Perhaps it was too soon to claim the never-starting summer in New York; the heat has arrived in full force. It would be nice to think that it would only hang on the east coast, but it has moved steathily across the country, settling also over California. San Francisco has been experiencing temperatures in the 90's Farenheit (~33 degress Celsius), a blinding heat that draws fissions in the streets from which Hades can jump out of the ground in shimmering waves. I can only imagine the tasty smells emanating from the subway stations across coastlines in Manhattan, whose notorious urine stench (among other pungent remnants) clings to hot days like waves to the ocean. The never-starting summer has more than arrived and is trying to make up for lost time...
Somehow I started to read Proust. The blame goes to Alain de Botton , a writer whose witticisms deconstruct modern thinking and make intellectualism seem but a trifle and a whim. He wrote a book in 1997 called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which distills the enigmatic French novelist into a self-help dispenser of pithy ideas. How clever I found Mr. de Botton to be when I dipped my toe into the vagaries of Proust; I picked up volume one of "In Search of Lost Time" and instantly fell into the deep end. What author dares to run sentences onward into the stratosphere that sometimes seemingly mellows behind the stars of a bright night, but never so much as an introspective person that wretches for the meaning of a simple thought, sometimes stumbling, but always emerging strongly as that same night in starry sky, almost an homage back to Van Gogh, whose rich paintings greatly represented the mood of a generation - and generations often afford a few mis-steps in l...
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