I have wasted a few hours on social networks, but I have also laughed and learned from friends and acquaintances who are now jumping overboard Twitter like the ‘Titanic’. I don’t know what to expect: whether to stay on the ship until the last ‘pizzicato’ of the violins or take the lead by saying goodbye to the little blue bird with an epitaph or a memorable phrase, like the one some literary monster would utter before traveling to the sea. beyond. Goodbye, ‘au revoir, mes amis’, see you in the bars, in the squares, in the books, some colleagues come exclaiming, with which everything is said. Sometimes, you try to be judgmental and all you get is customary chatura, even to Marcel Proust, whose death has just completed the centenary (November 18, 1922). And he looks where, I discover, loitering on Twitter, the last sentence that is attributed to the writer, pronounced on his deathbed, which is not one of the most brilliant: “Thank you, my dear Odilon, for having gone to look for this beer (at the Ritz) & rdquor ;. The last sentence and the last beer, like the one that cannot be drunk at the World Cup in Qatar. Not even Budweiser.
the cupcake
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It was not in beer but in a cup of tea that Proust dipped the toast, the cake or the madeleine that transported him, with a shudder, to his childhood, to summers at his grandparents’ house, in Combray, to the smell of the geraniums and orange trees, to that succession of mornings that burst into his consciousness, dragging with them “the parade, the incessant load of happy hours & rdquor ;. The great genius of French letters had little confidence in intelligence, in his groping, oscillations, and disastrous retreats. To recapture old impressions, to revive what has been lived, he preferred the senses and objects, where dead hours are sheltered.
Tenacity
Proust did not keep a diary or write his memoirs. His “I” more intimate ambushes in letters, in the meticulous correspondence that he maintained throughout his life, recently edited by Acantilado. And maybe in the answers of the famous “Proust questionnaire & rdquor ;, a game that a childhood friend proposed to her, Antoinette Faure, with 24 confessional questions. The writer completed it twice, the first time at the age of 14 and the second, as an adult, at 20 or 21. On the second occasion, he powerfully calls attention to the answer to “what is your main flaw? & Rdquor; . Proust answers that “the lack of will & rdquor;. Such a confession is surprising in someone capable of writing the 3,371 pages of ‘In Search of Lost Time’, a monument of literature in capital letters. Although perhaps he hit the nail on the head: we are that, eternal dissatisfaction and time that inevitably flows, flows and flows.