Friday, October 6, 2006

Proust: "People never cease to change"

People never cease to change position in relation to ourselves. In the world's imperceptible but everlasting march, we think of them as motionless, in a moment of vision, too brief for us to perceive the motion that is bearing them along. But we need only choose from our memory two pictures of them taken at different times, yet sufficiently close together for them not to have changed in themselves, perceptibly at least, and the difference between the two pictures measures the displacement they have effected relative to ourselves.
Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, translated by John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2002), 409

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