SLL will be on vacation 8/12-8/18 and resume posting 8/19.
I’m going on vacation, so I was searching for some pithy little vacation quote for the quote of the day when I stumbled on this one, from Marcel Proust. This is a matchless exercise in using a great many words to say next to nothing, but I’m glad I found it. I’ve never read Proust, and I now know that in my remaining time on earth, I’m never going to read him. Any Proust lovers out there, feel free to comment and make the argument that I’m an uncultured lout. From Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French novelist, critic, and essayist, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (1919):
There were some that were of so rare a beauty that my pleasure on catching sight of them was enhanced by surprise. By what privilege, on one morning rather than another, did the window on being uncurtained disclose to my wondering eyes the nymph Glauconome, whose lazy beauty, gently breathing, had the transparence of a vaporous emerald beneath whose surface I could see teeming the ponderable elements that coloured it? She made the sun join in her play, with a smile rendered languorous by an invisible haze which was nought but a space kept vacant about her translucent surface, which, thus curtailed, became more appealing, like those goddesses whom the sculptor carves in relief upon a block of marble, the rest of which he leaves unchiselled. So, in her matchless colour, she invited us out over those rough terrestrial roads, from which, seated beside Mme. de Villeparisis in her barouche, we should see, all day long and without ever reaching it, the coolness of her gentle palpitation.
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