My Year With Proust - Day 265

. . . For the next few days physical pleasure seemed to me to require, to be properly enjoyed, not only this serving girl but the timbered dining-room, so remote and isolated.  And yet it was to the other, in which Saint-Loup and his friends dined, that I returned every evening, from force of habit and from friendship, until I left Doncieres.  but even of this hotel, where he boarded with his friends, I had long ceased to think.  We make little use of our experience, we leave unfulfilled on long summer evenings or premature winter nights the hours in which it had seemed to us that there might nevertheless be contained some element of peace or pleasure.  But those hours are not altogether wasted.  When new moments of pleasure call to us in their turn, moments which would pass by in the same way, equally bare and one-dimensional, the others recur, bringing them the groundwork, the solid consistency of a rich orchestration.  They thus prolong themselves into one of those classic examples of happiness which we recapture only now and again but which continue to exist; in the present instance it was the abandonment of everything else to dine in comfortable surroundings, which by the help of memory embody in a scene from nature suggestions of the rewards of travel, with a friend who is going to stir our dormant life with all his energy, all his affection, to communicate to us a tender pleasure, very different from anything that we could derive from our own efforts or from social distractions; we are going to exist solely for him, to make vows of friendship which, born within the confines of the hour, remaining imprisoned in it, will perhaps not be kept on the morrow but which I need have no scruple in making to Saint-Loup since, with a courage that enshrined a great deal of common sense and the presentiment that friendship cannot be very deeply probed, on the morrow he would be gone.

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 411-412

As I grow older I seem, naturally enough, to be more and more jealous of my time and how I spend it.  I guess I should just blame stupid Adam Smith because I think this is one of those issues where scarcity drives up cost.  With each passing day I have less days to pass, which means that each remaining one is a little more valuable than the previous one.  Proust, writing as a younger man than I am now, already appears to understand the question of wasting time, and rather we can ever actually waste time with dear friends.  "We make little use of our experience, we leave unfulfilled on long summer evenings or premature winter nights the hours in which it had seemed to us that there might nevertheless be contained some element of peace or pleasure."  I'm sure that Marcus Aurelius would disagree with this point, since he always stressed using your time productively; every actions should be directed towards making yourself better intellectually and the world around you a better place.

True, but Proust would, I'm assuming, respond, "But those hours are not altogether wasted. When new moments of pleasure call to us in their turn, moments which would pass by in the same way, equally bare and one-dimensional, the others recur, bringing them the groundwork, the solid consistency of a rich orchestration."  Who knows what moments are actually productive?  That trip up across the border to the southern most Tim Horton's, besides providing delicious donuts and male bonding, might also feature the conversation that inspires the next great project that gives direction and meaning to life? And the donuts.