My Years With Proust - Day 730

The best minds of posterity might think what they chose, their opinions mattered to me no more than those of my contemporaries. The truth was that, if I thought of my work and not the letters which I ought to answer, this was not because I attached to these two things, as I had during my years of idleness and later, in that brief interval between the conception of my book and the day when I had had to cling to the banister, very different degrees of importance.  The organisation of my memory, of the preoccupations that filled my mind, was indeed linked to my work, but perhaps simply because, while the letters which I received were forgotten a moment later, the idea of my work was inside my head, always the same perpetually in process of becoming.  But even my work had become for me a tiresome obligation, like a son for a dying mother who still, between her injections and her blood-lettings, has to make the exhausting effort of constantly looking after him.  Perhaps she still loves him, but it is only in the form of a duty too great for her strength that she is aware of her affection.  In me, in the same way, the powers of the writer were no longer equal to the egotistical demands of the work.  Since the day of the staircase, nothing in the world, no happiness, whether it came from friendship or the progress of my book or the hope of fame, reached me save as a sunshine unclouded but so pale that it no longer had the virtue to warm me, to make me live, to instil in me any desire; and yet, faint though it was, it was still too dazzling for my eyes, I closed them and turned to the wall.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1099-1100

I can remember when I was writing my dissertation and how it seemed to be hovering over me the entire time, whether I was actively writing or whether it was just plaguing me like a ghost when I wasn't.  If I were optimistic I guess I could make the argument that even when I wasn't working I was still "working" because the dissertation was percolating along beneath the surface.  Of course, following that same logic I'm actively "working" on the epics book while I'm tinkering with Proust.   Considering how my witless dissertation plagued me I can't imagine how Remembrance of Things Past haunted Proust, not only because of the immense size of it but also because of how crucially important that it was to him (whereas my dissertation was clearly a means to an end to get to a place where I could teach college).  Proust tells us, "The organisation of my memory, of the preoccupations that filled my mind, was indeed linked to my work, but perhaps simply because, while the letters which I received were forgotten a moment later, the idea of my work was inside my head, always the same perpetually in process of becoming." I wonder how anybody survives writing a dissertation - or writing a novel - because everything else, including the very social activities that are keeping you sane and allowing you to work, seem like a major distraction.