Oh, Marcel, how I have missed you!

[emmarytz]

Was there no more to the book than this, then? These creatures on whom one had bestowed more attention and affection than on those in real life, not always daring to admit to what extent you loved them, and even, when my parents found me reading and seemed to smile at my emotion, closing the book with studied indifference or a pretense of boredom; never again would one see these people for whom one had sobbed and yearned, never again hear of them. Already in the last few pages, the author himself, in his cruel "Epilogue," had been careful to "space them out" with an indifference not to be credited by anyone who knew the interest with which he had followed them hitherto, step by step. The occupation of each hour of their lives had been narrated to us. Then, all of a sudden: Twenty years after these events an old man might have been met with in the rue des Fougeres, still erect, etc." And the marriage, the delightful possibility of which we have been enabled to glimpse through two whole volumes, fearful at first and then overjoyed as each obstacle was raised and then smoothed away, we learn from a casual phrase by some minor character that it has been celebrated, we do not know exactly when, in this astonishing epilogue written, it would seem, from up in heaven, by someone indifferent to our momentary passions who has taken the author's place. One would have so much liked for the book to continue or, if that was impossible, to have other facts about all these characters, to learn something of their lives now, to employ our own on things not altogether unconnected with the love they have inspired in us, whose object was now all of a sudden gone from us, not to have loved in vain, for an hour, human beings who tomorrow will be no more than a name on a forgotten page, in a book unrelated to our lives and as to whose value we were certainly mistaken since its fate here below, as we could now see and as our parents had taught us when need arose by a dismissive phrase, was not at all, as we had thought, to contain the universe and our own destiny, but to occupy a very narrow space in the lawyer's bookcase, between the unglamorous archives of the Journal de modes illustre and La Geograhie d'Eure et Loir.

from pages 63-64 of Days of Reading by Marcel Proust which webcowgirl so very, very, very kindly sent to me out of the blue.

Incidentally, I finished West of Here a few hours ago. Hussy that I am I wasted little time in giving myself over to M. Proust.