So that was it - a year of blood & guts ends with an MBA degree and a band of merry friends to wish me on my way into a new world and a new life. From January through November, I was immersed in a world unlike any other along Lac Leman in the "pressure cooker" of business schools, IMD. As the year in diary entries comes to an end, I celebrate its finish with a culminating index of links to all the entries that made up this year and this experience. Just browsing the titles stirs up memories that have already started to nettle into the recesses of my mind, memories that linger there like dew drops on fresh morning grass. In the sweetness of those moments that feel like dawn, I reminisce and think fondly to the days when I was in so much pain before. Somehow, it is much more bearable now - I guess memories wear rose-colored instead of black-colored glasses. And just like that, I am lost in a sea of memories that is a year at IMD...
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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