I have read 4 of the 7 volumes of In Search of Lost Time. I plan on finishing the entire book sometime in 2018. For me, reading Proust is like watching a painting in ULTRA ULTRA slow motion. What I find captivating about ISOLT is Proust ability to describe the tiniest of emotions and or situations weather awkward or something we never heeded much attention to.

Furthermore, I am yet to find any other writer with the style he wrote with. It’s music to my ears when I know he is about to describe something so perfect, so accurately in which the way I have felt at some point in time.

On pursuing trivial desires:

“They reminded me that it was my fate to pursue only phantoms, creatures whose reality existed to a great extent in my imagination; for there are people - and this had been my case since youth - for whom all the things that have a fixed value, assessable by others, fortune, success, high positions, do not count; what they must have is phantoms. They sacrifice all the rest, devote all their efforts, make everything else subservient to the pursuit of some phantom. But this soon fades away; then they run after another only to return later on to the first.”

On insecurity and envy (kind of)

“We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally.”

On judgement of others.

“our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as “seeing some one we know” is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.”

Anyway, just wanted to start a discussion on ISOLT since there are not many things about Marcel Proust on reddit.