“By the way,” said Swann to my grandfather, “what I was going to tell you has more to do than you might think with what you were asking me just now, for in some respects there has been very little change. I came across a passage in Saint-Simon this morning which would have amused you. It’s in the volume which covers his mission to Spain; not one of the best, little more in fact than a journal, but at least a wonderfully well-written journal, which fairly distinguishes it from the tedious journals we feel bound to read morning and evening.”
“I don’t agree with you: there are some days when I find reading the papers very pleasant indeed,” my aunt Flora broke in, to show Swann that she had read the note about his Corot in the Figaro.
“Yes,” aunt Céline went one better, “when they write about things or people in whom we are interested.”
“I don’t deny it,” answered Swann in some bewilderment. “The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.”
From “In Search of the Lost Time: Volume 1, Swann’s Way,” by Marcel Proust
I was talking to my niece and goddaughter Ana Belen—a full professor of Spanish language and literature at a major French university. We ended up discussing Marcel Proust. She made me aware of what I had missed since I had never read any of his books. As soon as I got home, I bought the seven volumes of “In Search of the Lost Time,” which is considered one of the best literary works ever written. She warned me it would require four years of careful reading. I began my project, and a few pages into his engaging prose, I found this apropos snippet. An overwhelming number of articles appear in newspapers and social media. Thousands of new books get published every day. Yet we have lost track of what Marcel Proust reminds us in the selected paragraph: “Only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.”
