finally, Proust

despite my love of literature, especially literary fiction, I never really got around to picking up anything by Proust. Not for any particular reason other than I had just never sought him out. Well A has the In Search of Lost Time collection, and I finding myself having exhausted most of my books and those that stood out of his, thought I would check out said collection. The first volume is Swann's Way in which the reader is introduced to Proust's childhood through a series of memories and accounts of his life in Paris & Combray. the first volume is some 600 pages, yet somehow, Proust has managed to keep me interested. Not in such a way that I can't hardly put the book down (because I've gone two or three days without reading a page in the two weeks since I've picked it up), but an interest that keeps me coming back despite having not read a page in two or three days. It is his "purple prose" as A puts it, that keeps me engaged as well as his narration of his forays in Combray and Paris. recently, I read a paragraph that struck a chord in me, to the point that I have noted it down so as to look back on it. it is lines as such that keep me turning the pages:

"after leaving this park the Vivonne began to flow again more swiftly. how often have I watched, and longed to imitate when I should be free to live as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lay flat on his back in the bottom of the boat, letting it drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky gliding slowly by above him, his face aglow with a foretaste of happiness and peace."

oh to end a day by the water. ..