Word: proust
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...American, disquieting in its silence, its indifference, its quotidian Frenchness. Absent is the cheesy but stirring spectacle: the miniature U.S. flags, the festooned Uncle Sams, the hot dogs and watermelons, the magnificent fireworks. Sitting in the Luxembourg garden (possibly the most beautiful place in the world) while reading Proust with a cheap but delicious bottle of Bordeaux, glancing up occasionally at kids kicking a soccer ball or the many menageries of pretty French girls, one wouldn’t even know the U.S. existed. Except for a group of picknickers munching on McDonalds...
...elegant double helix of the DNA molecule, Western science has illuminated the vastest contours and the most infinitesimal particles of the universe. The arts, surely, are more subjective, but Saul Bellow puts it well when he quips, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read...
...Such a view, however, is silly. Harvard is right to uphold pedagogical purity—forcing students to take accounting at MIT, for example. Yet students cannot live on Plato and Proust alone. If the hordes of economics concentrators are any sign, there is no lack of interest in the market. So, just as campus publications hone the skills of budding journalists, similarly should seed grants or non-interest loans from the administration nourish students’ brilliant ideas...
Perhaps one day the starry-eyed young man with his head immersed in a book, oblivious to the genocide in Sudan, will turn out to be the next Proust, who wrote what might be the twentieth century’s greatest novel about pastries. Or perhaps that smelly science nerd, slaving away in the Science Center while you stand outside shouting “No Blood for Oil,” will discover the cure for AIDS. So please, friends, leave them to their bubbles...
...rest of us, perhaps it's enough to drop the odd smart reference to June 16, 1904 (that's Bloomsday for Joyce fans, or, dear nonreaders, the day Ulysses takes place), the evocative aroma of madeleines (nostalgia muffins to novelist Marcel Proust), or George Eliot (remember, she was a woman). Bayard argues that the real secret to knowledge, cultivation and passionate reading lies in avoiding the traditional, linear approach to books. "Books aren't so much made to be read, as they are to be lived with," he says. Hey, doesn't that remind you of something Franz Kafka once...