In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7]

by Marcel Proust

I asked my neighbour if it were true that this major gave a demonstration of military history which had a genuine aesthetic beauty. “It is absolutely true.” “But what do you mean by that?” “Well, all that you read, let us say, in the narrative of a military historian, the smallest facts, the most trivial happenings, are only the outward signs of an idea which has to be analysed, and which often brings to light other ideas, like a palimpsest. So that you have a field for study as intellectual as any science you care to name, or any art, and one that is satisfying to the mind.”