I never receive any good mail anymore. I realized this after receiving a postcard from a great traveling friend - Le Maroc (or Morocco to non-French speakers). In the structured compartments of images on the postcard's front, there was another world foreign, displaying itself in sandy and flowing robe fascination. The more amazing part was flipping the postcard to find a person's handwriting - so rarely seen in mail received today. Magazines and credit card solicitations are too pinpoint perfect to even have a soul (not to mention that computer-generated, emotionless typeset), but in the penstrokes on the back of a postcard, I see imperfection and excitement. More important, I see care and affection in the extra thought required of a friend who happened to remember me by sending a small placard with collage of mosques and white beaches and turbans. Refreshing - and quite an infrequent pleasure - to receive something more than blah mail.
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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