The words aren't coming, or at least not how I thought they would. At the end of each previous volume, even if I didn't have all that much to say, a kind of running commentary, accumulated and added to over the course of reading, would promptly conclude and I could fling it onto the page without much thought. But in the face of the entirety of In Search of Lost Time, which I've read over the last 2-3 years in flaming little bursts, I've lost this faculty. Time Regained, more so than the other volumes, is reiterative, and now my mind involuntarily casts back to my memories of reading: face-up on the grass in the middle of the encampment, my borrowed volume coronaed by the overhead sun; at home lying on my bed, scratching behind Fishie's ears with one hand; the cafes where above the unfurled volume my gaze followed words and sometimes, women (lol I gotta die). Proust's prognosis for the reading and use of his work, as an instrument like a telescope through which one can magnify general motions and laws that usually remain at a distance from us, is almost unbearably true for me, and whether by a deception of craft or a real kinship, I find in the contours and details of Proust's thoughts and the narrator's life my own. And maybe my present lack of words is, I can only hope, the sign, not of a flimsy memory and shoddy intellect, but the gestation of presentiments, akin to the ones that finally drove Proust to, and that can only be realized through, Work.