I’ve never read Proust (maybe when I finish War and Peace I’ll give him a try) but Alan Jacobs’s Proustblog from yesterday makes me both want to pick it up immediately and never pick it up at all. That quality of “thinking so hard about what-it-will-be-like-to-kiss-Albertine that he doesn’t quite notice that he is in fact kissing her” is way, way too familiar to me for comfort.
I wanted to use the bulk of his post, though, as a jumping-off point for some thinking about prayer, and its relationship to boredom – which is where Jacobs ended his post.
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