Clara Reads Proust

by Stéphane Carlier

She counts down the days until her next holiday and is transformed as it draws nearer. When she comes to the salon for a cut and colour just before leaving, she’s a new woman – she’s like her own twin sister, full of the joys of life.

All night she’d dreamed about a bell suspended from a garden gate, about the rustle of a chiffon dress in a staircase, about church bells ringing out in the evening silence.

An event for which we are longing never happens quite in the way we have been expecting, failing the advantages on which we supposed that we might count, others present themselves for which we never hoped, and make up for our disappointment.

We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.