Sheila's.

Here she is nerding out over the fact that we had underlined exactly the same passage (actually, we had done that many times in the text, as might be expected from folks who share a love of literary works in general, and Proust in particular, would).

The passage in question (Marcel reflecting upon the death of Albertine): 

"Since her memory was linked to every season, the only way of forgetting it would have been to forget all of them, even if it meant that I would have to learn to recognize them all over again, like an old man who has suffered from hemiplegia, learning to read again; I would have had to renounced the whole universe. Only a real death of my self, I told myself (were it not impossible), would be capable of consoling me for her death. I did not realize that the death of the self is neither impossible nor extraordinary; it is accomplished without our knowledge and, if necessary, without our consent every day, and I would suffer from the repetition of every sort of day that not only nature but accidental circumstances of more conventional arrangements could introduce into a season."