no one told me about proust - by Celine Nguyen

personalcanon.com · 5,179 words · saved by 7 readers

on poptimism and literary snobs ✦ and why taste is cultivated through love, not education

In 2022, I decided to spend the year reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. At the time, I knew nothing about Proust: a bourgeois, assimilated French Jew who spent much of his life at the salons and society events of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, ingratiating himself with aristocrats and artists alike; a practitioner of anti-work avant la lettre, who—when his father insisted he pursue a profession—chose to volunteer at a public library, never showed up, and extended his sick leave for years; a neurasthenic who, in the last three years of his life, locked himself up in a cork-lined…

no one told me about proust - by Celine Nguyen

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