"I could hear what M. Legrandin was saying; like everything that he said, it sounded attractive; but I was disturbed by the memory of a lady whom I had seen recently for the first time; and thinking, now that I knew that Legrandin was on friendly terms with several of the local aristocracy that perhaps she also was among his acquaintance, I summoned up all my courage and said to him: 'Tell me, sir, do you, by any chance, know the lady - the ladies of Guermantes?' and I felt glad because, in pronouncing the name, I had secured a sort of power over it, by the mere act of drawing it up out of my dreams and giving it an objective existence in the world of spoken things."
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 133-134
When I'm trying to wind up my students in COR 110, which is essentially every day, I will try and get them to question the very nature of reality and existence; essentially, the reality and existence of reality and existence. Now, being eighteen they love that discussion, just as they also hate it because to them it's nothing more than a rationale to not do the reading.
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