
The Edifice (cc John Haynes)
My dear friend Kit has another extraordinary book on Proust coming out in 2022: Living and Dying with Marcel Proust.
I meditate on the breath and try to let go of thought but if ever there was a thought not to be banished it is Proust’s observation from La Recherche:
‘But, when nothing subsists of a distant past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, on the ruin of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory’.