I don't care what it says about me that I feel the need to pat myself on the back for finishing Swann's Way this morning. I'm just glad I finally read it and enjoyed it and can now have an inkling about what people are talking about when they mention Proust (you know, during all those conversations at the bus stop, the coffee shop and during commercial breaks of House). There is an exhausting thrill to the experience.

"Words present us with little pictures of things, clear and familiar, like those that are hung on the walls of schools to give children an example of what a workbench is, a bird, an anthill, things conceived of as similar to all others of the same boat. But names present a confused image of people–and of towns, which they accustom us to believe are individual, unique like people–an image which derives from them, from the brightness or darkness of their tone, the color with which it is painted uniformly, lke one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which because of the limitations of the process used or by a whim of the designer, not only the sky and the sea are blue or red, but the boats, the church, the people in the streets. Because the name Parma, one of the towns I had most wanted to visit ever since I had read La Chartreuse, seemed to me compact, smooth, mauve and soft, if anyone mentioned a certain house in Parma in which I would be staying, he gave me the pleasure of thinking I would be living in a house that was smooth, compact, mauve, and soft that bore no relation to the houses of any real town in Italy, since I had composed it in my imagination with the help only of that heavy syllable, Parme, in which no air circulates, and of all that I had made it absorb of Stendhalian softness and the tint of violets."