Tuesday, November 18, 2014

RIP: Marcel Proust - July 10, 1871 - November 18, 1922

"Everything great in the world comes from neurotics.
They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces."

1 comment:

  1. His cork-lined bedroom...from a blog: One of the highlights of the Musée Carnavalet is the replica of Marcel Proust’s cork-lined bedroom, complete with the bed in which he wrote and edited his seven-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time. It’s amazing—and sad—to think that someone who had such a powerful and lively imagination spent the last three years of his life cooped up in his tiny bedroom, confined to the bed that he owned since childhood. Proust suffered from severe allergies and asthma and, in the days before Allegra and Claritin, the only thing that protected him from the outside world was the layer of cork that lined his walls, designed to keep out the dust and pollen. Proust died before he finished editing the final volumes of his novel but, even in its unpolished form, In Search of Lost Time is widely considered to be one of the greatest works of literature of all time. “It’s Proust who ended the novel,” the American author Andrew Holleran once wrote, “simply by doing something so complete, monumental, perfect, that what the fuck can you do afterwards?” If you want to see the neighborhood where Proust lived, you can walk by his former apartment building at 102 Boulevard Haussmann and take a leisurely stroll through Parc Monceau, the quiet, gated patch of green where Proust took his daily walks.

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