Que dicir? A BELEZA! ( )

Never made it to this one and even if it is on my list of TBR...I doubt very much I will attempt it a third time.

I felt like Proust's mamma during the last 70 days. I couldn't ignore his plea for one more kiss - such a little boy, such huge, huge eyes. Yet, what a drain, that one! Ironic, that after 4200 pages of examination of the minutiae of a lifetime, Proust's In Search of Lost Time should leave me at the same train station, the same seaside resort, as Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Two paths, as with Swann's Way and Guermantes Way, yet whether I recline in a beach chair, or sit in the lotus position on a towel, I similarly reflect on the sadness of suffering and impermanence, the preciousness of the present moment, that all is vanity, and, maybe it's just the sunlight, maybe it's always just the sunlight, but in reflecting I am yet at peace. So many words? Or, stopping thinking, no words? Same mind. Your mind, my mind, Proust's mind. Yet at the same time different...perhaps as much as arousal and enlightenment...for how come I smile at the thought of a Zen roshi whacking M. de Charlus with a stick? ( )

So far, I have to say that I'm appreciating this book more than the last. The first novel in this collection seems to be about the narrator's obsessive jealous, which is a far more interesting topic than why Mme. Verdurin wants to invite M. de Charlus to her dinner parties or not, which is what it seemed at times the entirety of "Cities of the Plain" was about. Obsession is almost always good copy. ( )

Time Regained, p. 944, "But since strength of one kind can change into a strength of another kind, since heat which is stored up can become light and the electricity in a flash of lightning can cause a photograph to be taken, since the dull pain in our heart can hoist above itself like a banner the visible permanence of an image for every new grief, let us accept the physical injury which is done to us for the sake of the spiritual knowledge which grief brings; let us submit to the disintegration of our body, since each new fragment which breaks away from it returns in a luminous and significant form to add itself to our work, to complete it at the price of sufferings of which others more richly endowed have no need, to make our work at least more solid as our life crumbles away beneath the corrosive action of our emotions. Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure our heart; the transformation itself, even, for an instant, releases suddenly a little joy. But successors only in the order of time, for the primary element, it seems, is the Idea, and the grief is merely the mode in which certain ideas make their first entry into us. But within the tribe of ideas there are various families and some of them from the very first moment are joys." ( )