“What we admired yesterday we hate today, and tomorrow we may mock at it with indifference”
-Heinrich Heine, “The North Sea, 3”
“Thus it is that egoists have always the last word; having laid down at the start that their determination is unshakeable, the more the sentiment in them to which one appeals to make them abandon it is touched, the more fault they find, not with
themselves who resist the appeal but with those persons who put them under the necessity of resisting it, with the result that their own firmness may be carried to the utmost degree of cruelty, which only aggravates all the more in their eyes the culpability of the person who is so indelicate as to be hurt, to be in the right, and to cause them thus treacherously the pain of acting against their natural instinct of pity.”
-Marcel Proust, “The Guermantes Way”
“There is nothing so pleasant as to give oneself trouble for a person who is worth one’s while. For the best of us, the study of the arts, a taste for old things, collections, gardens are all mere ‘ersatz’, ‘succedanea’, alibis. In the heart of our tub, like Diogenes, we cry out for a man. We cultivate begonias, we trim yews, as a last resort, because yews and begonias submit to treatment. But we should like to give our time to a plant of human growth, if we were sure that he was worth the trouble. That is the whole question: you must know something about yourself. Are you worth my trouble or not?”
-Marcel Proust, “The Guermantes Way”
” It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to
recognise that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a
different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and
by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. Say
that we met a brigand by the way; we might yet convince him by an
appeal to his personal interest, if not to our own plight. But to ask
pity of our body is like discoursing before an octopus, for which our
words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with
which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.”
-Marcel Proust, “The Guermantes Way”
