On depicting reality

Marcel Proust in the late 1890s.

Many years ago, I read Swann's Way, the first volume of Prout's Magnum Opus, In Search of Lost Time, a work detailing every aspect of what it means to be alive from the 1st person perspective. 

What sets Proust’s work apart, however, is not his subject matter but his way of treating it. The unnamed first-person narrator’s story is laced with digressive explorations of the feelings and thoughts underlying even the smallest actions.

A first galley proof of À la recherche du temps perdu: Du côté de chez Swann with Proust's handwritten corrections

Few writers hold the world’s attention long enough for their 150th birthday to qualify as an event. But then, it’s hard to think of a novelist who has shaped readers’ imaginations as profoundly as Marcel Proust, whose anniversary on July 10 inspired literary tributes around the globe. Ever since his magnum opus, the seven-volume “In Search of Lost Time,” began to appear in 1913, it has been seen as a kind of master key to the modern mind.

Why Proust matters.

For Proust, being a member of a stigmatized minority is much like being a novelist, and vice versa: It means being in society but not wholly of it, compelled to pay attention to things that others take for granted. Proust’s complex games of hide-and-seek with his own identity suggest that it’s unnecessary to police works of literature for authenticity or insist that writers keep to their own patch. Even when they imagine themselves into different lives, the truths they express will emerge from their own deepest experience. Sometimes, wearing a disguise is what makes telling the truth possible.

Proust's description of sunlight shining through a window "just so" resonates to this day with yours truly.