There are three piles of books on one end of the dining table in my livingroom. On top of the tallest pile, which counts about twenty volumes, there perches Marcel Proust’s hefty masterpiece in French. And it came into my view as soon as I returned home. One look at it entices all sorts of feelings, too. There is much warmth that I feel toward the book. After so many years, it is as though it is my own. Not the copy, mind you, but the book itself. To my surprise, it also makes me feel guilty because I have left it behind in an empty house. I should have taken it with me, so that I could dip into it whenever I felt like it while I was away. On top of these feelings is the wish to return to the book as soon as possible. I had to fight the urge this evening, when there are so many things that I need to do upon my return. In the end, I just opened a random page to find a felicitous line: Come la vue est un sens trompeur! I closed the book at once, fearing entanglement. I made sure not to see which page it was on, either. Would that I had not seen Proust’s dear book at such an awkward time. A misleading sense, no doubt. Sight.

Addendum (March 3, 2019)

Behold, I just returned to the page opened at random an evening among evenings nearly five years ago! This time around, though, I came across the felicitous line as I was doing my regular reading of Proust’s masterpiece.[1] And I almost shouted when I recognized it: Come la vue est un sens trompeur![2]. There was no end to my merriment, indeed. Given that the Gallimard edition I happen to have counts two-thousand and four-hundred pages, the only way to rediscover this line is by careful reading line by line, page by page, chapter by chapter… And from cover to cover, too. Looking over my many quotes of one of my favorite books, it appears that I covered around a thousand pages in the intervening years. Staring at the bulky tome in front of my eyes, I cannot but concur with the title of this piece.

Footnotes

1. À la recherche du temps perdu, Paris: Gallimard, 1999.

2. Op. cit., p. 1602.