Finding Time Again: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 7 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Marcel Proust

Soon I was able to show people a few sketches. Nobody understood anything. Even those who were well disposed toward my perception of the truths which I intended subsequently to engrave within the temple congratulated me on having discovered them with a “microscope,” when on the contrary I had used a telescope to make out things which were indeed very small, but only because they were situated a long way away, each of them a world in itself. In the places where I was trying to find general laws, I was accused of sifting through endless detail. So what was the point of all of it? I had had a certain facility when I was young, and Bergotte had thought the pages I had written as a student “splendid.” But instead of working, I had lived a life of idleness, of dissipation and pleasure, of illness, anxieties and obsessions, and was undertaking my work on the eve of my death, without knowing anything about my craft. I no longer felt strong enough to face up to my obligations to other people, nor to my duties toward my thought and my work, still less to both of them.