Greg’s Reviews > Time Regained > Status Update

"Have pity on me." "No, you filthy brute." I crept as far as the window and there in the room, chained to a bed like Prometheus to his rock, receiving the blows that Maurice rained upon him with a whip which was in fact studded with nails, I saw, with blood already flowing from him..." Just think, about a hundred years ago Proust and friends were hundreds of shades of grey past today it seems.

"Can one not imagine some golden-haired aristocrat sprung from an ancient family such as his, intelligent and endowed with every kind of prestige, concealing within him, unbeknown to all his friends, a secret taste for [male] negroes?" Only 15 years later Cole Porter famously writes "Times have changed..." Proust and Porter were ahead of their times, certainly.

"Can one not imagine some golden-haired aristocrat sprung from an ancient family such as his, intelligent and endowed with every kind of prestige, concealing within him, unbeknown to all his friends, a secret taste for negroes [men]?" We're in the early 1920's Paris, Proust is dying, and one wonders if he would have written this...or a later seen (I peaked ahead as soon as I left the library) involving S/M?

"The pleasure of those earlier walks [as a child] which was that of seeing, on the way home, the crimson sky...was now replaced by the pleasure of setting forth at nightfall...the moon was already alight and would soon bathe them [the now-adult walkers] in their entirety." The author had passed before this book was published: the 1st page telegraphs we are heading toward permanent darkness. A great opening page.