Proust is the most companionable of the great writers, and he has provided me with good company throughout my long life – as I’ve recognized in his pages parallel thoughts and experiences of my own. Proust, in contemplating his future readers in his last volume, returns to the essential strategy of realism, identification with the experiences recounted on the page: ‘For it seemed to me that they would not be ‘my’ readers but the readers of their own selves… with its [the book’s] help I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves. So that I should not ask them to praise me or to censure me, but simply to tell me whether ‘it really is like that,’ I should ask them whether the words that they read within themselves are the same which I have written…’
see also: “I used to call myself an archaeologist of gossip.”
Photos: KIRBY
