Proust: a dialogue
‘Wasn’t it the sleepy-headed Proust, propped up by dusty pillows in his cork-lined bed on the Boulevard Haussmann, who, remembering a conversation he’d overheard between a grieving widow and a bellboy outside a guesthouse one grey autumn evening, picked up his pen and wrote: When he was alive you thought ahead to his absence and how it would obliterate you. Now the absence has arrived, you find yourself thinking backwards, with a slower, cloudy sadness, which fills up the dining room you played cards in together every evening. Really it feels as if he’s on holiday, and that when he returns in a few days time, with a red neck and blonde-grey stubble, he’ll confide, between sweet kisses, that he’ll never die, he’ll live in that room forever, and the infinite identical rooms that proliferate inside the false void formed by his temporary disappearance?’ ‘No, it wasn’t Proust.’
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Simon Firth is a writer from Morecambe Bay.
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