While Justice Antonin Scalia reads
I Believe in the Devil and Other Stupid Shit by Justice Antonin Scalia, here's Justice Stephen Breyer
on reading Proust:
It’s all there in Proust—all mankind! Not only all the different
character types, but also every emotion, every imaginable situation.
Proust is a universal author: he can touch anyone, for different
reasons; each of us can find some piece of himself in Proust, at
different ages. For instance, the narrator of the Recherche is
obsessed with the Duchesse de Guermantes. To him, Oriane embodies a
slice of the history of France and glows like a stained-glass window,
wreathed in the aura of her aristocratic lineage. Now, however different
the situations may be, we have all of us—in our childhood, our
adolescence, or later in life—admired from afar someone who has dazzled
us for this reason or that. And when we read Proust, we get a glimpse of
ourselves. In fact, I think that the only human emotion he never
explored—because he never experienced it himself—was that of becoming a
father.
What is most extraordinary about Proust is his ability to capture the
subtlest nuances of human emotions, the slightest variations of the
mind and the soul. To me, Proust is the Shakespeare of the inner world.
You know I loves me some
A lá Recherche de Temps Perdu - oh I'm sorry,
Remembrance of Things Past to you fucking bumpkins; besides possibly being the first classic to point out
the glory of the mullet, Proust of course was a great influence on my favorite author
Eric Kraft.
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